[Spooky23]

Risk management is on a scale.

You always try to react to high-probability, high-impact events (traffic accidents at pickup) with rules, controls and people. You may have rules to high-probability, low-impact events (running in the hallway). Low probability, high-impact events are important as well because the stakes are high. Shooter drills and fire drills fall into that category.

As a society, the United States has decided that the value of allowing easy access to firearms is such that risk of marginal people using them to murder children is ok. We've accepted that by default. Depending on how you count, there are several dozen to several hundred school shooting incidents every year.

It would be irresponsible not to have a protocol to protect the lives of children in school, and tbh, the kids accept it as part of life. Those of us who remember a more innocent time are more horrified.

[thaw13579]

We of course should prepare and have protocols to protect children in these scenarios, but there are better and worse ways to go about it. I essentially believe it's okay to leave young children blissfully ignorant of low probability / high impact harms (there are many that are equally likely to school shootings that we ignore). Lockdown protocols and training seem fine to me, if they are sufficiently abstract, but there is an emerging trend of "crisis simulations" which involve people posing as shooters, simulating gunfire sounds, and staff / students posing as shooting victims, etc. I think adults can handle this kind of realism, but there is evidence for harm in young children.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2301804

[Spooky23]

Fair point and I agree with you 100%. I wasn't aware that people are this bonkers.

I haven't followed this issue super closely, and based my previous statements on our experience - I have school-aged children and our lockdown drills are not anything like this and are very child focused. It's really about understanding what the staff and children need to do.