This is very normal in the US. Many schools prevented classrooms from opening the doors to improve ventilation during covid, because it would violate their policy about keeping the doors shut in case there was a shooting.
And yeah we have a relatively high amount of shootings, but they are still rare in an absolute sense. A lot of this is driven by an industry that sells bulletproof desks and junk, and needs to keep people afraid because it's profitable.
Edit: I should also point out that shifting responsibility for active shooter response to the individual, the victim, is a way to avoid discussions about actual policy change or to hold people with real power accountable at all.
"And yeah we have a relatively high amount of shootings, but they are still rare in an absolute sense."
To be clear on what that means: In a country of 350-400 million people, these are rare enough that each one can afford to be a media feeding frenzy. The media are constantly on lookout for anything that can cast as a school shooting because it's big ratings for them.
And they still happen only rarely. Months & years between them.
The only reason anyone thinks they happen at all is 100% that the media is constantly vigilant for any trace of a school shooting to bring to you. If the stories were ignored instead, or put out only locally and treated as any other item, it wouldn't even enter your mind to consider them a big threat.
Now, let's contrast that with the number of people helped each year by someone with First Aid training. Let's even discard the ones who are emergency responders. Heck, let's discard the ones done by people who have any other medical training at all, and just look at the people helped by people whose only medical training is their First Aid training. That happens so often it's not news at all. Probably happening right now somewhere in this country even as I type this.
So, naturally, it's important to pour All The Money into active shooter training. Even though for about the same amount of money and time you could train all those people in First Aid instead, which, by the way, is also useful in shooter situations.
This is part of why I have such loathing for the news media. This is an example of where they make Big Bucks pushing a particular gripping story, at the cost of distorting the entire society's views of what is going on and pushing out a merely "mundane" problem that affects hundreds or thousands of people a day. But, precisely because it happens so many orders of magnitude more often, it's not news, so the perception of society is that it's not worth dealing with.
To be clear on what that means: In a country of 350-400 million people, these are rare enough that each one can afford to be a media feeding frenzy.
And they still happen only rarely. Months & years between them.
The latest school shooting in the US was fewer than 30 days ago: 1 dead, 2 injured. It hardly made the news. There was another 3 days before that. In February there were 3 shootings. In January, 7 shootings. That's just this year. Hardly any of the shootings on this list even made national news, let alone were media feeding frenzies:
And yeah we have a relatively high amount of shootings, but they are still rare in an absolute sense. A lot of this is driven by an industry that sells bulletproof desks and junk, and needs to keep people afraid because it's profitable.
Let me correct that for you: all of this is driven by a gun industry that sells actual guns and bullets and has for decades lobbied gun safety laws practically out of existence in the US, and needs to keep gun owners afraid of their "second amendment rights" being taken away because it's profitable.
That's true, but it's also true that, separately, the responses and mitigation efforts often aren't rational and are preyed on by opportunistic business people with an interest in misleading folks, just like anything else.
That's definitely not the right way to assign blame. There's absolutely room to blame all the stuff you've mentioned here and also acknowledge that doing active shooter training is a massive over-response that does a lot more harm than good.
Active shooter training is what happens when you try to make active shooting situations happen never again, and yet people stand in your way such that they keep happening over and over and over again, year after year, decade after decade. Columbine was 1999. And it's not just standing in the way such that we do a little bit at a time and act cautiously and conservatively in implementing changes to preserve everyone's rights, but standing in a way such that absolutely any action whatsoever is impermissible.
At some point if your goal is to protect children who are subject to active shooter situations (which in fact do happen), then perhaps training people to make the best of them when they inevitably occur is all we can do, given the political climate. When a school full of first graders turns up shot dead and literally nothing is done, maybe active shooter training doesn't seem like a bad idea. This massive over-response is a reaction to the preceding massive under-response.
If you really don't want active shooter training to be a thing, make active shooters a thing of the past. Other places don't have this problem. If you want to make a change, call your congress people, and don't vote for them if they won't support sane gun measures, even if they're from a party you typically vote for.
