Active Shooter Drills Don’t Belong In Schools.
There’s a
guy out in Davis, CA named Bryan Malte, who runs an organization
called the Hope and Heal Fund. Bryan has
been in and around the gun-control movement for almost 30 years, and after a
long stint with Brady, he and his wife moved back to California where he runs
this important effort to help reduce gun violence in California, although what
he does obviously has application just about everywhere else.
Last week
Bryan published a very significant column on his website and on Medium about
active shooting drills in schools. Since you already have a link to his
website, here’s a link to the Medium piece as well. You might want to read his
column on the Medium website, because if it gets enough traffic then it might
become a featured piece which would get even more people to read what Bryan has
to say.
What he
has to say is that a whole industry has now grown up around the idea of ‘hardening’
our schools to protect the teachers and children from someone entering the
building with the intention of shooting the whole place up. The active shooting
industry’s target customer base goes far beyond education – hospitals,
workplaces – anywhere that might attract some jerk with a gun will sooner or
later get solicited by a salesperson selling them a program to help them get
prepared. Or as one of the leading companies
calls it, moving the customer from a ‘passive to proactive response.’
This is
all pure, unadulterated crap and like the gun industry itself, what is being
promoted is a response to fear. Bryan hits this one right out of the park when
he notes that not only are schools about the safest places for kids and adults,
but the active-shooter drills are themselves likely to cause fear. How do you
think a bunch of schoolchildren are going to react when they witness a staged
shooting “replete with
fake blood and student-actors’ ‘bodies’ on the hallway floors?”
Were it
the case that merchandising the fear of schoolchildren was only being done by a
cadre of fast-buck private outfits I wouldn’t be so concerned. After all, since
when has American ingenuity not found a way to make money off of fear? I don’t know if he’s still peddling freeze-dried
food for your backyard bunker, but Glenn Beck has been touting moving your
savings into gold and silver for at least the last ten years.
On the
other hand, when the huckstering is done by the one professional group whom he would
like to believe only gives us advice on what we really need, then something is seriously
wrong. I am referring to a program
called ‘Stop the Bleed,’ run by the American College of Surgeons with a shopping
cart on their website where you can purchase anything from a Personal Bleeding Control
Kit for $69, up to a wall-mounted Bleeding Control Station for $800, the latter
product can probably be attached to the hooks which used to hold the fire
extinguisher in the hall.
Along with
the medical supplies a school district can also opt for training, which gives
kids an opportunity to develop the same traumatic fears that might occur after
they get done with the active shooting drill.
Come to think of it, why not give the kids a dose of both? In the morning they can learn how to stand on
a toilet seat so that the shooter won’t know if anyone’s in the john; after
lunch they can see some pictures of how a person might bleed out unless they
wrap a bandage around the injured arm.
In 2018,
the American College of Surgeons donated $841,780
to Congressional candidates, with members of the GOP getting almost 60%
of the total. So far for the 2020 election, the GOP candidates are again
slightly ahead. Every, single one of these GOP recipients shamelessly
votes the NRA line. And these surgeons want us to believe that selling
their crummy, little medical kits to schoolkids will make a difference when
someone walks into the classroom with an AR15?
