Apparently, some schools in America routinely practice "active shooter drills", lifelike drills that are supposed to better prepare school kids for the next mass shooting, complete with fake blood, role playing, and even mock "execution-style" shootings of teachers.
In fact, 32 out of the 50 states have laws in place mandating such drills, which were brought in in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, and even more after the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings. Many American school kids have never known anything different.
However, not surprisingly, counsellors and researchers are finding that the drills have the effect of unnecessarily traumatizing the kids, and may even be counter-productive in that they try to give the impression that they might be able to actually do something about such an occurrence, thus setting them up to fail badly in the event of a real emergency. Certainly, the evidence shows that the benefits of such drills are out of proportion to the potential psychological damage they wreak.
What I find most difficult to stomach is the idea of "deception drills", where students and even teachers are unaware that a drill is in fact just a drill, and believe that a real massacre is underway. That just sounds like psychological warfare to me. America is raising a generation of traumatized kids.
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