Epistemic Status: You really, really should know this already. Reference post.
We have a $2.7 billion industry devoted to causing the traumatizing of children.
They refer to it as ‘active shooter drill training.’
I was initially motivated to write this when I saw a claim that the bipartisan gun deal allocated $5 billion in additional funding for causing childhood trauma. That turned out not to be the case (summaries of the deal from NPR, from CNN and from WaPo don’t mention it and it seems too big to have been overlooked if it was real), but these shooter drills are still traumatizing our children on a regular basis, which seems worth pointing out as another prime example of both our civilization losing its mind and also the existence of extremely low-hanging fruit.
As in, we could simply not traumatize our kids all the time for no reason. Crazy, I know.
For those who don’t know, an ‘active shooter drill’ is where they take young children who are forced by law to be at a given location each day, and periodically teach have them practice hiding and being shot at by a mass shooter.
If your response to that idea is ‘what, what, that sounds horrible and terrifying and we should absolutely positively not do that’ then you seem like a normal human to me.
If your response to that idea is ‘yes this will help protect our children’ then I do not understand you.
Yet these drills are required. Since school is also required, this is something the state is forcing on children. Children are being forced to report periodically for trauma.
This is so much worse than wasted time. If I am told that one of my children is going to have such a drill, I will keep my child home from school that day, this seems like what a parent who cares about their child would do.
If the school does not consider this an acceptable solution, I will pull them out of that school entirely. It’s not only a one-time thing, they think this is an important thing that they practice continuously.
All the replies are like this, of parents reporting children coming back from drills terrified. I have tried to argue against Gain of Function research and against constructing an unfriendly AGI, and had to talk various players out of some truly epically bad deck choices, but I have never, ever seen anything like as clear a case of something you absolutely positively and obviously should not be doing.
This Washington Post article has a variety of reactions to drills. Some of them are about how shameful it is that we have people shooting up schools in the first place, but mostly it’s about how these drills primary effect is clearly to traumatize students.
Yet this has ballooned into an industry, due to our demand to do something:
I do not need a study to say that this ‘may’ do more harm than good, and neither do you.
Once again, the problem of actual shootings is terrible but the magnitude is simply not that large. It (once again) bears keeping in mind the magnitude of the problem:
The database documents when a gun is brandished, a gun is fired, or a bullet hits K-12 school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week. There have been 1,322 individual shootings since the 1970s, resulting in 426 deaths and 1,225 injuries.
Or, alternatively, there is one live shooting incident in a given school every 6,000 years, with an average of less than one death out of an average school size of slightly more than 500 students.
Even if active shooter drills were 100% effective at preventing deaths from school shootings, as opposed to being useless or (more likely) highly actively counterproductive even on that front, it would still be completely criminally insane to subject kids to this kind of trauma.
The Study
For those who do not believe that evidence exists unless it comes in the form of a study or report, or who want to know exactly how much damage is being done here, the good news is we do have a study and a report on the study. The bad news is, well, the report’s contents. And also the study’s contents.
Not that it is entirely news, but the magnitude of the impact is I suppose news.
The results were sobering: Active shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%) overall, including children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents, and teachers. Concerns over death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills becoming a consistent feature of social media posts in school communities in the 90 days after a school drill.
In particular:
Using machine-learning psychological affect classifiers informed by prior research, this study aggregated and analyzed the sentiments expressed through millions of tweets and more than 1,000 Reddit posts. Results revealed that social media posts displayed a 42 percent increase in anxiety and stress from pre- to post-drills (as evidenced by an increase in such words as afraid, struggling, and nervous) and a 39 percent increase in depression (evidenced by words such as therapy, cope, irritability, suicidal) following drills.
…
This research unveiled alarming impacts of active shooter drills on the mental health of the students, teachers, and parents who experience them. In their current state, active shooter drills threaten the wellbeing of entire school communities over prolonged periods of time, leaving those who are affected in need of continued support to process their aftermath.
…
This study suggests that physical health may be significantly impacted by active shooter drills in schools as well. In the 90 days following a drill, concerns over health increased by 23 percent and concerns over death increased by 22 percent. The analysis revealed words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills came up with jarring frequency, suggesting that drills may have a direct impact on participants’ physical health or, at the very least, made it a persistent topic of concern.
This isn’t the methodology we would have hoped for, but it is the one we have and the results very much qualify under the ‘hot damn look at this chart’ test.
We get typical quotes like this:
I can tell you personally, just as an educator, we were not okay [after drills]. We were in bathrooms crying, shaking, not sleeping for months. The consensus from my friends and peers is that we are not okay.”