I don't think active shooter drills are that helpful. I think they are mainly "useful" as a political tool to take pressure off politicians and prevent any change in the "political climate".
Comments
This is very normal in the US. Many schools prevented classrooms from opening the doors to improve ventilation during covid, because it would violate their policy about keeping the doors shut in case there was a shooting.
And yeah we have a relatively high amount of shootings, but they are still rare in an absolute sense. A lot of this is driven by an industry that sells bulletproof desks and junk, and needs to keep people afraid because it's profitable.
Edit: I should also point out that shifting responsibility for active shooter response to the individual, the victim, is a way to avoid discussions about actual policy change or to hold people with real power accountable at all.
"And yeah we have a relatively high amount of shootings, but they are still rare in an absolute sense."
To be clear on what that means: In a country of 350-400 million people, these are rare enough that each one can afford to be a media feeding frenzy. The media are constantly on lookout for anything that can cast as a school shooting because it's big ratings for them.
And they still happen only rarely. Months & years between them.
The only reason anyone thinks they happen at all is 100% that the media is constantly vigilant for any trace of a school shooting to bring to you. If the stories were ignored instead, or put out only locally and treated as any other item, it wouldn't even enter your mind to consider them a big threat.
Now, let's contrast that with the number of people helped each year by someone with First Aid training. Let's even discard the ones who are emergency responders. Heck, let's discard the ones done by people who have any other medical training at all, and just look at the people helped by people whose only medical training is their First Aid training. That happens so often it's not news at all. Probably happening right now somewhere in this country even as I type this.
So, naturally, it's important to pour All The Money into active shooter training. Even though for about the same amount of money and time you could train all those people in First Aid instead, which, by the way, is also useful in shooter situations.
This is part of why I have such loathing for the news media. This is an example of where they make Big Bucks pushing a particular gripping story, at the cost of distorting the entire society's views of what is going on and pushing out a merely "mundane" problem that affects hundreds or thousands of people a day. But, precisely because it happens so many orders of magnitude more often, it's not news, so the perception of society is that it's not worth dealing with.
The latest school shooting in the US was fewer than 30 days ago: 1 dead, 2 injured. It hardly made the news. There was another 3 days before that. In February there were 3 shootings. In January, 7 shootings. That's just this year. Hardly any of the shootings on this list even made national news, let alone were media feeding frenzies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
Let me correct that for you: all of this is driven by a gun industry that sells actual guns and bullets and has for decades lobbied gun safety laws practically out of existence in the US, and needs to keep gun owners afraid of their "second amendment rights" being taken away because it's profitable.
That's true, but it's also true that, separately, the responses and mitigation efforts often aren't rational and are preyed on by opportunistic business people with an interest in misleading folks, just like anything else.
That's definitely not the right way to assign blame. There's absolutely room to blame all the stuff you've mentioned here and also acknowledge that doing active shooter training is a massive over-response that does a lot more harm than good.
Active shooter training is what happens when you try to make active shooting situations happen never again, and yet people stand in your way such that they keep happening over and over and over again, year after year, decade after decade. Columbine was 1999. And it's not just standing in the way such that we do a little bit at a time and act cautiously and conservatively in implementing changes to preserve everyone's rights, but standing in a way such that absolutely any action whatsoever is impermissible.
At some point if your goal is to protect children who are subject to active shooter situations (which in fact do happen), then perhaps training people to make the best of them when they inevitably occur is all we can do, given the political climate. When a school full of first graders turns up shot dead and literally nothing is done, maybe active shooter training doesn't seem like a bad idea. This massive over-response is a reaction to the preceding massive under-response.
If you really don't want active shooter training to be a thing, make active shooters a thing of the past. Other places don't have this problem. If you want to make a change, call your congress people, and don't vote for them if they won't support sane gun measures, even if they're from a party you typically vote for.
I don't think active shooter drills are that helpful. I think they are mainly "useful" as a political tool to take pressure off politicians and prevent any change in the "political climate".