"... nurses are telling us that they are walking away from situations where there are hyperrealistic active-shooter drills, and they themselves are traumatized by the experience. And they are watching the children be traumatized by the experience. They are telling us that they see preschool-age children go home and tell their parents that there was a shooter at school today. And they are telling us, in some situations, that they feel a gun-violence incident at their school, if it hasn’t already happened yet, feels inevitable. There is a lot of concern about the long-term and harmful psychological effects of hyperrealistic active-shooter drills, and that they are, in many instances, likely to be much more harmful in the long term than helpful in any kind of realistic scenario. And I think we need to understand what works before we widely implement something without understanding the long-term consequences...
So last year, there were 305 different shootings at a school. Two of them were deliberate attacks. The other 303 were a time when a gun was fired, and in that moment, students hear gunshots, teachers hear gunshots, the school goes into lockdown usually for hours, for 3, 4, 5, 6 hours. And because everyone heard that gunshot, they think that it is the real thing. They’re texting their parents, “I love you, goodbye.” But in reality, what we can see from data is that the most common situation to happen at a school is a fight that escalates.There are more teenagers carrying weapons than there have been at previous points in history, and when there’s a conflict, these conflicts are turning into shootings. And the shooter almost always runs immediately, so there’s no threat at the school anymore. But we only have one plan for when a shot is fired, and that’s lockdown. On the other end, when there is a deliberate attack — there have been 230 of those since 1966 — they don’t all happen in the classroom."
Last school year, news reports identified more than 1,150 guns brought to K-12 campuses but seized before anyone fired them, according to an investigation by The Washington Post. That’s more than six guns each day, on average...
Some years ago, in Jacksonville, the principal walked the halls during a drill. The classroom protocol was to ensure that their doors were locked to prevent a shooter from gaining access to the classroom.
ReplyDeleteThe principal--with the very best intentions, I believe--found a class where the door had not been locked. She opened it, went inside, make a gun of her hand, and said, "Bang, bang, bang."
She was taken to task over it. But I think sometimes that's the only way to get some folks to take things seriously. Yes, it may traumatize the kids if it's too realistic, but not nearly so much as the event actually occurred.
This won't sit well with liberals, but the chance of a child dying in a mass school shooting is very close to zero. But who wants statistical analysis when emotion will do? So, off we go spending a zillion dollars on securing schools and all the nonsense described in the post. Better to spend a zillion dollars on improving general psychological health. What's happening to our social fabric? Anyone? I'd begin by looking at the American family. We could have had this deep dive after Columbine. Instead, we outlawed trench coats! Our culture is rotting. It's an uncomfortable conversation, but childhood has been ruined in so many ways that have nothing to do with shootings; ruined in ways that produce more and more sociopaths.
ReplyDeleteThis won't sit well with liberals, but the chance of a child dying in a mass school shooting is very close to zero.
DeleteThe chance that a child dies is near zero. Luckily. However, if an American child dies, the most likely cause is gun violence.
And while you're right, that this does not sit well with liberals, I assume that conservatives love their children as well. However, children that grow up in conservative states have a higher chance of dying from gun violence than in a liberal states. And the kids that die in liberal states are more likely to be killed by a gun acquired in a conservative state than in their own.
It is incredibly tragic we have those statistics.
These children are not going to be kind when they get to vote.
@Crowboy - Emotions and statistical analysis agree here, because shootings are still on the order of a thousand times more common in the US than anywhere else on the planet. They also tend to be more common in red states. So, what mental health initiatives does the US have? Which ones are supported by conservatives? Who has more to gain by fixing the problem properly, conservatives or liberals? Who has more to gain by preventing the problem being fixed? Statistical analysis can tell you all of that.
ReplyDeleteThe percentage risk may be close to zero, but there's, um, room for improvement; three orders of magnitude on the risk percentage, and literally thousands killed and wounded every year.
When the children currently AT school become old enough to vote (and old enough to enter politics), they will probably take measures that fix the problem, because they probably won't want their own children to go through the same things they had to. If that's what it's going to take to fix the problem, then it'll take years more and you can probably look forward to another 20,000+ dead before the problem begins to fizzle out. If that really is the best the USA can manage, I'd call it kinda disappointing.
