Against Active Shooter Drills

thezvi.wordpress.com

6 points·imgabe··5 comments

You can argue active shooter drills are not being performed in an appropriate manner, but arguing you don't need them is quite debatable.

Fire accidents in schools kill far less people than school shootings, and yet we have fire drills.

There's a lot more evidence that fire drills improve response in ways that make a positive difference in practice than there is for active shooter drills (and not just for fires, since fire drills are mainly generic efficient evacuation drills); conversely, there's more evidence of adverse mental health impacts from active shooter drills than fire drills.

You will not convince me there is nothing you can do in an instance of school shooting that will reduce the victim count.

Even if school shooting drills were merely performed as a special case of evacuation with special procedures (in a format free of presenting anything graphic or scary for kids) that would be better than not doing anything about it.

> You will not convince me there is nothing you can do in an instance of school shooting that will reduce the victim count.

Nor did I claim that.

What I did claim is that the available evidence suggests that actual school shootings drills instead of unknown unspecified behavior changes are safety theater whose actual effects are enriching entities that provide those trainings and traumatizing students.

> Even if school shooting drills were merely performed as a special case of evacuation with special procedures (in a format free of presenting anything graphic or scary for kids) that would be better than not doing anything about

That might be better than nothing, but that's not what is actually done.

all they do during these drills is have the children sit quietly on the floor with the lights off for 2 minutes. Lame? Sure. But hardly traumatic.

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