The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the two largest teachers unions in the United States, have come out against active shooter drills.
“Everywhere I travel, I hear from parents and educators about active shooter drills terrifying students, leaving them unable to concentrate in the classroom and unable to sleep at night,” Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the NEA, said. “So traumatizing students as we work to keep students safe from gun violence is not the answer. That is why if schools are going to do drills, they need to take steps to ensure the drills do more good than harm.”
The teachers unions are joined in their opposition by the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, a gun control organization founded by Michael Bloomberg. And while the organizations may support ends not amenable to Second Amendment activists, this is one issue on which we can all agree: Active shooter drills are bad for kids.
In the 2017-18 school year, 4.1 million students underwent at least one lockdown at school. And more than 1 million of them were in elementary school, per the Washington Post. In the 2015-16 school year, close to 95% of schools drilled students on lockdown procedures, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
If active shooter drills are so widespread, you’d think that there would be substantial evidence that they’re benefiting children and not just needlessly traumatizing them. There isn’t.
And the odds of a school experiencing a shooting, while seemingly enormous given the news coverage of such events, are still minuscule. Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, “at least 147 children, educators and other people have been killed in assaults,” according to the Washington Post. While it’s a tragedy that the number is more than zero, fewer than 150 deaths over more than 20 years is not the crisis that widespread active shooter drills make it out to be.
Children are already scared enough as it is. According to Pew Research Center, “a majority of U.S. teens fear a shooting could happen at their school, and most parents share their concern.” Yet as statistics have shown, it’s not that likely.
What is likely is that children will undergo an active shooter drill, and the experience can be traumatizing. One article in the Atlantic reports: “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.”
Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, a part of Everytown for Gun Safety, says she’s seen how disturbing active shooter drills can be.
“In California recently, a superintendent hired a stranger to wear a mask to rattle the doors of classrooms without letting faculty and students know,” she said, according to NBC. “We’ve seen students asked to pretend to be victims and lie down using fake blood in the hallway.”
It makes sense that worried parents and educators would advocate for a solution in the aftermath of a tragedy. In the wake of the El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, attacks last year, demand for active shooter training shot up. But with scant evidence that they actually help students, active shooter drills are good in theory but not in practice.
Instead, schools should invest in other preventative measures. The Emmy-nominated short film made by Sandy Hook activists, Point of View, points out that few people recognize a future shooter until it’s too late. Educators can invest in looking for the signs of potential shooters, from disturbing social media posts to social isolation.
There are steps educators can take to help prevent school shootings. Active shooter drills, which do more harm than good, should not be one of them.
