#i had tornado and fire drills and they have active shooter drills

[patisserieblu]

I love seeing the "What to do in case of an active shooter" poster at the pharmacy 🫠😒

[whitehotharlots]

Hamster wheel

My first experience with active shooter drills came the autumn after Columbine. I was in a study hall course in our high school’s cafeteria. My seat was approximately ten feet from the exit, then it’d be just a thirty or forty yard dash through the parking lot to safety. 

We were walked through the steps. This is what a shooter alarm sounds like, and here’s how it’s different from a tornado alarm and fire alarm. When you hear the shooter alarm, you need to get beneath one of the spacious, fairly high-topped cafeteria tables and place your hands above your head. Whatever you do, you should not attempt to flee.

This was insane enough that even the kids who usually nodded along to everything teachers told them expressed some incredulity. I asked if they were being serious. Like, for real are you being serious? The door is right fucking there. We can leave, instead of putting ourselves in a physical position that would make us much easier targets.

I was told that, yes, this is for real. And any more questions would be met with detention. Now, wait for the alarm and assume your positions. We all complied.

A decade later, I and hundred or so incoming instructors at a large university went through more advanced training--by this point it’d become a cottage industry, and they had instructional videos. We were told not to panic, shut the classroom door, instruct students to get beneath their desks, and don’t let anyone flee. 

The good news was that in so large a campus, the odds of the shooter targeting your particular classroom were quite slim. Goodie. And in this case, you’ll never know who’s a cop and who’s a shooter--cops like showing up to active shooting scenarios in plain clothes while wielding large weapons, and what if a good guy mistook you for a bad guy? Also, if the shooter does enter your room, you and your students should throw whatever you have at your disposal toward him, try and disrupt his flow. 

In a room full of putative intellectuals, no one bothered to ask how it was that if a man with a gun attempted to enter our classrooms during a mass murder event, we were supposed to be able to tell if he was a bad guy shooter who needed to be stopped, or a good guy police man who would not be legally liable if you spooked him and he killed you.

Of course, I thought back to my high school training. And it finally made sense: the point of active shooter drills is not to mitigate loss of life during a mass shooting. It’s to deflect liability to the institutions that offer the drills. If codifying these procedures actually results in more casualties during a worst case scenario, well... that’s a small price for legal protection.

Columbine is now the touchstone for retro-90′s era school shootings, but to me, at the time, it wasn’t the most horrible or gripping. It all seemed too random, too much like an amateurish media fabrication; a pair of shitheads doing what they thought they needed to do to get nationwide attention. 

The one that really scared me, at a young age, was the Westside Middle School shooting a year before. The Columbine shooters were disaffected high school shitheads, like myself, and I felt I could diagnose such a situation on my home turf beforehand and either defuse it or, at the very least, make certain I myself would be in no real danger. The Westside kids were kids, aged thirteen and eleven. They didn’t wander about the halls of their school picking off any random enemy. They had a plan. They gathered a cache of weapons beforehand and pulled a fire alarm knowing where their classmates would congregate after the building had been evacuated. They perched atop a hill and used the high ground to pick off their classmates and teachers amidst the confusion.

What got me about that shooting was the tactics. Literal children, even at the time younger than me, could somehow figure out the value of having the high ground and preying upon mild, manufactured chaos. You didn’t need to be a genius to be very good at murder. You just needed intuition, guns, and some very basic training. This shit could therefore happen anywhere, at any time, and for any reason.

Back to Columbine: it might be hard for younger people to grasp this, but way back in the ancient year of 1999 a school shooting that killed a mere dozen-plus was could capture the nation’s attention enough to remain in the headlines for months. 

The internet was still very young at the time; the ubiquitous online-ness afforded by smartphones wouldn’t been seen for another decade, and social media as we know it was still 6-7 years away. Nonetheless, Columbine was the first hyper-modern domestic tragedy. The coverage of previous school shootings focused primarily on the event itself, with minimal attention paid to the shooters’ backgrounds and motivations. Like nearly every other tragedy that proceeded it, Columbine was used a backdrop against which preexisting and mostly unrelated culture war battles could be litigated. 

My, how the narratives flowed. The shooters were godless, perhaps even satanic. They were so incensed at their low placement on the social totem pole they exacted horrific revenge against the popular, god fearing masses. Before taking the pure and virginal life of an especially sympathetic, blonde victim, they mockingly asked her if she truly believed in our lord and savior. She was martyred for her affirmative response. 

This, we were told, is what happens when the natural social order breaks down. Marilyn Manson, Beavis and Butt-Head, dark clothing, loud music, divorce, feminism, homosexuality... these things are all connected, people! And if we as a society continue allowing for their proliferation, we can only expect more and more horror. 

