Last week, a picture of a little blond girl, about 3 years old, standing on a toilet circulated on social media. Her mother, Stacey Feeley, had shared the picture on Facebook and explained that she’d originally thought it was a cute balancing act by a toddler.
It wasn’t. It turned out that her daughter was practicing the lockdown drill she’s taught at her school in the case of an active shooter in the building.
The message was clear: We have gotten to such a scary point in society that 3-year-olds are in danger of being shot at school — so in danger, in fact, that we must take the extraordinary step of scaring the bejeezus out of impressionable and easily frightened youngsters, pouring nightmare fuel on an already-simmering flame.
Of course, that’s not really the case. As sensationalized as mass shootings have become, they’re still extremely rare. We are much more likely to die in a car accident or from an illness than
in any kind of mass shooting, let alone a school shooting.
According to the FBI, there were 479 gun fatalities for all children under 18 in 2013, the last year for which they have data. In a population of about 74 million kids and teens, that makes the likelihood of dying via a gun 0.000646 percent.
No one wants to make light of even one child being killed, at school or anywhere else, but the likelihood of such a thing happening remains extremely slim. So why are we raising kids with these chilling drills that can do lasting mental damage to them?
One mom in Long Island told me her daughter has been coming into her room at night ever since the drills started at her school. “She tells me ‘the intruders, the bad people’ are trying to get into her room, like the teachers tell her during lockdown. They’re scaring my kid! I’m angry.”
At my child’s school they teach them to hide in the closet of their classroom “in case of a big storm.” I’m glad my kid isn’t up all night worrying about bad guys, but now she thinks we need to stay away from windows when it rains.
The Long Island mom doesn’t want to be “that mom” who complains about something as serious as teaching kids to hide from shooters. But she doesn’t see the upside of traumatizing a child by repeatedly forcing them to “experience” an event that will likely never happen.
And, by the way, it’s nearly impossible to prepare for such an event, anyway. Just take a look at how Uncle Sam directs us to act in case of emergency.
A White House fact sheet nudges adults to confront the shooter, while FEMA guidelines include suggestions like: “If appropriate and safe to do so, request intruder to leave campus in a calm, courteous, and confident manner.” Would you mind not shooting up the hallways? We’re trying to administer an exam. Pretty please with a cherry on top?
The FBI promotes “Run, Hide, Fight” while many law-enforcement agencies across the country are pushing the more pro-active “Avoid, Deny, Defend,” which tells people to use everyday objects like pens or chairs to incapacitate the shooter. (I suppose it’s possible to hide behind a chair and then throw it at the intruder.)
The truth is, we don’t really know what to do in unpredictable situations like a random shooting, and we try to retain control by attempting to plan for the unplannable. Shooters don’t follow a script, and so a scripted response can only get us so far.
But a school emergency plan that includes teaching kids to stand on toilets to avoid shooters is simply taking things too far.
It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do any preparation, but just like most gun deaths in the United States are caused by handguns and not the AR-15s that raise the ire of gun-control advocates, we also wrongly focus on drills or procedures in the event of a shooter instead of doing more prevention.
One simple suggestion offered by Robert Siciliano, chief executive officer of PublicSchoolSecurity.com and author of “The Safety Minute: Living on High Alert” — advice echoed by many other
security experts — is: lock doors. Sounds obvious, but it isn’t. Locking both the main door of a school as well as classroom doors could make a big safety difference. We can also focus on better training for school security guards and work with teachers and administrators to know what to do in a crisis situation.
But let’s leave 3-year-olds alone.