They refer to it as ‘active shooter drill training.’
I was initially motivated to write this when I saw a claim that the bipartisan gun deal allocated $5 billion in additional funding for causing childhood trauma. That turned out not to be the case (summaries of the deal from NPR, from CNN and from WaPo don’t mention it and it seems too big to have been overlooked if it was real), but these shooter drills are still traumatizing our children on a regular basis, which seems worth pointing out as another prime example of both our civilization losing its mind and also the existence of extremely low-hanging fruit.
As in, we could simply not traumatize our kids all the time for no reason. Crazy, I know.
For those who don’t know, an ‘active shooter drill’ is where they take young children who are forced by law to be at a given location each day, and periodically teach have them practice hiding and being shot at by a mass shooter.
If your response to that idea is ‘what, what, that sounds horrible and terrifying and we should absolutely positively not do that’ then you seem like a normal human to me.
If your response to that idea is ‘yes this will help protect our children’ then I do not understand you.
Yet these drills are required. Since school is also required, this is something the state is forcing on children. Children are being forced to report periodically for trauma. (...)
This Washington Post article has a variety of reactions to drills. Some of them are about how shameful it is that we have people shooting up schools in the first place, but mostly it’s about how these drills primary effect is clearly to traumatize students.
Yet this has ballooned into an industry, due to our demand to do something:
One particular thing that was sometimes done was to have pretend gunmen roaming the halls firing blanks. I think we mostly realized not to do that.
There are also additional reasons to think drills are even worse than this.
- Drills teach children that they live in a world where deadly school shootings are are something they should expect to happen in their lives, which they aren’t. This functions to put the idea of shooting up a school closer to top of mind and to normalize it as a choice. It lets disturbed kids at risk of doing this see what it would look like, and maybe discover they like it, or that other kids deserve it.
- I propose that traumatized kids, kids who despise their schools for damn good reason, or those who are constantly among others with trauma, are going to more often choose to do crazy horrible things like shoot up the school.
- Drills show potential shooters exactly how everyone will react. This alone plausibly allows them to plan the most effective response measures in ways that more than nullify any benefits from the drill.
- Drills teach children exactly how much the system and the adults around them care about them. They’ll respond accordingly.
- Drills, preparing for drills, dealing with the aftermath of drills and all the resulting focus on such matters takes a lot of time away from learning, to the extent that was a thing school was trying to do.
On a civilization level, we should stop doing this. At minimum we should do less traumatic versions of it, ideally stop causing trauma for no reason.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase | Read more:
Images: Twitter/X
[ed. Absolutely. We're normalizing the abnormal. See also: Something Was Wrong (DWV). And if that's not enough to make kids more stressed, depressed and neurotic we have the new concept of 'Gentle Parenting', which just sounds like the old concept of helicoptering.]