None of the narratives passed scrutiny. The shooters were not disaffected loaners; they were relatively popular and Harris was an athlete. They were not bullied. They did not ask a girl if she believed in God before they shot her. They were not picking off the popular kids while sparing the misbegotten nerds and weirdos. They didn’t even like Marilyn Manson--their favorite band was the avowedly non-violent KMFDM, a group whose lyrics usually sound like something taken from a Dick and Jane book.

In spite of the thorough wrongness of nearly every aspect of the shooting’s coverage, Columbine remains the template for how we process acts of mass domestic violence. There’s no shortage of cultural grievances on either side of aisle, and zero popular or political will to question why it is that a society so inured to needless and manufactured deaths might keep suffering these paroxysms of horror whose targets and scale grow increasingly profane with each passing year. Like every other social problem, the causes are always obvious, always wholly subjective, and yet somehow always just beyond our capacity to control.

The vulnerability is inevitable. Always has been. The only thing preventing the people you pass on the street from ripping your throat out is a shared sense of human connection that was once so basic it didn’t need to be enunciated but now seems like a quaint illusion, perhaps even a malignant trick, a sheet of wool pulled over our once-naive eyes that prevented us from understanding the evil depth of those whose cultural and consumer preferences do not align with our own. The fact that this sort of petty, superficial dehumanization appeared to be driving factor of the initial shootings is ignored. We do not possess the moral bandwidth to acknowledge that we are living in the world idealized by the likes of Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold. 

The terrors keep coming. Our responses make us dumber and more hateful. Our preparations render us much more vulnerable to future horror. The wheel keeps spinning. It will never stop.

[thedeliverygod]

Tumblr is not letting me edit for whatever reason but growing up I just had tornado and fire drills.

Active shooter drills were added as a thing when I was in high school.

And yeah as I said in the post the mention of a hurricane drill is so weird to me I saw someone in the tags say they did it in Florida maybe cuz they have less warning? Idk but yeah in NC if a hurricane is imminent school is cancelled and most the time it was like “lol school got cancelled for some rain” but yeah

[ieatsurveys]

98.

When someone sneezes, do you say “Bless you,” or “God Bless you?” God bless you.

Do you ever look at someone cute, and automatically make a move? Yes.

How many times have you been to Wal-Mart/K-Mart in the past week? Zero.

What are two things you are excited to do in the near future? For the weekend.

Have you ever seen the movie A Walk to Remember? Cliche’ or worth watching? Yes, and it's a good movie.

Do you ever put condoms in old people’s buggies at the store? No?

Name one reason you go to a pharmacy regularly for? My pharmacy is mail delivery, so none. I only go to my physical pharmacy for my birth control.

What radio station could you not resist turning it to in the vehicle? I listen to Spotify, not the radio.

Do you live in a house, apartment, or another type of arrangement? Apartment.

Do you wear sweaters in the Winter or hoodies, more often? Hoodies.

Are you kind of a loner? Do you like being alone? I am a bit of a loner and yes, I do.

Are you one of those people who like to spell out numbers? Sometimes.

Is there an animal in the room with you right now? What kind? No.

Did you or do you still have a Furby? Was/is it annoying? I never owned one.

What's one event your town has that you don’t like to participate in? I don't know.

Are any of your siblings married? What are their spouse’s names? They are. Christiana and Lauren are the wives names.

Do you hate nosy people who ask too many personal questions? I don't hate people, but yes, I hate WHEN they do that.

Name one lyric from the song you’re listening to/the last one you listened? No.

Do you have a fax machine? Do you ever use it anyways? No and no.

Does your kitchen table have placemats? If so, what colors are on them? I don't even know why I have a kitchen table, I never use it. But no, I don't have placemats.

Do you know how to sew? What's your favorite thing to sew? I don't.

Have you ever owned a turtle? Did it ever bite you when you owned it? I have not.

Does your father have any creepy or scary friends you don't like? I don't think I've met his friends.

Who was the last person (if anyone) you said Happy Birthday to? Good question.

Do you have Photoshop? If so, how often a day do you use it? I don't.

What color are the walls in the room you’re in right now? White.

Has your school ever had a lockdown? If so, for what reason exactly? Yes, there was an active shooter in the next town over.

Do you enjoy it when your school has drills? (ex/fire or tornado drill?) No.

Do you watch any shows that you know your parents wouldn’t approve of? Yes.

Do you have any siblings who still believe in Santa, and are over age ten? No.

What color were the last pair of headphones/earphones you bought? Erm, probably white.

Do people call you a big mouth sometimes? Or more than sometimes? They used to.

Has anyone ever stolen your survey questions before, if you make surveys? When I used to make surveys, sure.

Leggings with denim shorts; yes or no?: No.

Do you like to burn candles?: Yes, but haven't in a while.

Are Yankee Candles really all that?: Yes.

Do you think any bands/artists are trashy?: No.

What makes you tick when taking surveys? Hmmmm, it gets annoying when they focus on one topic. I really like random surveys.

