E.J. Graff is a journalist, author, and editor whose work appears in such outlets as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Nation.
When the active shooter alarm went off in one Florida school, some students vomited from fear. Others stampeded from the cafeteria, panicked, injuring themselves. In a Virginia school, an active shooter announcement had middle school kids weeping, praying, and texting their parents goodbye. In a Worcester school, a gunman pointed a firearm at a teacher’s head — and sent her running into the hall sobbing.
They were all drills, the schools announced afterward.
“You have kids wetting their pants, you have kids crying, you have teachers crying, and you have everyone saying, ‘this is it — I’m going to die,’” Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, told The Guardian in 2020, arguing against this kind of drill. “And when it’s over, it’s like — just kidding!”
The school shooter drill is everywhere. Some schools hold drills that are “realistic,” with fake blood, “gunmen” in the halls, and no warning. Others hold drills that are as orderly as fire or tornado drills.
Sensible countries — Australia, New Zealand, or the UK, say — respond to mass shootings by banning civilian ownership of military-grade weapons and passing other gun laws. Not the United States. Here we have grown an industry of researchers, consultants, school employees, and others working on everything short of firearm restrictions that might protect children in school. Some in this industry have the children’s best interests in mind. Others are merchants of fear, peddling expensive services and items like bulletproof whiteboards instead of advancing genuine safety.
Chief among the patchwork of solutions is the school shooter drill. Sociologist Kieran Healy says the drill has become a ritual of American childhood.
As many as 40 states mandate such drills, according to the Education Commission of the States. (Shockingly, no state requires drills for police officers on how to respond to school shootings, as the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and Frontline found after the disastrous law enforcement response to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.) Although Massachusetts does not mandate school shooter drills, queries to seven school districts found that Cambridge, Newton, Pittsfield, and Plymouth schools all conduct shooter or lockdown drills of some kind; three others did not respond. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 96 percent of schools had students practice responding to a dangerous intruder at least once in the 2021-22 school year. Some members of Gen Z have been through so many drills and real-life lockdowns, they’ve dubbed themselves Generation Lockdown.
But security experts, gun violence activists, and social scientists don’t agree on very much about such drills. Among the unanswered questions: What do they achieve? How should they be run? Should students be involved, or only school staff and police departments? Do we really want to keep practicing this bizarre cultural script, teaching children that someday someone will shoot at them for no good reason?
Let’s put on a school shooter drill
The drills themselves vary dramatically. Some school systems conduct simulations, although they’re increasingly frowned upon, with a masked person shooting rubber bullets, recordings of gunfire played over the PA, fake blood smeared on the “victims,” and people yelling in the hallways. Other drills teach children to choose among possible courses of action, such as running, hiding, dragging desks toward the door, or throwing things at the intruder. Some teach only simple lockdown procedures like finding a place to hide, locking doors, and staying quiet and out of sight.
As a 2023 New England Journal of Medicine article explained, people like retired police, counterterrorism experts, and school safety personnel have been coming up with their own ideas about what to do, without much testing. Put simply: Since the 1999 Columbine massacre, folks have been making up these exercises as they go.
Many professionals have come to oppose the theatrical or immersion approach, saying that it traumatizes schoolchildren, staff, parents, and the community at large. The National Education Association, a teachers union, argues against simulations or unannounced drills, pointing to the teachers, staff, and students who have sobbed or became too terrified to act, and even suffered physical injuries from stampedes, rubber bullets, or pellet ammunition. The American Federation of Teachers, the National Association of School Psychologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, Sandy Hook Promise, and numerous individual researchers all argue against involving students in such simulations.
A handful of state departments of education have begun banning or recommending against simulations, including those in New York, Kentucky, and Texas. Eric Lamoureaux, the emergency and safety coordinator for the Pittsfield school district, said he didn’t know of any Massachusetts schools that currently conduct realistic drills (the Worcester drill described above was at a private school in 2013).
Some observers argue that students shouldn’t be rehearsing a mass shooting at all.
