On the morning of July 16, 2015, Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez drove a rented silver Mustang convertible to the Armed Forces Career Center on Lee Highway in Chattanooga. He opened fire on the storefront from his car, spraying bullets through the glass doors and windows. Then he drove seven miles to the Navy Operational Support Center on Amnicola Highway, crashed through a security gate, and continued shooting.
By the time police killed Abdulazeez in a firefight at the Amnicola Highway facility, five servicemembers were dead. Four Marines (Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Sullivan, Staff Sgt. David Wyatt, Sgt. Carson Holmquist, and Lance Cpl. Skip Wells) died at the scene or shortly after. Petty Officer 2nd Class Randall Smith, a Navy reservist, died two days later from his wounds. A Chattanooga police officer and a Marine recruiter were wounded.
The attack shook Tennessee in a way that few events have. It also forced a conversation that business owners across the state had been avoiding: how vulnerable are our facilities to a determined attacker?
The Security Gaps on Lee Highway
The Armed Forces Career Center on Lee Highway occupied a strip mall storefront. Glass windows across the front. A standard commercial door. No armed guards. No ballistic film on the glass. No bollards preventing vehicle approach. No controlled entry point.
This wasn’t an oversight. It was policy. Department of Defense regulations prohibited military recruiters from carrying personal firearms at their duty stations. The career center was, from a security standpoint, indistinguishable from the tax preparer and the cellphone store sharing the same strip mall.
Abdulazeez exploited that vulnerability with terrifying simplicity. He pulled up to the curb and shot through the glass. The entire initial attack took seconds.
The Navy Operational Support Center on Amnicola Highway had slightly better physical security: a perimeter fence and a gate. Abdulazeez drove through the gate. The fence slowed him down by a few seconds at most. Once inside the perimeter, the facility’s defenses were minimal.
The Political Response
Within days of the attack, governors across the country reacted. Florida Governor Rick Scott ordered National Guard members at recruiting stations to be armed. Texas Governor Greg Abbott did the same. Indiana Governor Mike Pence followed. The message was clear: the policy of unarmed military personnel at public-facing installations was finished.
In Tennessee, the political response focused on carry laws. State Representative Tilman Goins from Morristown introduced legislation aimed at lowering the handgun carry permit age for active-duty military and veterans. The argument was straightforward: if 19-year-old Marines are trusted with weapons in Afghanistan, they should be trusted with them in Chattanooga.
The Pentagon eventually changed its force protection policies to allow certain personnel to carry firearms at recruiting centers and reserve facilities. That process took months. In the interim, armed civilian volunteers showed up at recruiting stations across Tennessee. It was a well-intentioned but legally complicated response that created its own security headaches.
What Private Businesses Should Be Asking
The Chattanooga attack targeted military facilities. The next one might not. Any business with a public-facing storefront, an open lobby, or a glass facade shares the same fundamental vulnerability that the Lee Highway career center had.
Tennessee business owners watched the Chattanooga coverage and asked themselves the same question: could that happen here? For many, the honest answer was yes.
Here’s what businesses should be evaluating.
Access Control
How does someone get into your building? If the answer is “they walk through an unlocked glass door,” you have the same exposure the Lee Highway career center had.
Access control doesn’t have to mean armed checkpoints and metal detectors. For most businesses, it starts with basic measures. Lock exterior doors and require visitors to be buzzed in. Install a video intercom at the main entrance. Issue keycard or fob access to employees and track who enters and exits. Position the reception desk so staff can see the entrance before a visitor reaches the interior of the building.
Businesses with high foot traffic (retail stores, medical offices, government service counters) can’t lock their doors during operating hours. For these locations, consider controlled vestibule entries where visitors pass through a first set of doors into a monitored space before accessing the main area. Banks have used this design for decades. It works.
Visitor Management
Who’s in your building right now? If you can’t answer that question, you have a problem.
Visitor sign-in logs are a start. Digital visitor management systems are better. They capture photo ID, print temporary badges, and create a real-time record of every non-employee on premises. When something goes wrong, you need to know who was in the building and when.
This matters for businesses of every size. A Nashville law firm, a Knoxville medical clinic, a Memphis warehouse. All of them benefit from knowing exactly who’s inside their walls at any given moment.
Active Shooter Protocols
Before Chattanooga, most Tennessee businesses had never discussed active shooter response with their employees. After July 16, the conversation became urgent.
The Department of Homeland Security’s “Run, Hide, Fight” framework is the standard. Employees should know their evacuation routes. They should know where to shelter in place if evacuation isn’t possible. They should understand, at least in concept, what to do if directly confronted by a shooter.
Running a tabletop exercise doesn’t cost anything. Gather your management team, present a scenario, and walk through the response. Where do people go? Who calls 911? Who accounts for employees after evacuation? Where’s the rally point? These are basic questions that most businesses can’t answer until they’ve practiced.