Your chance of winning XYZ Lottery lottery might be one in a billion. If you play this lottery your chance of winning is obviously higher than someone who doesn't. But it still may as well be zero, because one in a billion is like not playing at all. Comparing the US to countries with no school shootings doesn't really address my argument. We're still over-reacting and in all the wrong ways. I could list a hundred things that are hurting children more than guns--none of which are we willing to talk about.
DeleteThank you for this response. Gun violence is the number one killer of children in the U.S. Downplaying this heart-wrenching fact to argue a political opinion is at best disingenuous and at worst actively complicit.
DeleteThe kind of "active shooter" episodes the post addresses are not the number one killer of children--not even close. But, let's look at guns anyway. I'll guess the number one cause of death by firearm is suicide. Are school shootings causing suicide numbers to increase? No. I'll guess number two is gang violence in the poverty stricken inner city, with minors dying directly and/or due to collateral fatalities from stray bullets. Here again, is this school shooter mayhem of the sort that occurs twice per year in a US school? No. So, who's being disingenuous?
DeleteThey are a real enough risk that they are trained for.
ReplyDeleteWhat would Nancy Reagan say? "Just say 'No' to guns." Problem solved. :)
ReplyDelete@Crowboy again
ReplyDeleteIf you're going to talk about statistical analysis, we can do better than pulling a bogus number out of thin air. 'One in billion' is a disingenous way to phrase it. The only 'lottery' I know of with odds that low are the UK Premium Bonds, and you don't lose your ticket when you 'bet' in that.
UK lottery:
4 numbers 2,179 to 1
5 numbers 144,414 to 1
5 numbers and bonus ball 7,509,578 to 1
6 numbers 45,057,473 to 1
US population: 340,000,000
Mass shooting deaths per year, US: 900
Mass shooting woundings per year, US: 1300
So getting a bullet wound in a mass shooting isn't even the top prize, it's quite closely equivalent to 5 balls.
If we assume every human being knows about 1,000 others; friends, schoolmates, relatives close and distant, then the odds you'll know someone caught in a mass shooting drop to less than 4-ball levels. To be strict, you can't just multiply the 2,200 number by 1,000 because people caught in the same shooting tend to be somewhat statistically correlated. Multiplying by 1,000 assumes they're entirely independent, which gives an over-estimate. But multiplying by 300 or so should more than compensate for that.
At this point I can help but be reminded of the slogan the UK lottery used, many years ago. "It could be you." That's rather more chilling for the US national lottery.
And on the subject of the 'hundred things that are hurting children more than guns', mental health measures would help with many of them, /including/ the gun problems.
'100' is another large-sounding number you pulled out of thin air. I challenge you to quantify the 100 'worse things' you think there are. If you were to do that exercise, you'll have a rankable list of bad things. I'm sure you'll find the ones at the top of the list are clearly, undeniably worse than guns, but by the time you get down to about item #20-30 or so, you're going to be talking about relatively 'minor' issue, which are technically worse than guns, but probably only by a few percentage points. I predict that by the tail end of the list, you'll be scraping the barrel hard enough that you probably are below the harm caused by guns. Don't forget it's not just person x getting shot, it's person y having their best friend die in front of them. That's harm too. Just these realistic drills are traumatising enough to upset adult professionals - that was the original point of the article. And it multiplies your 'one in a billion' number (which would be one death, and one death only, in the whole of the US, every 3-4 years, and not one other person affected) to levels where basically everyone in the country has a friend or a friend of a friend, who HAS been affected.
If you're going to try to talk about statistical analysis, that's more than just spouting a few large numbers. Spout them by all means, but then try cross-comparing. All I did here was take you at your word. You have a problem in the US that's 1,000 times worse than elsewhere else in the Western world, and your 'one in a billion' downplays it by a factor of around the same in the opposite direction.
Seriously, try enumerating your 'hundred things'. If gun deaths turn out to actually be item #26 in severity (or even as low as #85, which I doubt), then by your own argument you should change your mind and favour the same reforms as the liberals. And if guns turn out to be item #4, what you gonna do then? Re-rationalise, so you still don't have to do anything? I hope not.