A recent study by researcher Luke J. Rapa, a Clemson University associate professor of educational psychology, found that during the 2021-22 school year, the United States saw 93 school shootings with casualties. But that figure includes any gun violence on school property, including a Saturday night fight on the playground, angry parents pulling guns in the parking lot, or a kid pulling out a gun during an argument before school. Rapa says, “We spend a large amount of time, resources, and energy on these drills when [mass shooting] actually is a small proportion of the incidents of violence recorded in and around schools.”
Of course, every homicide is appalling. And for each firearm-related injury or death, many more students suffer lasting psychological distress. But should 50 million US schoolchildren really be rehearsing for an event that fewer than 0.02 percent of them will encounter, even secondhand?
Sarah Burd-Sharp, a researcher at Everytown for Gun Safety, thinks not. Everytown recommends leaving students out of school shooter drills entirely.
Based on a study Everytown conducted with the Georgia Institute of Technology, analyzing tweets and Reddit posts in the months after such drills, it appears to Burd-Sharp that these rehearsals traumatize students and their communities. Even if a lockdown training is done as calmly as a fire drill, she explains, “Kids watch TV, right? They see these actual shootings in schools.… Being reminded of our gun violence epidemic is deeply traumatizing for children.”
What’s more, she emphasizes, three out of four school shooters are either current or former students at that school — meaning lockdown drills inform potential shooters about what strategies schools and students might take.
The case for doing drills, but differently
Jaclyn Schildkraut, a former professor of criminal justice who is now at the Rockefeller Institute of Government researching mass shootings, disagrees with Burd-Sharp’s critique. She notes that while a shooter is usually stopped within a few minutes, a rehearsed lockdown can still reduce the number of victims — and make it harder for the shooter to reach his goal (the perpetrator is almost always a he) of a high-enough body count to make the national news.
Few advocacy groups, security experts, or social scientists oppose drills entirely. Instead, they argue that if there is a drill, it should be, well, boring. Talk students through the steps involved in advance, calmly and without agitation; if adults are calm, children will follow their cues. Make sure any effort is both developmentally and culturally appropriate. Discussions with high schoolers will be different from those with kindergarteners — and schools will need to talk differently with students from violent neighborhoods or backgrounds (say, migrants from war zones) than with students who may have never heard a gunshot. Announce any drill well in advance to the students, parents, and community. Assign counselors or trusted adults to check in with particularly vulnerable students, both before and after. In this approach, the goal is to build “muscle memory,” so that if there’s ever an intruder, students don’t freeze, panic, or stampede.
Within the school-safety community, there’s heated discussion about simple lockdown drills versus “options-based” approaches, in which staff and students are taught to assess the situation and choose what to do. Schildkraut, co-author of “Lockdown Drills,” argues for the former, saying students feel better prepared, not traumatized, by practicing a simple list of lockdown procedures: finding a safe classroom, locking the doors, turning out the lights, and hiding from view. She speaks scathingly of options-based approaches. “You don’t actually want to encourage unarmed civilians … to seek out a fight with somebody who has a firearm,” she says, especially in schools where staff are already trying to discourage students from fighting. The American Association of Pediatrics also opposes options-based drills, citing one study that found that school staff trained in several options “were almost twice as likely to misjudge” what to do “compared with untrained school staff who relied on common-sense actions.”
And yet logistically, if there is a shooting, not everyone will be able to hide. If a middle-schooler starts shooting up the cafeteria, shouldn’t fellow students be ready to think for themselves and maybe shove a table against him?
Two well-known options-based approaches are “Run Hide Fight,” developed by the Department of Homeland Security for adults, and “ALICE,” or Avoid Lockdown Inform Counter Evacuate, created post-Columbine by a married couple, a former elementary school teacher and SWAT trainer. Lamoureaux teaches the ALICE model in Pittsfield schools, explaining that students learn that they “can lock down, evacuate, move a desk in front of a door, hide, and shut off lights. We just don’t want them to freeze and do nothing.” He says that ALICE and other such approaches can be done without becoming simulations, that the drill is announced in advance and on the loudspeaker, and that students practice their options without panic. After the 2023 Holyoke Mall shooting, some Pittsfield staff and students thanked Lamoureaux for the drills, he says, because “the restaurants and shops they were in didn’t know what to do.” But they knew to consider their options: “look for exits, know how to secure yourself, ask where’s the gate.”
