My daughter started having ALICE training in middle school. There was definitely a shift in how to respond to active shooter situation. By HS they were having drills with fake perpetrators where the response differed based on where you were in the building in relation to the mock shooter. DD uses some of those ALICE lessons whenever she’s in public - identifying exits, having a plan on where to go, etc… I hate that it has come to this.
@Creekland was very clear that fighting back to defend oneself is a last resort. Please let’s remember that our children and their teachers are not warriors. While there’s no substitute for preparedness, our primary focus needs to be on addressing the underlying problems.
If we have no plan to have moved to a better place in 10, 20, or even 50 years, then we are doing a great disservice to our children, grandchildren and beyond. Viewing this as an acceptable cost of freedom sickens me.
If it was my child(referencing post 165) I’d be railing at the perps and possibly the parents, if I felt they had been neglectful. Maybe even the school, if I felt they had been cautioned but were neglectful.
I would not be mad at a stranger in D.C.
Yes, the perpetrators are most to blame. But sociopaths exist among us; it is pretty much impossible to cure. So given that some portion of the population is prone to extreme violence against others, and we are unwilling to lock people up prophylacticly, it would behoove us to minimize the tools they have at their disposable to initiate such violence.
There is reporting that the hired security guard may have accidentally shot at a deputy who was responding to the call, and he may have also shot a student. He also apprehended and restrained one of the shooters.
Many, including our president, feel the solution to school shootings is to arm the adults who work in our schools. As a society, are we willing to accept the risks this entails and is it fair to expect our teachers to accept that kind of responsibility?
The most current estimate of the number of firearms in circulation in the United States is 393,000,000.
In 2017 there were 10,982 murders by firearm.
Assuming each was committed with an individual firearm, unique to each crime, .00279% of the firearms in America were used to murder someone.
Statistically your children have never been safer.
I can’t even begin to imagine the chaos of such a scene.
Safer from what, @GKunion? The risk that they will be murdered at school may be relatively small, but not the risk that they will be on a campus during an active shooter event-over 200k kids already have experienced that. And the risk that they will have to participate in and respond to active shooter drills is close to 100% in the US right now, and zero in the rest of the world. The risk of a generation traumatized by fear and anxiety seems pretty high to me.
Statistics don’t mean a lot to those directly or indirectly impacted by this kind of senseless violence.
@roycroftmom Fear and anxiety in generations of children is more a function of agitated parents than actual threats.
I’m going to remember this quote, because this is exactly what happens so much of the time.
@GKunion, the latest fatal fire in a US school was over 60 years ago-we still have fire drills. The last fatal shooting in a US school was this week, so we clearly still need active shooter drills. That can create fear and anxiety in any sane person.
@roycroftmom How parents choose to address their children’s anxiety, as well as their own, will either perpetuate or mitigate the issue.
@GKUnion wrote:
In fact, there were 14,542 people killed by guns in a homicide according to statistics from the CDC and the FBI, an increase from the year before. In fact, 2017 was the highest year for gun deaths in several decades, adjusted for population.
Including suicide, the number was 39,773. As usual, the states with the highest % of gun ownership had the highest % of gun suicides.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/13/us-gun-deaths-levels-cdc-2017
Do share any tips to mitigate the anxiety in children-I am sure Colorado parents would find that helpful. For many in the surrounding area this was the 3rd actual lockdown in a month-this event, lockdowns related to the young woman obssessed with Columbine who eventually killed herself, and one other incident I do not recall at this moment. So I would expect anxiety to be rather high right now, with good cause.
@greenwitch My number came directly from table #20 of the FBI UCR for 2017.
Interesting article about the psychology behind gun owners: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-are-white-men-stockpiling-guns/
If there is a fire in the school, almost 100% of the time you want the buildings cleared and everyone to get out as fast as possible. With a shooting situation, that may not be the case and the order is to ‘shelter in place.’ It’s hard to know what is required until the situation is unfolding.
My kids were part of a situation on their first day at a high school. There wasn’t a shooter but the marine base had an AWOL marine who had made some ‘threats’ in a journal. The school was a collection of buildings, about 8 on the main level and another 3 up on a ridge above the school. They first evacuated all to the gym, which was of course IN a building, and then to the football field. 4000 students and staff all on the hot football stadium (it was like 105 that day).
I arrived to pick up my kids 6 hours later (when they had been evacuated to the grocery store parking lot next to the school which was also 105 degrees), with marines in full gear, dogs, machine guns up on the ridge, both marine and news helicopters circling, the I-5 closed (right next to school) and probably 200 police, sheriff, ambulance, and other law enforcement people surrounding the school.
Anyway, all the fire drills in the world wouldn’t have helped them or the school prepare. They’d been in school for less than one hour when this all happened. They had to follow the others to the gym because they had no idea where it was.
And that wasn’t their first lock down situation.
“Mass shootings are a bad way to understand gun violence”
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-are-a-bad-way-to-understand-gun-violence/
How about free societies in which relatively few people have guns? There are such places. They occasionally have horrible incidents (the recent mosque shooting in New Zealand comes to mind). But in general, their death rates from gun violence are much lower than that in the United States. And in many of these countries (and again, New Zealand would be an example), it’s hard to even imagine the citizens being at the mercy of a tyrannical government.