K–12 teacher
or:
“[After drills, kids] think a villain is coming to school and wonder when it’s happening, not if it’s happening”
K–12 parent
As usual, somehow the conclusion is unwilling to quite come out and say the obvious.
In the absence of any conclusive evidence on drills’ effectiveness at ensuring safety during actual active shooter incidents, Everytown urges school decisionmakers to assess whether the potential but unproven benefits of these drills outweigh their known collateral consequences.
This is still madness. What is the maximum potential upside here? Again, it certainly can’t be more than 100% prevention of school shootings, and we know it is much much less than that.
In light of this study’s findings, Everytown strongly encourages school systems to prioritize these proven school safety strategies above active shooter drills.
…
Comprehensive school safety plans require far more than periodic active shooter drills.
Prioritize other measures over traumatizing children? Requires ‘far more than’? This is a report that lays out in detail how traumatizing drills are for kids, notes their benefits are entirely unproven (and of course, couldn’t possibly make up for this) and then urge prioritization?
We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore we must do it.
No. We mustn’t. I’d also rather we not deploy drones.
They go on to say, if you must traumatize your kids, how about traumatizing them less efficiently via these recommendations:
Drills should not include simulations that mimic an actual incident;
Parents should have advance notice of drills;
Drills should be announced to students and educators prior to the start;
Schools should create age and developmentally appropriate drill content with the involvement of school personnel, including school-based mental health professionals;
Schools should couple drills with trauma-informed approaches to address students’ wellbeing both during the drills, and over a sustained period thereafter; and
Schools should track data about the efficacy and effects of drills.
So if you are determined to traumatize children, you should then spend tons of time dealing with the trauma you’ve caused, involve extensive materials related to mental health professionals, and provide notice of the trauma to come, and track the effects.
So, I mean, yeah, I guess if I had no choice but to traumatize children I would do that?
One particular thing that was sometimes done was to have pretend gunmen roaming the halls firing blanks. I think we mostly realized not to do that.
There are also additional reasons to think drills are even worse than this.
Drills teach children that they live in a world where deadly school shootings are are something they should expect to happen in their lives, which they aren’t. This functions to put the idea of shooting up a school closer to top of mind and to normalize it as a choice. It lets disturbed kids at risk of doing this see what it would look like, and maybe discover they like it, or that other kids deserve it.
I propose that traumatized kids, kids who despise their schools for damn good reason, or those who are constantly among others with trauma, are going to more often choose to do crazy horrible things like shoot up the school.
Drills show potential shooters exactly how everyone will react. This alone plausibly allows them to plan the most effective response measures in ways that more than nullify any benefits from the drill.
Drills teach children exactly how much the system and the adults around them care about them. They’ll respond accordingly.
Drills, preparing for drills, dealing with the aftermath of drills and all the resulting focus on such matters takes a lot of time away from learning, to the extent that was a thing school was trying to do.
What to do about this?
On a civilization level, we should stop doing this. At minimum we should do less traumatic versions of it, ideally stop causing trauma for no reason. I’m an idealist.
On a personal level, you should do a few things.
Ensure that any schools you send your children to are informed about how terrible all of this is. They may or may not be permitted to stop or make changes, but it’s worth a shot.
Ensure all relevant authority figures at all levels also know how terrible this is and how much you oppose this.
Ask when the drills are. Keep your children out of school on those days.
If they won’t tell you when the drills are, ideally figure it out, things that look random often aren’t.
If you can’t figure it out at all, strongly consider your other educational options.
That last one sounds dramatic, but the effects here seem quite large and quite bad, and also likely to be indicative of other problems. If a school is run by people who are not willing to help me not traumatize my child, this is not where I want my child spending the bulk of their day. If they think it is necessary, this is not where I want my child learning to think or do mathematics.
I would extend this logic to the presence of police, or metal detectors, or any other militarization of a school. Any place where such measures are actually necessary is not a place to put children. Also, no, nothing involving doors will meaningfully help.
There are a variety of other approaches also being debated. I am not here taking any position on them either way. This is about avoiding the obviously horrible option.
I was in high school ~four years ago, and we already had these “drills”. I didn’t get the impression that anybody took the threat of school shootings seriously enough to find them scary but I wouldn’t be surprised if younger or more innumerate children did.
When I was in primary school in the UK we were told there were 2 fire alarms. When this one went off we would line up outside, when this other on went off we would lock the doors and crouch under the desk.
Both drills were a welcome distraction from having to do any work.
Curious as to what the get under the desks alarm was supposed to help with and how long ago this was? I’m having trouble fitting it into my world model.
It was about 15 to 20 years ago. We had no idea at the time either!