Which approach works best? It’s impossible to tell. As a New England Journal of Medicine article dryly put it, “With such low-frequency events, there is little opportunity for rigorous outcomes testing.”
Nor is it clear whether any two schools are performing the same kind of rehearsals, even if they use the same terms. Since there’s no way to measure whether drills prevent casualties, researchers ask students whether they feel more afraid or more prepared after a drill — hardly a reliable indicator. At Congress’s request, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has convened an ad hoc committee to study these messy questions and make recommendations. Its report is due this summer.
While hardly any experts or advocacy groups oppose drills, neither do they emphasize them. No drill will prevent a mass shooting. Experts and advocacy groups tend to focus on prevention, the real goal. They emphasize comprehensive gun safety laws, secure gun-storage laws, and red flag laws; developing a school climate in which students feel comfortable telling some adult if a fellow student shows signs of instability; and assessing each young person’s threat thoughtfully and in depth. But while gun safety laws are making progress in some states, no one imagines that the federal government is going to pass such laws nationwide any time soon.
That leaves an opening for the merchants of fear — vendors selling items that will supposedly battle-harden schools or schoolchildren, like bulletproof whiteboards, walls, nap blankets, and backpacks. Experts have contempt for these vendors. Security professionals and organizations like Everytown, Sandy Hook Promise, and March for Our Lives scorn metal detectors, security cameras (except at doors), facial recognition software, and other systems. They’re considered too easy to bypass, jamming up entrances and creating a prison-like feeling in schools. That has been shown to bring down academic performance and leave students feeling less safe and less likely to trust school staff, since they feel that they’re mistrusted and under surveillance. That paradoxically makes the schools less safe, since students won’t tell staff if someone is behaving dangerously. School security professional Kenneth Trump (unrelated to the president) calls these measures “security theater” — showcasing safety without actually delivering it.
Aiming for fame
The United States has grappled with school shootings for decades — consider the 1966 University of Texas bell tower shooting or the 1979 “I don’t like Mondays” California school shooting. Columbine, of course, made these a cultural script — one that other unhappy American adolescents continue trying to emulate and surpass.
Eric Madfis, a University of Washington criminologist and sociology professor, lists various factors that make the United States susceptible to this particular tragedy: easy access to guns, mental health care that is “stigmatized, expensive, and privatized,” and a culture of masculinity that’s intertwined with violence. Young boys and men, he says, who aren’t good at the usual masculine markers like sports or dating feel that they can boost their masculinity quotient with firearms.
University of Alabama criminologist and mass shooting researcher Adam Lankford adds another underlying risk factor: the American “obsession with celebrity culture, being a celebrity at all costs.” For those unlikely to launch a TikTok dance craze or become YouTube influencers, there’s always mass killing. If the US media were to refuse to publicize, or even use, the names of these murderers, Madfis and Lankford say, the motivation to shoot up schools for fame would be seriously reduced. But as it stands, a high-enough kill count all but guarantees in-depth news coverage of the killer’s methods and motives, social media notoriety, and a frighteningly detailed Wikipedia page.
So what’s our way out? Lankford reminds us that cultural scripts fade and get replaced. At some point, the script will lose its power and be replaced by another troubling path to notoriety.
Which brings us back to the root problem: America’s perverse inability to license, regulate, and oversee firearm use.
Unlike other nations, we’ve not only accepted our grim script, we’ve institutionalized it. “No way to prevent this, says the only nation where this regularly happens,” reads the deadpan Onion headline, satire that has become so familiar it sounds like despair.
As a result, with each school shooter drill, we keep teaching American children that someday, somewhere, someone will shoot to kill them, and all they can do is try to hide.