What Are Active-Shooter Drills Doing to Kids? | Hacker News Reader

What Are Active-Shooter Drills Doing to Kids?

theatlantic.com

21 pointsdsr1213 comments

Slightly off-topic, but I have a friend who does training for active shooter response (he goes around to schools and large businesses and teaches people what seems to work best for saving lives in these situations). When I see things like "they huddle under their desks in the dark" I cringe. His training is very different, and focused on evacuating the students and disrupting the shooter. First, barricade the doors, then seek immediate escape and RUN. If that's not possible, everyone picks up whatever they can throw and gets ready to pelt the shooter with it if the door is breached. While this is happening, people escape around the edges and others attempt to subdue the shooter (taking advantage of the fact that it's very hard to shoot accurately when you're being pelted with hard, heavy objects).

He has researched a number of these events, and he has some chilling stories. In one case, the shooter walked up and down the rows of desks where people were cowering in the dark and executed each person. I think he said there were only a couple of survivors, and even those were critically injured. In the same shooter incident (sorry I can't recall where he said this one happened), another classroom used the disrupt and escape method, and almost all of them survived.

Bringing it back to topic, I wonder how the psychological effect would change if the students and teachers were trained with active responses that have been shown to greatly improve their odds of survival, instead of being told to wait passively in the dark and hope they get skipped. Would the fear be reduced? I honestly don't know how it would be for kids, but in my own case I feel better when I'm prepared to act instead of having to wait around for something to happen to me.

>I honestly don't know how it would be for kids, but in my own case I feel better when I'm prepared to act instead of having to wait around for something to happen to me.

You mean similar to how any sort of hostage / terrorist event on planes tend to get stopped by passengers now after 9/11 because folks would rather go down fighting?

Also, thanks for sharing the anecdote.

The drills don't make sense to me. If it's a drill to protect the students against one of their own, that student has also been in the drills and knows that quiet rooms still likely have people in them.

If I remember correctly, the last school shooting had the kid shooting through a door's window into a classroom and killing people who were hiding in the corner. Obviously he knew they were in there already. The drilling he was in would've showed him that.

So what is the point of it? You are giving away any and all secrets to the potential assailant. It's nothing like a fire drill or a "mother nature" type of drill. They should really just stop doing it.

I don't think it is about actually hiding or being secret. It's just about stalling. Getting through a locked door takes time that responding officers can use to get to the school. Most school shootings stop as soon as the first responding officer engages with the shooter.

Locked door will not stall a person with a gun willing to shoot through said door. And as they know about the drill they will not be fooled into thinking nobody is there. Plus they can just shoot the lock off. And building a real barricade takes a long time, strength plus skill.

It will prevent any solid response from you though, other than jumping out the window (if possible).

This is why people are trained to evacuate not stay putt during danger. Or stall it actively if they can. Same principle as in fires, earthquakes, floods, bombings or other terror.

If you raise children in fear, they're easy to manipulate into fear as adults.

I wonder if there's any connection between the Booomers' upbringing in the duck-and-cover era and their later full-throated support of security theater in the name of "anti-terrorism".

> If you raise children in fear, they're easy to manipulate into fear as adults.

An implicit claim in the quoted text is that one of the reasons people want to implement such drills is to produce adults that will be easier to manipulate. I think a claim like that requires some attempt at justification.

(And before anyone jumps to conclusions, the point I'm making is completely independent of whether I think the drills are a good or bad thing).

The justification is hard - you would have to run serious longitudinal studies. By that point the damage (or not) is done. In fact this could be considered an unsanctioned social experiment, doubly unethical because it is ran on children and bypasses parental oversight.

Just consider what happens in quite heavily militarized countries such as South Korea. They get large numbers of people who are obedient and respect authority - this on top of the general Asian proclivity to do so.

Or perhaps see what happens in Israel and Palestine with all the missile drills.

Wow. Talk about solving the wrong problem.

America is strange.

I remember drills that had us huddling under our desks because Russia was going to nuke us. Those desks are magical.

I think this is good. Kids go into these drills with eyes wide open, and are forced to confront the reality of their own mortality, and how easily their life could just come to a gruesome end even in a safe setting. The sooner one realizes this in life, the sooner one starts to live with intent, and discerns the difference between things that truly matter in life and that which is fleeting and vain.

Some will instead break faced with this reality or... even worse. Since this is not personalized, it is extremely irresponsible to run such drills.

If they really want to do this, they could choose a hand picked group to actually train in civil response instead of this dumb. Enough trained people should be able to stop an active shooter as opposed to scared bunch of kids.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com