Have you ever started typing something and then someone spoke and you ended up typing what they said? Yes.

What type of white-out do you use: bottled liquid, tape or pen? Bottled.

What would you put on your perfect sub? Chicken fingers.

Do you have anything that’s limited edition? No.

[what-in-the-gloobie-glob]

I firmly hate the state of America especially right now

Cw: this is about gun violence

Before this post goes on please know that I am fortunate enough to have been sheltered from a lot of what I will bring up later in this past. And that even as shitty as this my sound, Truthfully I ignore most national news if it doesn't affect me. So please take this with both a grain of salt and a grain of sugar because this is no longer something that I am ignoring.

For context I live in a neighborhood where there is a non zero amount of people who celebrate Diwali. Now I personally don't know much (anything) about Diwali (I'll educate myself at somepoint) but I have just recently learned that fireworks are involved.

For further context I have at least one neighbor who has a gun, and said neighbor sometimes likes to fire it into the air at night at random. Why? Idk. Are there other neighbors that do this? Idk but I haven't ruled it out.

Now for the part that I hate, and I don't hold this against the people, thus was just my automatic reaction. So fire works started going off, and I'm in bed none the wiser, and I hear the first of the fire works go off. And in a moment I will realize 'oh its just a firework'

But my initial response? "Oh shit. Who the fuck has their gun out at 6pm and why the hell are they firing it in a neighborhood full of kids?"

There would be (are currently) lapses in the fireworks and any time they started up again, this happened. And it actually makes my heart do this kinda unsettling jump thing, and I hate it.

Now, again, I want to say that this is nobody's fault. I don't have a problem with cultural traditions, I really respect them, and I tried to be respectful in this post even with my limited knowledge (please tell me if I was disrespectful at any point and I will do my best to amed it asap). But the fact that this was my initial reaction (or even a reaction at all) probably means there is a problem in america.

So yeah I just wanted to share this because, everyone talks about the state of America, and bring politics into it, and I just wanted to say it goes deeper than that.

I also want to say that I've seen tiktoks about some non-Americans (definitely not all, but enough that I noticed, and I generally am not on that side ot tiktok) like to bring up school shootings when making fun of America. And I want to say IT IS NOT FUNNY!! It's a real issue, and real people die, real CHILDREN die. And you're laughing about it?

And that's not the only way it affects people. It's very traumatic, even for the kids who haven't physically gone through one, even for the kids who only have to learn about it.

Do you know how bad it has to be a kid in kindergarten and learning about active shooter drills. Do do know how heartbreaking it is for a parent to have to send their kindergartener (or any child for that matter) to school knowing that their backpack weighs just a little more because it holds a kevlar insert in it, on the hopes that on the off chance that a shooter does come for them that their child(ren) will be a little safer.

Everyone grows up with fire drill, and tornado warnings. I am now out of highschool (secondary school) since 2 years ago. I had two (2) tornado drills in 7 years (one was a really bad storm featuring tornado warnings, so is it really a drill?). I had one fire drill for each year I was in school, but none of which were ever real, nor were they close to real. I never once had to truely worry about a real fire. I had three (3) intruder drills, one for each school (elementary, middle, high), there is one (1) time my sister had an intruder drill, this was probably 7-8 years ago, there was a robbery nearby, but it got nowhere near the school (teaching was still actively happening)

Now I want you to think about how 3 something 4 times a year kids have to go through a shooter drill. How many times has teaching been interrupted for this? How many times has a kid seen real life scenarios of this happening with real consequences? (How many times has a school truely caught on fire or been hit by a tornado?)

There are kids (honestly it's most of them at this point) who know in their heart that the shooter drills probably won't save them if it happens to them. There are kids who are actively accepting the fact that they may have to take a life to save their own.

I saw a tiktok of a kid who said he has an escape plan for every single room in the school. Let me repeat that. EVERY. SINGLE. ROOM. And I know for a fact that that kid is not alone. I know for a fact that I too was constantly looking for ways of escape. I too was thinking about how if I couldn't escape, how I could use my use my desk to hide for a single moment. Did you know we were taught to line desks and tables up behind the door all the way to the wall so the door couldn't open? Kids were thinking about how to stab someone in the neck with scissors. Or how to bash a skull open with a holepuncher or a tape dispenser, or how to blind someone by throwing their backpacks. Kids are taught to put their backpacks an their front so that they have more protection.

THIS IS NOT FUNNY! THIS IS SCARY!

The state of America is horrific, and it's actively changing the way children are learning, and viewing the world. Children are actively being taught that they are not safe, and they just have to live with that. Kids are growing up fearful and they don't even know it. They don't know that it isn't normal to step into a classroom and note the desks, and wall position, and if/where there are windows, and how that relates to the door. They don't know that it isn't normal to have to live with a "them or me" mentality and yet they do.

What does this mean for the future?

And for the love of whatever you love PLEASE DON'T JOKE ABOUT IT!

