Active Shooter Drills Will Not Save Our Kids

With the new school year, we’re once again traumatizing a generation of children with a lesson that won’t work

Law enforcement and first responders from Cumberland and York Counties participate in a regional active shooter training at Deering High School led by the District II Training Council. Photo: Portland Press Herald/Getty Image

My nine-year-old daughter will start fourth grade in a few weeks — another year of reading, playing, and, a few times over the course of the year, quietly huddling in the corner of a classroom pretending to hide from a mass shooter.

Her first active shooter drill occurred when she was two years old, in the weeks after the murder of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Her daycare installed security code–controlled locks on the doors and instructed teachers to play “quiet time” with the toddlers.

My daughter was too young at the time for it to affect her, but I was distraught — not just because of what it meant to live in a country where babies have lockdown drills, but because I knew it would do little to help in the case of an actual mass shooter.

There is no amount of running or hiding behind desks that will protect children from weapons like the ones mass shooters often use. The gunman in Dayton, Ohio, for example, was able to shoot 27 people and kill nine in just over 30 seconds. The rifle he used was modified to hold a 100-drum magazine and was legal to carry in public.

And when the attackers are students themselves, they know exactly what the school’s response will be to a mass shooting. When the shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School attacked and killed 17 people, for example, the former student used his knowledge of lockdown drills to murder as many people as possible.

It’s insane to pretend that lockdowns will spare our children from a gun that can shoot dozens in under a minute. In reality, the only way to save lives is by enacting gun control legislation and making a real effort to address the growing problem of young white male rage.

These drills are also dangerous. We don’t know what their long-term effects will be, but we do know that children have been known to faint and throw up. My own daughter has told me about children crying or shaking.

Why subject our children to traumatizing, expensive, and mostly ineffective drills?

Lockdown and active shooter trainings are also a macabre growing industry — one school training program in Pennsylvania, for example, costs more than $125,000. In Indiana, teachers were shot “execution-style” with pellet guns during a drill, causing injuries. In Missouri, drama students use theater makeup and fake blood to create realistic-looking bullet wounds in their heads and bodies for drills.

Why subject our children to traumatizing, expensive, and mostly ineffective drills? The National Rifle Association and Republican Party would have us believe they’re a necessity. They’d rather have parents anxiously teaching our children how to hide behind a bulletproof backpack, believing that gun violence is inevitable, than organizing to stop people from being able to buy a weapon of war.

Even worse, they’d like us to think that arming teachers is the solution, even though weapons in school will more likely hurt than help students. Just this week, a first-grader pointed a loaded weapon at a classmate — a gun he got from the desk of a district administrator.

Gun violence in the United States shows no signs of slowing. In the weeks since the mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso, 27 people have been arrested for making threats of mass violence. Among them, a 23-year-old in Las Vegas who had materials to make a bomb and who was planning to attack a synagogue and gay bar, a 19-year-old in Chicago who made threats against an abortion clinic, and several teens across the country who made threats about school shootings.

When my daughter goes into her fourth-grade classroom in September, I want her to feel — and be — safe from people like these. A locked door and crossed fingers simply won’t cut it.