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
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