[emrudy]

There was a poll that went around a while ago that i just can't stop thinking about. It was asking what kind of drills people had in school, like fire, tornado, active shooter, what have you.

But then one of the options was hurricane.

Like??????

I grew up in eastern NC. You know a hurricane is coming for days in advance, sometimes a whole week if the path is clear. They just cancel school.

[pixiefoibles]

Hey I noticed that, in school as minors, we did regular drills for fires, tornados (I live in OH), and active shooters

But never once have I had a job do that, or even go over that information. Like I once asked my manager “if there were an active shooter here, what would we do?” And he couldn’t answer me. At a different job we were almost snowed in and they just…didn’t have a procedure. They just sent us home when the weather cleared up and thankfully we never lost power. But—

Hey. Hey,

[oftengruntled]

I don’t think I’ll word this correctly, but these are my thoughts on school shootings in the good ol’ US of A.

First of all, I’ll establish my perspective. I am a recent high school graduate with a sibling who has just entered high school. My mother teaches at an elementary school. My father works in the government, but not in an area relevant to this discussion. I do not have much education in the US government besides the basic core curriculum, and even that has been disrupted by some factors I do not find relevant.

This discussion is not about Uvalde specifically, but the trend of school shootings overall. I have not had an opportunity to look into Uvalde beyond what the grapevine’s fed to me, but I fully intend to do more research in the future, based on some accusations I’ve heard.

My school has, from what I’ve seen, at most two police officers on school grounds to cover almost 20 entrances to the school building, which seems far from adequate to prevent an active shooter from harming a significant percentage of the school population (of course, any death from a school shooting is very significant, I mean larger numbers). My school also performs active shooter drills about once a semester (or so) and treats them largely the same as fire and tornado drills. The PA system tells us it’s happening, we sigh and sit in a corner of the room, then we get up. No further discussion of school shootings. It’s not like we don’t have the opportunity for it, there are whole class period we set aside for schoolwide lessons on stuff like mental health every day. But instead we treat active shooters like fires and tornadoes - almost unavoidable natural disasters. Which active shooters aren’t, let me be clear. I’m not sure if this is a national pattern, or even a statewide pattern, but the most directly we address school shootings is the occasional walkout. Among students and faculty, the drills are treated as little more than a nuisance.

This treatment of school shootings (not including walkouts) does not address ways to prevent school shootings from happening in the first place, instead telling us how to react to a school shooting, which is to sit in a dark room hoping the shooter doesn’t know that’s what we’re doing. This treatment prevents the meaningful discussion of the reasons behind a shooter’s actions and how they arrive at the decision to kill students. It does not tell us what to look for in our classmates for possible school shooters, it does not tell us how to treat our classmates to prevent school shooters from developing. It does not stop school shootings from happening, it arguably helps shooters who were once students at my school. This informs potential student school shooters that the school does not consider them worth its time to help or to prevent them from attacking their classmates. It tells them their school ultimately doesn’t care about what damage the student has endured until that student attempts to turn the damage outwards. 

Moving on to the public response to school shootings and policies relating to them. It’s absolutely and unconditionally horrifying to me how quickly various groups around the US will trend from grief over the losses to manipulation of said losses to support their ideals. Usually it takes barely a week for headlines and social media responses to go from “oh my god children were shot to death” to “yeah, kids died, and here’s what that means for your political arguments” and that happens around a week and a half after the shooting itself. Not two weeks after their classmates and faculty were brutally massacred, the survivors have to face the rest of the country dragging the event from political extreme to political extreme, while almost nobody outside of the county it happened in appears to care about the real effects on the remaining students besides proving a point. It’s abhorrent to treat the deaths of many children as little more than a political tool, an opportunity to stick it to the other wing that just happened to fall into your campaign. 

When a policy change is considered, which is rare, it takes almost no time for 2nd amendment supporters to rain down in droves, condemning anyone who suggests the shooter shouldn’t have had access to guns as a traitor. No matter how many school shootings happen, no matter how many children die, they decry any bill that so much as mentions firearm restriction. They act as if the Founding Fathers had assault weapons in mind when crafting the Bill of Rights, as if firearms designed to efficiently kill that have a crime in their names are totally fine. 

What frustrate me about this unyielding adherence to a 300 year old law isn’t legal obedience, but how welcoming it must be to potential school shooters. When these people refuse to restrict gun purchases, they directly allow school shooters to access the resources they need to kill people. More than that, they give potential school shooter a community they will feel safe in, one that will support them right up until they actually shoot a kid, a community that will inadvertently provide a school shooter with everything they need to succeed. 

And I know from experience that someone will bring up that one guy who drove a truck through a crowd in France as if that man couldn’t have killed dozens more people if he had an assault weapon. They’ll say that people will find other ways to kill people, completely ignoring that it’s harder to effectively kill someone with a truck or something than it is to kill someone with a weapon designed to do that.

