Quincy News: Active-Shooter Drills Are Tragically Misguided

– News and commentary covered by Quincy Quarry News.

Safety vest wearing evacuees
Edmon De Haro image via The Atlantic
Active-shooter drills are misguided.

Tragically misguided.

For starters, there is scant evidence that they are effective.

They can, however, be psychologically damaging — and they reflect a dismaying view of childhood.

Make it stop
Image via The Atlantic
The impulse driving these preparations is understandable. The prospect of mass murder in a classroom is intolerable, and good-faith proposals for preventing school shootings should be treated with respect.

But the current mode of instead preparing kids for such events is likely to be psychologically damaging.

Related article: What Are Active-Shooter Drills Doing to Kids?

Drills aren’t limited to the older grades. Around the country, young children are being taught to run in zigzag patterns so as to evade bullets.

Hunkered down in kindergarten
Edmon De Haro image via The Atlantic
Kindergartens classes have added words such as barricade to their vocabulary list and five and six year-olds are instructed to stack chairs and desks “like a fort” should they need to keep a gunman at bay.

In one Massachusetts kindergarten classroom hangs a poster with lockdown instructions that can be sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”:

Lockdown, Lockdown, Lock the door / Shut the lights off, Say no more.

A good case can be made that the scale of preparedness efforts is out of proportion to the risk. Deaths from shootings on school grounds remain extremely rare compared with those resulting from accidental injury, which is the leading cause of death for children and teenagers.

In 2016, there were 787 accidental deaths (a category that includes fatalities due to drowning, fires, falls, and car crashes) among American children ages 5 to 9 — a small number, considering that there are more than 20 million children in this group. Cancer was the next-most-common cause of death, followed by congenital anomalies. Homicide of all types came in fourth.

To give these numbers even more context: The Washington Post has identified fewer than 150 people (both children and adults) who have been shot to death in America’s schools since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, in Colorado.

Not 150 people a year, but 150 in total over nearly two decades’ time.

Preparing our children for profoundly unlikely events would be one thing if that preparation had no downside. But in this case, our efforts may exact a high price.

Related article: The Futility of Trying to Prevent More School Shootings in America

Time and resources spent on drills and structural upgrades to school facilities could otherwise be devoted to, say, a better science program or hiring more experienced teachers.

Much more worrying: school-preparedness culture itself may be instilling in millions of children a distorted and foreboding view of their future.

It is also encouraging adults to view children as associates in a shared mission to reduce gun violence, a problem whose real solutions, in fact, lie at some remove from the schoolyard.

We have been down this road before. In an escalating set of preparations for nuclear holocaust during the 1950s, the “duck and cover” campaign trained children nationwide to huddle under their desk in the case of a nuclear blast. Some students in New York City were even issued dog tags, to be worn every day, to help parents identify their bodies.

Assessments of this period suggest that such measures contributed to pervasive fear among children, 60 percent of whom reported having nightmares about nuclear war.

Ponder the parting letter a 12-year-old boy wrote his parents during a lockdown at a school in Charlotte, North Carolina, following what turned out to be a bogus threat: “I am so sorry for anything I have done, the trouble I have caused,” he scribbled. “Right now I’m scared to death. I need a warm soft hug … I hope that you are going to be okay with me gone.

American children today are probably the safest in history; however, is childhood itself imperiled by overreacting to arguably overblown existential threats?