How We Compound Our National Disgrace Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

How We Compound Our National Disgrace

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 2h

I want to recommend to you this article in the Times about the active shooter drills which are now commonplace in schools around the country. The gist of the article is that we may be or are traumatizing (triggering depression, chronic anxiety and more) a generation of young Americans with drills the effectiveness of which are at best uncertain.

Like many of you I have thought and felt a lot about the scourge of school shootings that have plagued our country for more than 20 years. But somehow this article made me angrier at us as a country, as a collective, than most actual school shootings themselves. In part it may be that every individual school massacre presents us with facts and agony, physical and emotional, that are all but beyond comprehending. Here though you have the young girl angry at her teacher for confiscating all cellphones before class because she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to notify authorities about a mass shooter or say a final goodbye to her mother before she was shot to death.

This somehow is extremely comprehendible, painfully relatable in a way that the total horror of school massacres are not. More importantly, stories like this are certainly to be counted in their thousands and millions in children across the country. Thankfully only a minuscule number of children are directly affected by school shootings, in the sense of those who sustain direct physical injuries or the broader penumbra who spend hours locked down in classrooms but emerge physically unscathed. But virtually every school in the country now conducts active shooter drills on some relatively regular basis. If you’re a parent of kids under 18 you don’t need me to tell you this.

Reading the piece I had a welling up of anger at us as a society – not just the NRA or the Republicans but of all us – that we have not only let this continue but created the whole organized system of secondary trauma in the active shooter drill … all because we’re unwilling to do anything about the scourge of mass shootings itself. This affects not just dozens or hundreds but millions on an on-going basis, all due to a practice of collective national paralysis and impotence. A true disgrace.

This part of my reaction was global – not just traumatizing drills but the hard reality that yes, these massacres do happen on a fairly regular basis, even if the number of people killed pales in comparison to the number killed by guns in the society at large. But the article was particularly good at illustrating how an entire industry has grown up to serve the demand for active shooter drills. In many cases they’re run by people who either literally have no idea what they’re doing or have real knowledge brought over wholesale from SWAT type training of military training that can be completely inappropriate for kids and schools.

Kids’ brains aren’t the same as adult brains. They’re susceptible to trauma in ways that adults are not and simply scaring them doesn’t always have the same cause and effect result as we hope it does in adults. Critically, there’s been very little study into what is actually effective or not effective for these trainings – no real mandates or regulations requiring that people who organize these drills have at least some basic training in mental health or child psychology to ensure that the efforts are effective and not needlessly damaging. (The article does note real evidence that proactive interventions with kids who show signs of the potential for acting out in this way actually are fairly effective.)

Some of you may remember this story from March which would be comical if it weren’t so horrifying and freakish. Teachers in Indiana were actually injured during a drill when they were forced to undergo mock executions using some kind of pellet gun. According to the local teachers’ union who blew thee whistle on what happened: “Four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles — resulting in injuries to the extent that welts appeared, and blood was drawn … The teachers were terrified, but were told not to tell anyone what happened. Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.”

It’s hard to read this stuff and not see that the people organizing those kinds of over-the-top, bonkers exercises are themselves acting out some sort of sublimated rage or massacre fantasies. If not that, or certainly in addition to that, you have idiots just making shit up as they go along. The Times article tells about another no-warning drill that was clearly made to appear like a real attack was underway, with simulated gunfire, people trying to force open classroom doors. Parents were understandably outraged.

I am no expert on preparedness or child psychology. But it seems to me there’s very little utility in simulating an actual shooting, let alone actually shooting anyone with a BB or pellet. You’re not going to and don’t want scare kids enough that they’re going to be prepared for or somehow ready for an actual school massacre. As the article notes, what’s really important is that the adults be prepared, both emotionally as much as that is possible and in practical terms knowing a specific strategy for how to react. Kids not soldiers whose job it is to go into harm’s way and need to be prepared, literally and figuratively, to do so.

The unfortunate reality is that school shootings are real. Our kids hear about them on the news. So there’s certainly some utility in educating them about a basic set of things to do if the worst happens: lock the door, wait for a certain all clear, whatever the specifics. I should be clear too that I absolutely know that there are thousands of school administrators and teachers organizing and running these drills with great care and empathy and dedication. We’ve placed them in a terrible position.

As long as we continue to clothe ourselves in national disgrace by letting this continue without even taking a few practical steps to prevent the carnage we need to take some practical, as-little-harm-inducing-as-possible steps to limit the death tolls when attacks happen. For the moment our national disgrace on guns seems to have triggered a secondary abdication: poorly planned and often aimless, ineffective, abusive secondary trauma to compound the first.

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