I’m sorry if this is off-brand, I just had to get it out. I felt like I was just talking to a brick wall when discussing this with my mom. 

[jesus-0f-suburbia]

when i was a small boy back in elementary school, i had one shooter drill per year, two fire drills, and two tornado drills. the shooter drill was very simple, turn off the lights and we all hide in the corner.

when i got to middle school we started to have two active shooter drills per year. and the procedure started to get more involved, turn off the lights, pile desks in front of the door, then hide

freshman year i had my first alice assembly. they started teaching us how to fight back. things that would be best to grab, how to pile the desks in a more efficient way. we had four drills that year

sophomore year, we had a shooter threat. we liked the desks, five kids grabbed the heaviest things they could find, and the rest of us waited. we waited in a dark corner. and the. we waited more

i lost my junior and senior years to covid, but i know it’s only getting worse. my seven year old brother should not have to worry about hiding from a shooter during his arts and crafts class. this should not be happening

[lanibgoode]

I’m rereading Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire’s Feed series, and I’m noticing some interesting parallels to current events. Behind a cut to shield a mutual from a trigger.

I just reached the point in the book where Georgia says “I’m still a child of my generation; for me, a large crowd is fifteen people. The wistful looks older people sometimes get when they talk about gatherings of six and seven hundred are compeltely alien to me. That’s not the way I grew up, and shoving this many bodies into one space, even a space as large as the Oklahoma City Convention Center, feels wrong.”

and I know, absolutely, that this parallel was not one Seanan meant to draw, because way back in the far-off, beautiful land of 2010, the nightmare that is happening right now was not. Although I suppose it is possible that she saw what was coming. by 2010, security theater was deeply embedded in our lives. this was post-columbine, but still before the number of mass shootings really started ramping up (obviously). 

there’d been a lot, because americans have always valued guns over lives, and just scrolling through the wikipedia page on american mass shootings is downright horrifying, because so many are schools. so many. anyway. 

George’s fears of being in a large space with so many other people is understandable, because of how Kellis-Amberlee spreads. for us, the terror of being in large spaces with other people is just the way life is now. the way our kids do active shooter drills at school alongside fire drills and tornado drills (or earthquake drills instead? is that how it works in areas that don’t have tornadoes?) 

the very first time I read the newsflesh series, the whole way the world had changed seemed so impossible to me. imagine the stress and terror of shopping for groceries, of going to school, of hospitals and the outdoors and being unable to do anything anywhere whenever you wanted, because what if an animal or a person amplified?

but now? now, here, I cannot send my children to school, I cannot watch my wife go to work, I cannot go shopping for fucking TOILET PAPER without wondering if this is it. If this is the day someone won’t come home.

I don’t like that my perspective has changed. 

[eric-raleigh]

I need to rant for a minute about this crazy, effed up world... so I’m hiding it behind the cut to spare you.

Trigger warnings: Gun violence. 

This morning I got a call from my dad.  First words out of his mouth: Someone just shot at us.

Me: WHAT?!

Dad: [Mom and I] were driving and heard a loud bang as an 18 wheeler was passing, then the back window shattered...

They thought the furniture they were moving had shifted somehow, or fallen out, but when they pulled over to the side of the road, they saw a shotgun sized hole in the side of the truck on the passenger side. They said had it come into the cab, it would have hit my dad in the back. 

You guys, my dad could have been killed today because crazy sons of bitches are allowed to have guns. While I’m so thankful that my parents are okay, two thoughts come to mind:

1.) At this point, fuck the second amendment, NO ONE needs a gun. (Okay, so that’s just my emotional knee-jerk reaction to this, but WE HAVE GOT TO HAVE BETTER REGULATION ON GUNS AND WHO OWNS THEM!!!) 2.) What if this was some kind of highway road rage that we hear about later on the TV, where some crazy asshole was shooting up cars (and possibly killing people)?  

I mean, you just don’t know anymore and it’s absolutely terrifying. I’m so tired of not feeling safe ANYWHERE I go. To a concert, to a bar, to work, in my car, the grocery store. I don’t have kids, but I have school-aged nephews who have lockdown drills. I have friends who are teachers who have lockdown drills. I work somewhere that has active shooter training.  WHY IS THIS BECOMING SO NORMALIZED THAT THESE DRILLS ARE AS COMMON AS FIRE OR TORNADO DRILLS?!?!?!

Too many of my friends have been involved in situations where there has been an active shooter. They have lost loved ones. They have been traumatized. There’s a back-to-school PSA about “weaponizing” (for lack of a better word) school supplies that is downright disturbing and chilling if for no other reason than the fact that this is our reality.

I’m tired of the Second Amendment argument. I’m tired of the “Democrats want to take guns away.” I’m tired of “bans don’t work.” This is an American epidemic. We are the only 1st world country that has this many mass shootings every year. This is not normal.  There is no argument left that can support anyone’s right to own an automatic rifle, or any gun that has not been purchased 1.) legally with 2.) an intensive background check.

