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Comment by staticman2 | Hacker News Reader

Among other things an entire day on active shooter drills?

Is it possible your niece was joking?

Unfortunately, no. My niece's mom, my sister, called her school to ask wtf was going on. They gave her a lame, lawyer-approved response about their responsibility to protect children and the drills are mandated by the state, blah blah blah. So yeah, my niece said they practice how to respond (call 911, not your parents?), what to do if the teacher is shot (they don't use the word "shot", though), and they talked about tactical gear, like bullet-proof backpacks, which my niece wants now.

>call 911, not your parents?

What else do you expect government run schools to teach if not "engage the government at any/every opportunity"?

Looking back on my own education what a disservice some of those behavior patterns (not specifically that one) they tried to teach us would be in adult life.

I don’t think advising kids to make their first and possibly only call to an emergency number where someone’s all but guaranteed to pick up quickly and dispatch help instead of to a parent who might not pick up for any number of reasons and can’t personally dispatch emergency responders (but will surely just themselves turn around and call 911) is, like, a Big Government propaganda conspiracy. Seems more like plain old good advice.

While probably appropriate for a shooting, "when shit's going down, call the government first" is generally not a terrible way to handle things as an adult as it tends to reliably turn N-figure problems into much more complicated N+1 or N+2 figure problems. Running your situation by a cooler head not immediately involved is almost always better and the government is always slow enough to show up that you don't lose anything if you do go that route.

Likewise, I think it is very ill-advised to cram kid's heads full of "dial 911" at the young vulnerable age where repeated messaging goes into the kind of memory that's all but impossible to overwrite.

Given the recent school shooting where police waited around outside as the shooting was happening and parents were the only ones to intervene, it doesn't seem like such good advice.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing the LE leadership at that particular, ah, event, plus maybe many of the other law enforcement folks present, subjected to some... consequences. Whatever the victims' parents want, really, I'd be pretty open to anything. I have ideas but I'd not suggest my preferences matter here, and would rather leave it to them, even if they settled on "nothing".

And ACAB, yeah, sure. Basically true, I agree.

That's still your best first move if there's a mass shooting. Anyone you call's just going to call 911 anyway (god, I hope). You do want hospitals on alert and calling in trauma surgeons, and ambulances on the way. And usually the police aren't that astoundingly useless in these cases, even if their outcomes are mixed.

I do think more often than not police are, in general, a net-benefit and force for "good", if you will, when called in for a mass shooting, and I don't think it's a particularly close call. Though yeah sometimes they are pretty bad even for that purpose (and they're often bad for other purposes, sure), and in the case of Uvalde they were disgustingly bad, and I here employ "disgustingly" with its full force and not flippantly.

Still, like... probably call 911 first if someone's shooting up a school?

lol, our legal system helping to destroy education via risk mitigation.

That's wild. My daughter just started public high school last week and they haven't had any meaningful talk about safety, no active shooter drills, nothing like that. They did waste several days on orientation and how class will be organized, stuff like that, but since she's a freshman I guess maybe that makes sense. This week she's been assigned homework.

But this is a boring suburban town on the edge of a midsize metro in the PNW, which is not exactly the most exciting place in the country.

> they don't use the word "shot", though

Can I guess.. "bulleted"? Similar to how the creators of brainrot content say "unalive" or "seggs" because they want to make sure their content can go viral, and there's the belief words like "kill", "died" or "sex" will trigger Zuck and Co.'s censorship?

2025, what a year to be alive...

My employer has us do active shooter training once a year. It only takes a couple hours, but I'm not surprised at all that many schools would spend a whole day (or more) on it, considering the attention paid to school shootings.

(Not to mention the break from teaching/studying.)

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