Did the rate of school shootings change after the Columbine massacre was all over the news everywhere in the U.S.? I agree that the chances of any given school having a mass shooting are approximately zero, but I’m less inclined to trust an average that starts in the 1970s than one that starts in the 1990s even though more data is usually better.
(Also, should we distinguish between rampage killings in which the goal is indiscriminate slaughter and murders of specific individuals for more conventional motives that happen to have occured in a school and used a gun?)
I’m not convinced that it’s not possible to design a program of drills that teach a useful response to the every-6000-year problem of “your school is under attack”, without injuring the mental health of the students to the point where it isn’t worth doing. (Whether it’s then worth the time from the school day is another question, which depends on how or whether you value that time to begin with.)
Is there a similar problem with the mental health costs of fire, tornado, and earthquake drills being remarkably high? Having experienced those drills, and seeing the complaints about active shooter drills inflicting trauma, I’m left concluding that the active shooter drills are a fundamentally different kind of practice than other emergency drills. We could abolish them and book a net win, but maybe we could also make them like the other drills instead, and thus make them cost-effective to do, for an even greater benefit.
It could be the case that the other drills are similarly dangerous to mental health, but they have benefits that justify their costs, due to the other kinds of emergencies being more common. Or, it could be that none of the emergencies are worth the mental health costs of drilling for, but we just happen to be examining this one right now. Or, it could be that broadly comparable physical drill activities are much more damaging to one’s mental health when one is told one is practicing for being attacked by a human, rather than a tornado, and the kids will figure it out no matter what kind of drill you claim it is, and there’s no way to make an active shooter drill safe enough to do. Or it could be the case that nothing you could teach in a reasonably safe drill is going to be particularly effective in an actual attack.
But I don’t buy Zvi’s equivalence between anything one could describe as an “active shooter drill” and damaging children’s mental health. All we know is that current practice appears to be damaging children’s mental health.
I have to wonder: qui bono? Who is making money off this? Who do they own in the government? How are they planning to benefit from the second-order effects? Is there some conscious attempt here to traumatize children so that they will shoot up more schools so that there will be more drills so that the people benefiting from the drills will benefit more? That may sound horribly blackpilled but there is no depth to which the sociopathic will not sink, and they have a historical tendency to end up in control of things.
On the “plus” side, it would make it easier to argue that, if an AGI gets to the point of being able to hack into most computer systems, then it’ll be able to incapacitate the human population.
I don’t understand the statement that active shooter drills are a billion-dollar industry. I’d suspect that mine were cheaper than fire drills. The teacher instructs us on where to hide, we hide, and then eventually someone comes to unlock the door.
I think the trauma is overstated because it pulls mostly on the particularities of your life. Most of your indicia of trauma is shared experiences from your social circle. From my social circle, those shared experiences are always that active shooter drills are fairly interesting and break up the monotony of school life in a memorable way. I personally don’t know anybody who has ever reported being traumatized from an active shooter drill (I know more people who have been traumatized by being awoken for fire drills). I have now only heard people report this as traumatizing through this post. I’m not saying that my indicia trump yours, but it does temper their weight.
I also think the drills serve more and different purposes than merely lowering the harm from school shootings. For one, it teaches kids from a young age how ridiculously stupid authority can be. Clearly hiding under your desk or piling up in the closet is a really stupid plan to protect yourself from an active shooter. Yet that’s what the people in authority are having us practice! Many kids correctly realize that this is another example of authority being stupid, and might even start theorizing about improper incentivizes. Yes kids have many other examples of authority being stupid, but things like fire drills and active shooter drills benefit from being really obviously stupid and related to one’s bodily safety.
The drills can also just teach people generally that there is violent danger out there. The first time someone seriously considers that they could die in a shooting shouldn’t be in college when some gangbangers start killing each other a block from their campus. Many of those middle schoolers will end up living in big cities for part of their lives and a part of big city life is maintaining the basic mindset that there are some violent and crazy people who may attack you and you need to be somewhat prepared to survive. 20-somethings who never even heard a gunshot before may freak out and not be able to handle life apart from their hometown. It can be quite surreal to get an e-mail notification about a shooting outside your campus and to see new bullet marks in the library wall. The drill is acclimating them to this future reality.
I agree with the first paragraph (my experience of drills like these was also as a fun break from the monotony of schooling), but strongly disagree with the other two.
The second two paragraphs seem to take the general structure of “this bad thing is actually good because it prepares people for future bad things”. By this argument, it seems like you could support any bad thing so long as it is less bad than some other bad thing that someone might hypothetically encounter in the future. I think it is much more straightforward to simply say that bad things are indeed bad, and that we should prevent whatever bad things we can at a low cost.