I don’t care about your political views. I don’t care who you voted for. There is no valid argument that you could ever give that would support the ownership of an assault rifle, designed for mass casualties in a combat situation.  

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know how to solve the problem, but we have to start with regulation of weapons that private citizens can own, and how they obtain them. 

[teenvogue]

Kesha on Common Sense Gun Laws and Partnering With March for Our Lives to End Gun Violence

In this op-ed, singer-songwriter Kesha explains why she teamed up with March for Our Lives and rapper Chika to fight gun violence.

When I was growing up in school we had mandatory fire drills, we had mandatory tornado drills living in Tennessee, but we never had something that my nephew now has in his public elementary school: mandatory active shooter drills.

The first school shooting in my memory happened at Columbine. I was 12 years old and remember feeling as if the world was crumbling. I thought it was a freak accident, it must be. I thought this school shooting was something we would all read about in history books as a solitary, horrifying event in our country. One that every American family could understand was an earthquake to the core of our very foundation: our children. I assumed we would rally together, and it would never happen again. It couldn’t happen again, something so horrific wreaking havoc on one of the safest, traditionally mundane, and yet mandatory places: a school. But, here we are, almost 20 years later, and somehow, I feel as if we’ve found ourselves as a nation not only divided by politics, but seemingly taking sides on the basic human necessity to be safe.

I can’t imagine how hard it must be for teachers, like my nephew’s, who have to explain to kindergarteners why they have to hide under their desks and not make a sound. I heard a story about a teacher at my nephew’s school telling her young students that the drill was in case a “monster” comes into the school, and everyone has to hide from the “monster.” We can tell children why fires and tornadoes happen because we have science, but how do we explain this? We are forced to lie to children because the truth is too nonsensical: the truth is that politicians seem to be too scared for their own jobs and donation sources to try to do anything significant to prevent these awful shootings from happening again.

It's sad to me that many politicians, pundits, and everyday Americans dismiss gun violence, not just mass shootings in schools, as just another part of the culture in our country. I wish it wasn’t. It doesn’t have to be.

In the years since Columbine, little has been done in order to take meaningful action against gun violence; those who do often do so because they have been personally impacted by the terror and heartbreak gun violence brings. But we have seen young people, like Black Lives Matter activists and the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, mobilize to do something about the devastation in their communities. And finally, it seems, people are listening.

Continue reading

📸: Olivia Bee

[ieatsurveys]

57.

When someone sneezes, do you say “Bless you,” or “God Bless you?” Bless you.

Do you ever look at someone cute, and automatically make a move? Pffffft, naw. Just a lot of awkward eye contact.

How many times have you been to Wal-Mart/K-Mart in the past week? Zero.

What are two things you are excited to do in the near future? New job starts on Monday (training for 3 weeks!) and I don't have anything really exciting for this summer. Usually I travel, but not having a job for 3 months made it difficult to travel when you don't have money.

Have you ever seen the movie A Walk to Remember? Cliche’ or worth watching? Yes. I enjoyed it.

Do you ever put condoms in old people’s buggies at the store? No?

Name one reason you go to a pharmacy regularly for? I have a monthly prescription.

What radio station could you not resist turning it to in the vehicle? When I had my car, I listened to my spotify.

Do you live in a house, apartment, or another type of arrangement? Apartment.

Do you wear sweaters in the Winter or hoodies, more often? Both.

Are you kind of a loner? Do you like being alone? I'm not a loner, though I'm introverted. I have many extroverted tendencies and I like to socialize.

Are you one of those people who like to spell out numbers? Sometimes.

Is there an animal in the room with you right now? What kind? No.

Did you or do you still have a Furby? Was/is it annoying? I never owned a Furby.

Whats one event your town has that you don’t like to participate in? Squirrel hunting, haha.

Are any of your siblings married? What are their spouse’s names? Yes, Lauren & Christiana.

Do you hate nosy people who ask too many personal questions? I don't hate them, but I hate it when they do ask personal questions.

Name one lyric from the song you’re listening to/the last one you listened? Nah.

Do you have a fax machine? Do you ever use it anyways? No.

Does your kitchen table have placemats? If so, what colors are on them? No, I have a tablecloth, though.

Do you know how to sew? Whats your favorite thing to sew? Nope. I mean, I know the basics, but yeah, nothing extravagant.

Have you ever owned a turtle? Did it ever bite you when you owned it? No.

Does your father have any creepy or scary friends you dont like? I don't know his friends.

Who was the last person (if anyone) you said Happy Birthday to? Someone on Facebook.

Do you have Photoshop? If so, how often a day do you use it? I don't.

What color are the walls in the room you’re in right now? White.

