I Am Well Versed in Active Shooter Training. What About First Aid?

And yeah we have a relatively high amount of shootings, but they are still rare in an absolute sense. A lot of this is driven by an industry that sells bulletproof desks and junk, and needs to keep people afraid because it's profitable.

Edit: I should also point out that shifting responsibility for active shooter response to the individual, the victim, is a way to avoid discussions about actual policy change or to hold people with real power accountable at all.

On the other hand, I did some primary school in New Zealand and we had what I would now call a lock-down for the same reason, where school shootings really aren't a thing. I think schools ought to plan for that kind of thing for safety. I think the kind of first aid they teach you in active shooter training if you happen to take them as an adult (I did because I had a buddy trying to start a business after leaving the military doing it) is actually also really good first aid for anyone who's doing extreme sports, or going in the wilderness, or working around heavy machinery, etc.

I don't think any of that means that people shooting up schools is accepted as normal.

edit: Now that I've read TFA, I'll also add that I've worked in the US my entire adult life and I've never had active shooter training that was mandated at work, or heard of anyone I know having that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_... lists 12 school shootings in 2022 until now!

Mass shootings are apparently treated not as symptom of an ininimal social environment or deficient access control to means but more like the inevitable change of weather. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

That’s about it.

The train stations also have these on tv screens nonstop which are basically leave if you can, hide otherwise, and if there’s no option left, swarm the shooter as a group.

Edit: wait, no I remember something that was insane to everyone. The teachers all had keys to the rooms that locked from the outside, and were required to lock them and then leave on their own. That was wild, both from the perspective of putting all the teachers in the open hallway and filling everyone’s head with this imagined scenario of a guy blind firing at the class through the door window.

When my oldest kid went through one for the first time in 1st grade, they came home and broke down about it. Said they didn't want to die at school and was afraid the bad men would attack. We ended up going through therapy with a child play-therapist which helped my kiddo a lot (in case anyone might be running into this issue and is unsure of what to do).

Somehow this is considered OK, but the "trauma" of wearing a mask to prevent an airborne illness was too much to bear.

When I graduated, they had just started doing them. But the baseball field was still unfenced, and little kids from the neighborhood could still use the outside hallways to play tag in.

By the time my youngest sibling graduated in '11 training was every year, the school was no longer public property that anyone could hang out on, and there were armed police patrolling it.

Each door had a little cardboard thing to cover the window in case of an active shooter situation to prevent them from peaking in.

I should add (as a current high school student in Washington State) a couple days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, the DHS asked high schools to practice "chemical lockouts": ensuring all students are inside, sealing externally facing doors, etc.

Also, at least in my state, in the mandatory physical education class for high schoolers (which is only for one year), we do learn CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, and a few other first-aid techniques. However, by the time students graduate, they will have forgotten all of that training.

Basically all of them consisted of "Sit under your desk and play thumb wars quietly with classmates and listen to your teacher or the classroom speakers instructions"

But hosting a class? That is something everyone organization has full autonomy to successfully accomplish. It is within the organizational and budgetary resources of small companies, big ones, churches, schools, local community centers, etc.

Think about the duck and cover training for surviving a nuclear blast. You might not be able to do much as the average individual to avoid nuclear confrontation, but you can mitigate it on the margin with some tangible steps.

I'd not have expected it beforehand, but it turns out that even fairly mild & common versions of the training (not the extreme sorts that occasionally make the news) can leave adults literally shaking. It's really hard on some people. Yet we subject a huge percentage of our children to it. The risk does not justify that.

Many Republicans will tell you that there is an absolutely vital constitutional right to own, carry, and stockpile all kinds of firearms. Some of them believe it. But this doctrine was only popularized in the 1970s and still does not have majority support today [1].

[1] https://www.pollingreport.com/guns.htm

You'll likely never need one and it will be lost/defunct after a few years (due to heat & moisture). Kit or no, you need a first aid class and a first aid kit. Rather than another expenditure and one more gadget to keep track of, stay with the basics.

Otherwise people will buy a "bleed kit" on Amazon and toss it in the trunk, thinking that they're fully prepared for an automobile accident or such. When an accident does occur, they may or may not remember the kit, take it out and read the instructions manual. Meanwhile someone will die b/c the kit owner wasn't educated enough to "apply pressure to the wound."

[Cue spammers citing questionable personal anecdotes where a "bleed kit" in a car trunk saved them from amputation/death.]

Even comparing, very specifically, intentional firearm homicide of children outside of school to school shooting deaths shows that, per hour, schools are fantastically safer than when kids aren't at school. The US has a gun violence problem but school shootings are just a barely-audible echo of it.

It's very hard to measure/analyze the risk from drills vs. the risk from no drills, especially if the rate of shootings is changing over time.

At the time it was a little tiresome, but after the fact I appreciate the time and resources spent on it.