Wide eyed
Screaming 
Short breath
Shaking hands
Pulls
Fluorescent green
Lever on the 
Wall nearby.
 
Sticky white foam
Explodes out
From pipes
Hanging bolted 
Beneath the 
Fire suppression
Sprinkler system
Lines. 
 
Coughing
Banging into furniture
Scrambling away
Blood trickling by
Fresh, jagged, 
Bullet holes
On the wall.
 
Now he struggles
To reload.
 
The thick foamy
Foggy haze
Clings to him 
Hard to pull
His hands away
From the magazine. 
Coughing.
 
Footsteps
Heavier on the
Sticky ground
Harder to see down 
The goo speckled
Optics.
 
Greasy wavy hair
Plastered to his
Face.
 
Black clad officers
Fly down the hallway.
 
He clicks the 
Trigger 
Awkwardly, 
Laboriously pulling his finger 
Away, sticky release,
Trying to pull again, 
Missing, 
Bullets falling, 
Into the tiled floor, 
And cement walls,
 
As he is smashed apart 
Splattered red scrambled egg yolks  
Blown out of him by police 
Assault rifles. 
 
Metro crime scene
Cleanup contractors
Pressure wash 
And mop their
Way through the
Building
Reloading their
Canisters with
Green soapy fluid
Quickly hand drying
Behind them
To avoid
Water
Damage. 
 
Federal officials reviewing proposal
For mandatory installation of the system
Sternly click through graphs. 
 
Red lines show normal killing rate 
Per unit of time the shooter is active. 
Blue lines parallel beneath the red,
Show the encumbrance system adjusted killing rate.
 
The gap,
Statistically, 
Are the lives saved. 

**The point here is, in addition to preventative tactics like better policing, gun control, and access to mental health services, why are we not considering methods to help mitigate damage onsite?

I’m not trying to put this out as an actually correct solution, though I guess it might be. It’s just a starting point.

The hypothetical tool is trying to stop activity quickly. So how do you do that? Is it something earsplitting? Is it foam? Is is tear gas?

This story focuses on foam delivered like the fire suppression chemicals that come out of the pipes you see in public buildings:

The story is supposed to be disturbing, because installing a system like this is acknowledging the possibility of this occurring much more directly than gun control or mental health initiatives do. Any time you look up and see the pipes, you remember that it is a possibility.

The question this is supposed to leave you with is, why would we let squeamishness prevent us from preventing deaths?