Has your school ever had a lockdown? If so, for what reason exactly? Yes, there was an active shooter in the area.

Do you enjoy it when your school has drills? (ex/fire or tornado drill?) No.

Do you watch any shows that you know your parents wouldn’t approve of? Yes.

Do you have any siblings who still believe in Santa, and are over age ten? No.

What color were the last pair of headphones/earphones you bought? White.

Do people call you a big mouth sometimes? Or more than sometimes? No.

[jupiterjames]

So, I got an email from my daughter's school yesterday. Keep in mind this school has only grades K-1, meaning 5-7 year olds.

The email was to notify all parents and guardians that in light of the country's climate, all county schools will be enacting WEEKLY ACTIVE SHOOTER DRILLS.

Let that fucking sink in, my fellow Americans.

A school with 5-7 year old children is having active shooter drills more often than fire drills or tornado drills because this goddamn country and Republican rhetoric will allow 19 fucking school shootings since JANUARY and "send their thoughts and prayers" rather than enact gun control laws.

I literally hate every single person who screams about violating the Constitution with gun control. I hope you motherfuckers choke because I had to sit down with my frightened six year old daughter and she asked, "is someone going to bring a gun to my school and shoot people?" And I could NOT tell her, "no."

Fuck you, Conservative America. Fuck you and your fear mongering and making my daughter tell me all about how she thought about pretending to be sick so she didn't have to get on the bus and go to school BECAUSE SHE IS SIX YEARS OLD AND SCARED THAT SOMEONE IS GOING TO SHOOT HER IN HER CLASSROOM.

I'm so angry about this. So sad. Sorry for the rant, but I was stewing too much to function. I'll delete later.

[profound-boning]

Man, I feel for you so much right now. I can't imagine teachers going into that career thinking about giving their actual lives to save children from shooters, its not the damn military. Wishing you and your students so much strength and bravery rn.

I can honestly say I did not get into teaching with the expectation that I would need to constantly be on alert to defend my students. When I was young, we did fire and tornado drills and we had “lockdown” procedures for dangerous situations but honestly it doesn’t feature. Today in my school district we have protocol for situations involving dangerous activity both inside the school and outside of it--if there is police activity in the neighborhood we can’t go outside for any reason. Plus the drills for school shooters. It’s literally part of the vocabulary now and part of the way that I’m supposed to teach the kids our protocols and practice it with them.

I teach middle school. My kids’ birthdays are all in the 2004-2006 range. A solid five years after the events at Columbine.

I teach in Denver. Aurora is the suburb to the east. That (cinema) shooting happened in 2012 when my kids were in elementary school. Centennial is just to the south. That school shooting happened in 2013 just one year later. These are real and tangible events in my children’s lives and in my own. A friend of mine went to Arapahoe High School and his sister was there that day (she survived). My partner teacher has had multiple real emergency lockdown situations at our school and she’s only in her 7th year of teaching. Not 27th or 47th but seventh (7th!!!).

I don’t want to carry a gun in my classroom or on my person. I want accessible mental health services for all my kids. I want strict regulation on which people get to own guns and how often they need to be checked on and how exactly they need to be stored inside the home. I want weapons like the ones used over and over again in these shootings to be taken out of population of the US.

And I don’t want to hear one goddamn word about how your precious right to own a gun trumps my students’ right to stay alive.

Because what if the next person who tries it comes to my school and aims at my kids and what if I can’t save them?

[newstfionline]

What Are Active-Shooter Drills Doing to Kids?

By James Hamblin, The Atlantic, Feb. 28, 2018

There’s always at least one kid in tears, as they huddle under their desks in the dark. Still Beth Manias, an early-elementary literacy teacher outside of Seattle, tries to act upbeat and relaxed.

“I have them whisper about their favorite candy, dinner, books, movies--whatever, as a distraction,” Manias told me. She tells the kids they’re practicing to stay safe in case there’s ever a bear on campus. Though, she admits, “They always see through this. The older they get, the more savvy they become, probably because they are exposed to more of the news.”

At schools across the country, more children are taking part in mandatory “active-shooter drills.” Forgoing any pretense of a bear, sometimes a faculty member plays the role of a shooter, jiggling doorknobs as children practice keeping perfectly silent. Many parents, teachers, and students say that the experience is somewhere between upsetting and traumatizing.

Which may be worthwhile, if it were clear that the drills saved lives.

Active-shooter drills came into existence after the Columbine massacre in 1999. What is known of their long-term psychological effects comes from the reports of people now in early adulthood.

Ryan Marino, an emergency-medicine physician at the University of Pittsburgh, recalled that his school had adopted the drills during that period, after a student was found to have a “death list” and access to guns. He told me the drills didn’t seem real until he was 12, and a fellow student coughed during one of the drills. “The teacher told us that if this had been real, we would all be dead.”