Dying in a mass shooting is very improbable. In a mass SCHOOL shooting? Even less probable. But you appropriate numbers having nothing to do with the post and the resources devoted to insane school security measures.
DeleteThe number of students who die in a mass shooting episode, in a school in the US, per year, is roughly 30; less than one in 10 million Americans. Number of young people who commit suicide? About 5,000, ages 10-24. (Total US suicides? About 50,000, and growing.) Is the mental and physical health of students improving? Teachers tell me otherwise.
So, why?: Latchkey/abandoned suburban neighborhoods, empty home-lives, child poverty stresses, junk food, obesity, screen time, social media mania, career obsessed parents, climate collapse terror, economic collapse terror, the wealth/income gap, child abuse, child neglect, materialism, consumerism, lack of honest discipline, drugs, trauma, video games, gender confusion and loss of traditional sex roles, destruction of boyhood and girlhood, lack of contact with nature, lack of economically useful participation, etc.
Compare any part of this with childhood in the average American farm family of 1950. What kind of people are we producing? Anyone working in US schools knows we’re collapsing. But who wants to look at our way of life? Better to run another "active shooter" drill.
So your argument is that it's not guns that are the problem but the fact that society has changed dramatically, with increased urbanization, since 1950. Of course farm life was, and still is, hardly idyllic, and attempts to provide a social safety net for both rural and urban people have been largely undermined by conservative financial policies. Rural areas also have high crime rates so gun violence isn't just a problem in cities.
ReplyDeleteGuns may not be the cause of violence but they make it easier to commit violence. And you're objecting to school shooting drills because of the low statistical probability of one occurring but think about how many parents don't want their child to be a statistic.
I suggest the book Methland, just for its description of the decay of rural America.
DeleteFrom 2019:
ReplyDeleteThe Company Behind America’s Scariest School Shooter Drills
https://www.thetrace.org/2019/12/alice-active-shooter-training-school-safety/
Agreed that the school 'security' measures /are/ a colossal waste of time and money, and traumatising too. The mental health and welfare measures that would be many times more effective, and would have much more wide-ranging benefits than just shootings tend to get blocked... by conservative politicians. You get the school security terror theatre /instead/ of the things that would actually work better.
ReplyDeleteBTW Is that 24 out of your hundred? Many of those wouldn't be valid because they're too vague to numerically quantify. 'Materialism'?
Children are also being killed in mass shootings that happen outside of school (about 650 events last year in the US). School prepares kids for life outside of school.
ReplyDeleteAs a general comment, if you have enough mass shootings that you can categorise them into school mass shootings, workplace mass shootings, religious mass shootings, race-related mass shootings, public mass shootings and sports mass shootings, and can make statistically meaningful inferences about the different types, there miiiight be a tiny smidge too many mass shootings going on. It's just a thought.
ReplyDeleteOne is too many. Who would say otherwise? The question is, what do you do about it? Is every church gonna run shooter drills? Every mall? Etc.? Of course not, because a more rational mind-set prevails outside the educational sphere. It's highly ironic that educators are some of the least rational people.
DeleteSaw this today and added the link to the post - "Guns are seized in U.S. schools each day. The numbers are soaring."
ReplyDeleteLast school year, news reports identified more than 1,150 guns brought to K-12 campuses but seized before anyone fired them, according to an investigation by The Washington Post. That’s more than six guns each day, on average...
The implication being that these guns were gonna be "fired?" You mean as opposed to kids showing off by bringing a gun to school and showing off by breaking a rule that freaks out their minders? Or a kid bringing a gun because their school feels more like a Third World prison than an educational institution? Here again, is this a gun problem or a discipline, social breakdown problem? Or a really interesting psychological puzzle, viz. Columbine. It's a puzzle we don't want to solve because solving it means implicating ourselves in the crime--not the crime of not controlling guns, but the crime of allowing a horrific set of values to dominate in our culture. Counting guns is a great distraction.
DeleteCould you clarify what you mean by "allowing horrific set of values to dominate in our culture"? Above you cited1950 as a better time, and yet it was a time of segregation, when homosexuality was a crime, and women's rights were severely limited.
ReplyDeleteIs that an era we should really look to as a model of morality, or are there perhaps other issues, including easier access to guns in contemporary society, we should be considering?