Now they want terrified kids to be first responders too

[Danmel]

The Department of Homeland Security, in response to mass shootings and I suppose other mass catastrophes, has started a program to teach bystanders, including students, to learn how to slow bleeding from bullet wounds. If the run, hide, fight isn't traumatic enough, and the lockdown drills and songs aren't traumatic enough, now these kids are supposed to try to keep their friends from bleeding out???
What have we become?
https://www.dhs.gov/stopthebleed

[HAB911]

1. Between this and bullet resistant backpacks

I feel so much better

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. We are each our own first responder and preparation is never a bad thing.

[Danmel]

4. True, but if this is to be done before help arrives

Doesn't it contradict everything we tell people to do in active shooter training. And what if a 15 year old tries and fails to save a friend, a classmate? Now we are adding an extra layer of trauma and survivor guilt. This isn't the answer. Getting rid of weapons of war is the answer.

[Jim__]

3. And good luck stopping the bleeding from a wound from an AR-15 - *** WARNING GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION

From The Atlantic:

...

In a typical handgun injury, which I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ such as the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, gray bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.

I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?

The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semiautomatic rifle that delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. Nothing was left to repair—and utterly, devastatingly, nothing could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.

...

[Newest Reality]

5. This is not an acceptable solution or a good idea.

I remember the duck and cover days in school. In retrospect, I think it was psychologically harmful and the benefits were way out of line with the risks. Oh, sure, if there was a nuke attack and it was far enough away, you might be safer under your desk and prevent blindness, but come on.

This idea is absolutely inane and inappropriate and does more harm than good. Instead of growing up with some stability and at least a sense of a safe environment provided by adults, we get the opposite by driving this home in grotesque ways rather than seeing any intelligent attempts to investigate the underlying causes behind the trend of mass shooting. How brilliant! What a great response. What a letdown to the students.

No, this is not a rational society at all if we are going to further traumatize children in their early development with ideas like that. They are not even at a stage where they can process that kind of information well, and it just gets sublimated as fear. I mean really, we don't expose children to certain adult content or ideas for that very reason, yet this is considered a practical solution? Is any attention payed to the ramifications of that considering the percentage of children who will ever really need to respond in that way? Risks versus cost?

I strongly appose this idea and consider it an emblem of a failure of the people we entrust to understand it and prevent it. It is a cop out and it will have implications for society when these kids grow up. It is a crying shame, as they say.

Like pointing at mental illness and video games, (which skirt the real problems or avoid them) this one is a sign of more ineptitude and failure to address.

[hlthe2b]

6. They already are. Better to teach them how to help themselves and others.

A lesson psychologist/psychiatrists emphasize about dealing with stress and fear is that imparting some sense of self-control--actions one may take to mitigate--are very important. This is no less true in children.

Some of the school shooting drills are upsetting, for sure, but teaching kids first aid is not one that I'd criticize.

[Kid Berwyn]

7. Easier than getting a law passed.

While a nation full of EMTs is a noble thing, it’d be better to outlaw all of the assault weapons and supersized clips Murica’s gunhumpers so cherish.