If you want to prepare people for living in places with a high incidence of gun violence (should we even be doing this?), it seems like practical and useful skills for avoiding violence would be paramount. Off the top of my head, you might teach them:
How to detect when a situation is escalating
How to identify whether a neighborhood is safe or not
How to estimate the proximity of gunshots
What to do when you hear gunshots
How to safely handle a firearm by going to a gun range
Or maybe it’s dull, boring and dumb like most other things in school. How you perceive the threat of mass shootings, or anything else, is not one-size-fits-all. School tends to be a ways down on the list of one’s influences at any age and if one’s dearer influences consider shootings to be a very unlikely cause of problems to one’s health, as is objectively the case, one might simply think the school is making a silly waste of time...business as usual.
So maybe a more direct problem is parents and other influences who may or may not be distributed unequally by political beliefs, who promote the idea that shooting is a direct threat to the life and limb of some individual. Does this include the OP?
To generalize this problem, the world is stuffed with terrifying threats, and would-be threats that tend to be a problem to process serenely at any age. Who is responsible? Maybe humans who “decide” to create new humans practically autonomously as a result of a biological process rewarding fitness to reproduce above practically all else.
Your “what to about this” section doesn’t do anything to address the underlying problem that shootings happen.
The whole point is that doing nothing to address the underlying problem that shootings happen is better than doing active shooter drills to “address the underlying problem that ‘shootings happen’”. (Note the nested scare quotes; it is not actually the case that “shootings happen” in any meaningful sense, and it is definitely not the case that “active shooter drills address the problem that shootings happen”.)
This is one of those cases where the answer to “We can’t just do nothing!!” is “Yes, we can, and should, do nothing.”
School shootings happen, and much more in the US than other countries.
And both are much worse than actually addressing the underlying problem.
Zvi addressed this in the OP:
In other words: no, school shootings pretty much don’t happen, for all practical purposes.
If C > A and C > B, that is, actually, irrelevant to the question of whether A > B.
Or, rather, much like winning the lottery, it does happen, but it doesn’t happen to you.
It is a separate and entirely different problem.
First, do no harm.
If thing B exists to mitigate thing A, they are not separate.
I don’t know what harm you had in mind.
Thing B ostensibly exists to mitigate thing A. It is attempting (/pretending) to mitigate thing A.
Thing B bears the burden of proof. It is not sensible to say “we’re doing thing B unless you solve A.” Thing B has to demonstrate itself to have any impact whatsoever upon A, before it becomes defensible by virtue of A remaining unsolved.
The harm in mind is all of the stuff listed in the essay and in the studies linked.
Of course one does not have to accept that thing B thing mitigates thing A just because it says so. But it seems like the sort of thing that could work, and there is nothing in the OP to suggest that it doesn’t—the OP only says that school shootings are “unlikely”, without quantifying that.
There’s a rationalist version of the OP waiting to happen.
The obvious (and rational!) response is that “it seems like the sort of thing that could work” is a grossly insufficient reason to do anything remotely resembling what’s described in the OP, especially given the massive harms of the intervention in question. It just doesn’t even approach being a sufficient reason. It’s not even in the same ballpark as a sufficient reason. The relative scales of harms to be mitigated, certainty of mitigation, and harms inflicted by the intervention, are orders of magnitude off from where they’d have to be for that to be a sufficient reason.
I suspect Zvi didn’t spell out “active shooter drills haven’t prevented school shootings because we’ve had active shooter drills for a decade now and school shootings haven’t stopped”
(and the corollary “active shooter drills haven’t improved outcomes in the shootings that still occur”)
because he figured his readers would be able and willing to make that particular inferential leap on their own.
“Stopping” is not what “mitigate” means. It means that consequences are not so bad. Bullet proof vests are mitigation, not prevention. Option C is what prevents shootings happening.
That’s fair, but the burden of proof is still on B. There is zero evidence that B mitigates school shootings in any fashion.
In my culture, it’s an obvious fact that school shootings are a completely soluble problem … But I wouldn’t expect other cultures to have an implicit understanding of that .
This seems to be a complete non-sequitur, relative to my comment above.
You seem to be responding as if I had … made some sort of claim that school shootings cannot be solved or prevented? Or that Zvi had made such a claim?
Which leaves me confused. I do not think I said what it seems you think I said.
TAG, you are not communicating, here.Communication is not currently managing to happen, between us. (Edit to reduce blameyness/hostility.)I don’t know what your quoting a comment several steps up the comment chain has to do with answering my confusion about your non-sequitur. Are you trying to say “it’s not a non-sequitur relative to your last comment, Duncan, because it ties in with something many steps previous in the conversation”?
Remember , there’s an option C that removes the need for drills and removes the harm of shootings. I’m not pro drill, I’m pro dealing with the real problem.