> active shooter drills

What the fuck

>> active shooter drills

>What the fuck

Took the words right out of my mouth...

It gets better.... they do the drill but then don't even practice the most important and highest priority of the 3 option which is to RUN.

It turns out, running is too inconvenient for the teachers to deal with, because it's a lot of work to round up kids that have run away (and probably not the safest thing to begin with anyway for just a drill). So instead they drill for them to hide, which should be done only if you can't run away. The thing is, watching both the Uvalde and Christchurch massacre videos, it will become crystal clear to you that hiding is the literal worst of the three options as you become a sitting duck.

So they have the drill, then drill into the kids to be sitting ducks because it is more convenient for the administrator than dealing with kids that are running. The advice I have for my kid is to not give a damn what the teacher says, to grab the nearest long durable object and smash out the windows and run away.

> The advice I have for my kid is to not give a damn what the teacher says, to grab the nearest long durable object and smash out the windows and run away.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, the advice I gave my son was to look both ways when crossing the road, not to mess around with plug sockets, and not to run when carrying a pair of scissors.

I honestly don't know how the US has got itself into such a messed up state that such drills are considered necessary and routine, or how it is that the people are ok with this. I'm guessing it's a boiling a frog type scenario as it doesn't make sense otherwise.

> don't know how the US has got itself into such a messed up state that such drills are considered necessary

As the comment above you says, they’re between counterproductive and unnecessary, and purely creatures of posturing and appeasing scared parents.

I think you've missed the point there, which is that something has become necessary to prepare for the horrifying reality of mass shootings.

Unfortunately, due to the political situation in the country, it's currently impossible to do the one thing that we know might actually stop those shootings (make it harder or impossible for people, especially children, to get their hands on heavy weaponry). So by the "logic" of "we must do something" "this is something" "then we must do this", we have active shooter drills instead.

Assuming the drills are necessary currently, doing "the one thing" isn't going to end them for at least decades. It's not going to be an either or situation.

The best solution I see is worldwide disarmament in some manner that still allows equalization of women, elderly, etc in physical force. That's a pretty tall order honestly not sure that happens anytime in my lifetime. It also has a sort of 'prisoner dilemma' element where the individual would be insane to give up their arms while the criminal still has theirs.

> It also has a sort of 'prisoner dilemma' element where the individual would be insane to give up their arms while the criminal still has theirs.

Advocates of "gun control" in the US don't realize this part, they seem to assume by making guns less available the criminals won't be able to find them.

My belief is that covid-19 responses were over blown too. Particularly the long lasting effects on young children. American society is already struggling with healthy socialization. Now we have children with earliest impressions being that "others" are dangerous.

Sure covid-19 was a serious disease but it appears to me to be a tossup whether the lockdowns, loss of schooling, etc will cause as much or more long term damages. It may turn out to not be the case, but I believe interventions should have at least a 100-to-1 effectiveness to harm ratio. Most vaccines fall into this rang, or much lower. I severely doubt the responses will be near that rate.

I think people are bad at reasoning about sub-percentile or even sub 1-in-10 risks. During covid, on one hand you had people over-exaggerating pandemic risks due to hearing specialists like epidemiologists considering only the fallout of their field. It's hard to compare other small risks without hard work. On the other hand you get people over-exaggerating the risks of a vaccine because they hear of a few cases of bad reactions. It's hard to compare small risks without hard work.

Unfortunately, I think experts are almost more prone to that overestimation issue. Any individual school is still probably unlikely to have had a shooter incident. But a school safety expert would've seen many of them, leading to drills.

Sigh whatever happened to those libertarian floating countries?