School shootingActive shooter drills may reshape how a generation of students views school
Increasingly, schools are turning to active shooter drills and videos to prepare students and staff to face a gunman. As a sociologist who studies the social impacts of security strategies, I am concerned about the unintended ethical and political consequences of these exercises.
Recent school shootings and the March for Our Lives rallies held in cities around the world on March 24 have rekindled debates over how to keep students safe.
“The notion of ‘it can’t happen here’ is no longer a notion,” said Sheriff Tim Cameron of St. Mary’s County, Maryland after a student opened fire on March 20 at Great Mills High School, killing one student and injuring another.
Increasingly, schools are turning to active shooter drills and videos to prepare students and staff to face a gunman. As a sociologist who studies the social impacts of security strategies, I am concerned about the unintended ethical and political consequences of these exercises.
All students deserve safe learning environments. Yet training kids to take responsibility for their own survival while treating gun violence as inevitable may make schools – even those that are never the site of a shooting – feel unsafe. Effects like this need to be weighed against the potential benefits of active shooter training to ensure that measures to protect students do not cause unintended harm.
Ethical dilemmas of “run, hide, fight”
By 2013, over two-thirds of public schools in the U.S. used lockdown drills to prepare for an active shooter. In these exercises, students huddle in classrooms to practice waiting for help from police and SWAT teams.
School shootings continued unabated, however, so the Department of Education began to encourage students and teachers to plan a more active response. Rather than huddle and wait, students and teachers are now told to “run, hide, fight.”
Lockdown and “run, hide, fight” active shooter drills are designed to habituate students and staff to an active shooter situation. However, some schools have faced criticism for using overly realistic simulations. For example, when officers armed with rifles burst into a Florida school for an unannounced drill, parents were outraged.
