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Jesus Christ... do kids really do regular active shooter drills at school now? This country is beyond fucked.
In America they've been doing it since I was in middle school. And for good reason, too.
I almost made it out of high school without needing to utilize what we were taught in those drills, but then towards the end of my senior year some jackass kid decided to bring a gun to class and started shooting teachers and students. America is wild.
It's absolutely insane that mass murders at schools have just become a fact of life in the US now, where it happens on an almost monthly basis, perhaps even more frequently than that.
In the UK we're struggling with a knife crime epidemic too. So much senseless violence taking too many lives on both sides of the Atlantic.
Craziest thing is that neither Canada nor most of western Europe is dealing with this. i.e. it's not just senseless violence, but entirely preventable senseless violence.
Even places like Switzerland, which have a high gun ownership rate, don’t.
When my dad was young, he and his brother found one of great-grandad’s old revolvers in a storage trunk, and brought it to school. Once lunch rolled around, they took it out and showed it to the teacher, who thought it was a very cool antique, and they and the teacher spent the lunch period oohing and aaahing over it. A school shooting wasn’t even something people thought about. It just didn’t happen.
Schools here also used to have firearms clubs and drill teams; my high school actually had an all-women shooting team if I remember correctly. And it was an inner-city school.
Somewhere, something changed here in the US. I don’t know when or why. But a good deal of gun owners and 2A supporters grew up in those days and remember them well, and I think they don’t want to believe that change happened?
Maybe it was when people started fetishizing guns? I don’t know, but I wish it would stop. No other countries deal with this kind of nonsense.
where it happens on an almost monthly basis
It's more than one a week.
The chart isn't up to date for 2024: https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index.html
All incidents of gun violence are included if they occurred on school property, from kindergartens through colleges/universities, and at least one person was shot, not including the shooter. School property includes but is not limited to, buildings, fields, parking lots, stadiums and buses. Accidental discharges of firearms are included, as long as at least one person is shot, but not if the sole shooter is law enforcement or school security.
That's kind of important since that definition doesn't line up with what most people are thinking about when they hear "school shooting". To provide an example, let's say a drug deal goes bad in the parking lot of a football field after hours and someone gets shot - that's a school shooting. Not as bad as some definitions though, since a street shooting where a stray bullet happens to strike a garage building used to maintenance school buses probably doesn't count under this definition.
Also, I find it interesting that the rates spiked way the hell up for the Biden admin, like 2021 to present is way higher than before.
Also my state has a really low rate despite having extremely lax gun laws (literally allowing open carry to everyone 18+ who can otherwise legally have a gun and concealed carry to everyone 21+ who can otherwise legally have a gun).
We do fire drills once or twice a year where I live (not the US). I've been around for forty years and I've met only two people with a firearm licence (both for shooting sport-related reasons). The European mind can understand the historical reasons beyond the 2nd Amendment, but not the fetishization of firearms.
The 2nd itself isn’t even the problem, it’s that it isn’t in any actuality followed. It explicitly says “well regulated militia”. I’m an armed leftist but nothing about US firearms is well regulated
In this context "well regulated" means like a smoothly-running clock, with the implication being that militia members will need weapons for training and practice.
As a lefty, part of me wishes we learned into the well regulated militia part and viewed firearms as a part of community defense. But, also as a lefty, there's much more important things we could do to improve community resiliency before we finally get to firearms training.
In the context and time it was written, this means something closer to "armed citizenry trained to handle their weapons and how to respond to a threat" and not "restricting weapons to the national guard" or "restricting weapons based on the number of total rounds they can hold" or something like that.
I suspect most of the pro-gun folks wouldn't be that angry at the idea of requiring range time and local emergency drills as opposed to the usual attempts to restrict 2A.
In the context of when it was written, the authors didn't believe having a standing army was a good idea, machine guns either didn't exist or would melt after any sustained use, and artillery was meant to either break walls or make infantry nervous that they might end up being one of the few hit.
The ship has sailed on all of those and many other assumptions people had in those days, which makes me think that maybe it's time for a new constitution. And maybe codify some of the gentlemen's agreement stuff and harden the system against those who just want to ruin it from within because it's more profitable for some if governments don't help people meet their needs.
I am a 66 year old American. I have no guns. The only time I have seen or operated one was when I was in the Navy in the early 1980s. I have seen the damage that guns can do several times in the 30 years I have been working as a child protective service caseworker/supervisor.
Yes, yes they do.
This is America
I’m nearly 30 and did them in elementary school
I’m in my 30s and we had them all throughout grade school.
I'm 43, and we didn't have them at all by the time I graduated in '96
Columbine was in '99, so that checks out. I think schools started doing them sometime after that tragedy.
Which was kinda weird to me. Bowling Green happened a couple years earlier, and there had been school shootings in this country ever since the mid to late 1800s. Seemed like an overreaction to me.
What are you referring to with Bowling Green?
Apparently it was Paducah, not Bowling Green, I conflated two different stories
https://www.ksba.org/protected/ArticleView.aspx?iid=6GAU2A2&dasi=3G32
I graduated in 2002. Based on the other responses, it seems like they started doing them shortly after that.
I'm pretty sure active shooter drills have been ongoing for over a decade at some schools at this point. There was a whole thing a few years ago about schools "putting litter boxes in classrooms for kids that identify as cats" that conservatives were freaking out about where it turned out that the schools had cat litter in classroom survival kits. They sell Kevlar backpacks for kids.
This country has been screwed for decades now.
yup
Likely monthly or every two-three months, if my memory serves and they haven't increased the rates any. I think really after Sandy Hook they doubled in intensity, I remember doing active shooter drills with regularity after that moment.
I'm teaching Highschool in Germany. We do fire drills once a year and involuntarily every time something goes wrong in chemistry class. We also do what we call amok drills every other year.