“That single experience shaped my childhood,” Marino said. “Having to practice and prepare for a peer coming to my school and shooting at me and my friends was something that really changed the overall atmosphere. Looking back, it was a major shift in how the world felt.”

In the two weeks since the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, new and renewed calls for such drills raise the question of whether they do any good--and if they might be doing harm.

The day after the event, Susan Hennessey, the executive editor of Lawfare, tweeted: “Feeling mildly nauseous reading a note from my kid’s preschool about implementing active-shooter drills.”

Brian Leff, a writer in Los Angeles, told me his fifth-grade daughter’s principal just announced the school is contemplating a surprise lockdown drill. “Now my daughter can’t stop thinking about when it’s going to happen and how she’ll know if it’s ‘real’ or not.”

The writer Allison Gibson says that at her 4-year-old son’s preschool, they’re called “self-control drills,” because the goal is to get the students very quiet. “The first time he mentioned it, when he was 2, I had to piece together what he was referring to, and it nearly broke me.”

Of course, general lockdown and disaster drills have a long history; a generation of Americans came of age hiding under desks from nuclear bombs. While the idea of such a maneuver protecting a person from a bomb blast or nuclear fallout became fodder for jokes, the drills themselves had insidious effects on kids’ senses of safety. Some teachers reported that students’ artwork changed to feature mushroom clouds and sometimes the child’s own death, bringing a pervasive sense of danger into the places where kids most need to feel safe.

Despite some similarities to natural-disaster and Cold War drills, active-shooter drills also mean exposing kids to the idea that at any point, someone they know may try to kill them.

“It’s good to do emergency drills, but active shooters are not a drill anyone should have to do,” says Meredith Corley, who taught math in Colorado in the aftermath of Columbine. “It re-traumatizes kids who have experienced violence. Getting the kids settled back into the work of learning after lockdown drills is a nightmare. That mind-set has no place in a learning environment.”

“I was slightly too young for bomb drills, but in greater Kansas City, tornado drills were de rigueur,” says Lily Alice, a Midwesterner born in 1965. “We did have tornados now and then. The difference, of course, is that no one stockpiles them to use against other people, and weather forecasts mitigated some fear.”

Even President Trump, who has expressed support for arming teachers, has warned against active-shooter drills. During a White House meeting last week, he said, “If I’m a child and I’m 10 years old, and they say we’re going to have an active-shooter drill, I say, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Well, people may come in and shoot you’--I think that’s a very negative thing ... to be honest. I don’t like it.”

Studies of whether active-shooter drills actually prevent harm are all but impossible. Case studies are difficult to parse. In Parkland, for example, the site of the recent shooting, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, had an active-shooter drill just last month. The shooter had been through such drills. Purposely countering them may have been a reason that, as he was beginning his rampage, the shooter pulled a fire alarm.

In any case, preparedness drills always change the baseline level of risk that people perceive. This heightening can manifest as stress and anxiety, not to mention changing the way kids understand how people treat one another--to even consider violence an option, not in some abstract way.

Colleen Derkatch, an associate professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, studies how we assess risk when it comes to our health. “The more prepared we are, the more heightened our sense of risk,” she told me. “And one potential effect we haven’t considered is how these kinds of preparedness activities affect kids psychologically, and could increase a sense of feeling at risk. They really expand the ways in which we feel increasingly under siege.”

Preparedness activities, that is, are never neutral. Derkatch’s work relates this concept to the anxiety wrought by a culture of “wellness” products, which are ostensibly meant to keep us healthy, but also enhance our awareness of health risks. “They give us a sense that we’re all constantly on the edge of illness,” Derkatch told me. “Preparedness can be a good thing, but it has very real costs and consequences. For children whose personalities are just forming--who are figuring out what kind of world they live in--if this is the input they get, I think it will have a significant impact down the road.”

Derkatch has an 11-year-old daughter who is in the sixth grade. In her school, they’ve done lockdown drills, but the drills are the sort that are generalizable to any emergency. The teachers are very clear that it’s just a drill, and they lock the doors, and kids stay in their seats. There’s no hiding or barricading, as many schools in the United States now require.

If you were to move to the United States, I asked Derkatch, would you want your daughter going through these sorts of drills?

“No,” she said. “But I wouldn’t move to the United States. And guns are the reason why. Guns and health care.”

“Kids perceive the world generally as a bit of a dangerous place now because of how they tend to be closely supervised at almost all times,” said Derkatch. “If you look at the proposals in the United States, it sounds like they’re trying to make schools an awful lot like prisons, with monitored perimeters and armed guards and possibly armed teachers. You could extrapolate from the experiences of kids living in potentially violent situations, where you never know what’s going to happen. That does have a profound impact on kids.”

“I will never be able to explain it well, but losing a feeling of safety as a child, especially at school, is a major thing,” said Marino, the emergency physician who was terrified to cough. “Anyone who has not gone through school with active-shooter drills can never understand what it feels like.”