How Stupid Can A Shooting Drill Get ?
I'm bringing this up not in the heat or anniversary of some awful school shooting, but because once again some misguided adults tried an active shooter simulation on students.
Active shooter drills are pretty upsetting in the best of times. I've been through them, and the experience was unnerving. the experience was unnerving. Add to that the non-zero number of drills that are handled terribly.
Like the infamous Indiana drill in which teachers were shot with pellets ("This is what happens if you just cower and do nothing," the helpful police offered.) The Indiana legislature, hearing about this terribly upsetting drill, decided that-- maybe it's a good idea to shoot teachers with pellets. "It's got to do with reality and making sure they experience the emotions and adrenaline," offered the head of the state senate education committee who was also an ordained minister.
Or that time in Missouri, where the state mandates shooter drills, that students were outfitted with fake wounds and fake blood.
Firing blanks during a drill doesn't even count as unusual any more. As are discussions about the "right" way to conduct these drills (which just kind of skip over the if).
But local law enforcement can still find ways to surprise. Just this week, Burlington police officers teaching a class of high school students (in the police station) decided it would be a good idea to stage a surprise faux active shooter attack. Masked gunmen burst into the room and started firing (blanks, one presumes). The students thought they were there to tour the station and hear a presentation about how detectives solve crimes. The police thought they were giving a demonstration of eyewitness unreliability. The students were scared to death.
Police said they'd used the same "realistic as possible" demonstration with adults and college students without trouble, but of course adults and college students are not regularly marinated in a system that reminds them constantly that even in a seemingly safe place, they could be brutally murdered at any moment. This is how we've raised a whole generation.
It is infuriating and enraging. Since Columbine we have insisted as a country on "hardening the target" which translates into making schools responsible to thwart attacks and students responsible for saving their own lives, but not--God forbid--in any way interfering with every American's born right to have at their disposal technology that has no purpose other than to rip bullets through human flesh as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
Of all the things that schools are asked to fix--ignorance, poverty, racism, drug abuse, pregnancy, auto accidents, etc etc etc--the demand that schools and students somehow shoulder the burden for a nation with the worst death-by-gun figures in the industrialized world is the most unjust, unreasonable, unfair and unhealthy. It is also one of our societal tells, a clear sign that all our collective talk about how much we value young humans is just not serious talk at all. And it's not just every death that reminds us, but every child who spends a day (or more) shaking or crying because once again some adult has decided that the best way to handle gun violence in this country is to scare the living shit out of some children.
It's like we're living in a period where legislation is shaped by utter fantasies - imaginations shaped by cheap, simplistic stories.
The gun lobby seems hellbent on turning the world into the Mad Max hellscape they already think it is. The Silicon Valley aristocracy seem to think the best of their astonishing $$$ is to live out some kind of Star Trek dream. Christian jihadists want to create a world where babies are always problem-free, where men are men and women are women, and we can all come together with Jesus.
Cultures are shaped as much by the stories we tell each other about the world, as they are by the facts of the world itself. And it's never been clearer to me that we need kids to read serious stories, real stories, lots of stories, written by people who wanted to tell thoughtful stories - not by some committee trying to hit all the targets laid out in the 4th Grade Reading Standards for their state.
A school safety presentation I had to sit through as a staff member featured suggestions that rooms should be de-identified and student work in the hallway shouldn’t have names on it so an angry, possibly non-custodial, parent couldn’t easily find the classroom/teacher/kid they were looking for. In an elementary school. Saying elementary school can’t be a welcoming environment for little kids because of the potential for violence.
The same police officer also mentioned that the way they conducted drills, they would have people go around and check the classroom doors, and even if they were locked, if they could hear people inside, would unlock the door and tell the kids in there they were dead because they made noise.