Some companies are going further, bringing in trainers to run live drills. The cost for a professional active shooter training session in Tennessee runs between $1,500 and $5,000 depending on the size of the facility and the number of employees. That’s a fraction of what a single workers’ compensation claim costs.
Guard Presence at Public-Facing Locations
The Chattanooga attack put a spotlight on soft targets, locations where the public walks in freely and security is minimal or nonexistent. Recruiting centers, retail stores, medical offices, houses of worship, and government service counters all fit this profile.
A uniformed security officer at the entrance of a public-facing location serves two functions. First, the visible presence discourages some attackers. Not all. An individual determined to cause mass casualties may not be deterred by a single guard. But opportunistic violence and lesser threats (workplace disputes that escalate, domestic situations that spill into a business, random acts driven by mental health crises) are often prevented by a visible security presence.
Second, a trained officer can respond in the critical seconds between the start of an attack and the arrival of law enforcement. In Chattanooga, Abdulazeez’s attack on the Lee Highway facility lasted less than a minute. Police response times, even in urban areas, typically run four to seven minutes. That gap is where people die.
Armed officers narrow that gap. They can engage a threat, direct evacuations, and coordinate with arriving police. The cost of posting an armed guard at a storefront location in Tennessee runs $20 to $35 per hour depending on the market and the provider. That’s real money for a small business. It’s also real capability that didn’t exist at the Lee Highway career center on July 16.
The Industry Response
Security companies across Tennessee reported a surge in inquiries after the Chattanooga shootings. Business owners who’d never considered hiring a guard company were suddenly making calls. Property managers who’d been running month-to-month contracts started signing annual agreements.
One firm that saw a noticeable increase in interest was Shield of Steel, a veteran-owned security company based in Memphis. The firm’s staff includes former law enforcement and military personnel. That background carried extra relevance in the weeks after an attack on military facilities. Shield of Steel provides armed officers, GPS-tracked patrol vehicles, and alarm response services, and their military roots give them a practical understanding of threat assessment and facility hardening that civilian-only firms sometimes lack.
The company told me they fielded calls from businesses they’d never heard from before. Small offices, medical practices, retail shops, all asking basic questions about guard services and facility security audits. “People watched the news and realized they had nothing,” a company representative said. “No plan, no guards, no access control. They wanted to fix that fast.”
That reaction was common across the industry. The challenge for veteran-owned firms like Shield of Steel is that some of the capabilities they bring (active shooter response training, threat assessment from a military perspective, coordination with law enforcement) may exceed what a small retail shop actually needs. A boutique on Main Street in Franklin needs a door guard and a camera system, not a tactical response plan. Matching the right level of service to the right client is something every firm has to get right, and over-selling protection that a client doesn’t need erodes trust.
The Harder Conversation
Facility hardening and guard presence are practical steps. They’re also reactive. The harder conversation is about what security can and can’t prevent.
Abdulazeez acted alone. He had no criminal record that would have flagged him in a background check. He purchased his firearms legally. He chose targets that were publicly known and minimally protected. No private security measure in common use at Tennessee businesses in 2015 would have guaranteed prevention of this specific attack.
That doesn’t mean security is pointless. It means security is about reducing probability and improving response, not achieving invulnerability. A locked door slows an attacker by seconds. Ballistic film keeps broken glass from becoming shrapnel. An armed guard provides immediate response capability. An evacuation plan gets people moving instead of freezing.
None of these measures is perfect. All of them improve the odds.
What Businesses Are Doing Now
In the month since the shootings, I’ve talked to business owners in Chattanooga, Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville. The responses fall into three categories.
Some are taking action. They’re hiring guard companies, installing access control systems, running employee training sessions, and reviewing their insurance coverage. A medical office in Hixson told me they installed a buzzer entry system the week after the attack. A property management company in Cleveland put armed guards at two of their commercial buildings for the first time.
Some are planning to act but haven’t started. They’ve gotten quotes from security companies, talked to their insurance agents, and mentioned active shooter training at a staff meeting. The intent is there. The execution hasn’t happened yet. In six months, half of them will still be “planning.”
Some have done nothing. They watched the coverage, felt the anxiety, and went back to business as usual. They’re betting it won’t happen to them. Statistically, they’re probably right. An individual business’s odds of experiencing an active shooter event are very low.
The problem with playing the odds is that the Lee Highway career center was also statistically unlikely to be attacked. Until it was.
Tennessee businesses don’t need to turn their offices into fortresses. They need to take honest stock of their vulnerabilities, address the ones they can afford to fix, and train their people on what to do when something goes wrong. The Chattanooga shootings gave every business owner in this state a reason to start that process. Whether they follow through is up to them.