We are psychologically damaging our children

[SHRED]

Link to tweet

[spanone]

1. K&R...

[virgogal]

2. No we aren't .....I had air raid drills and we went to the school basement

and we all survived....kids are resilient

[OneGrassRoot]

3. I think there's a difference...

What you experienced was preparation in case of attack by an outside force. Still awful, even if kids are resilient.

But these kids know the attacker could be one of them or anyone they encounter in everyday life. That feels like an additional psychological burden.

Both suck because both are preventable.

[Whiskeytide]

4. Hmmm. Who is to say...

... we weren't damages by those air raid drills. Look how we’ve tuned out. Apparently 60 m Americans were so F’d up they voted for trump.

[thesquanderer]

11. Bingo. You make some kids more fearful, and fearful voters tend to be Republican. (n/t)

[Arkansas Granny]

5. We also had fire drills and tornado drills. I think the big difference between those drills and the

active shooter drills of today are because mass shootings are nearly everyday occurrences with body counts and videos.

We knew that schools could catch on fire, but how often did it happen? We knew that tornadoes were possible, but how often did that happen? I don't think those drills had the same anxiety attached to them as the active shooter drills that schoolkids today have to deal with.

[lunatica]

7. The difference is that natural disasters are

normal things that can be prepared for and which have brought about better building materials and scientific innovations which save more and more lives as they are implemented. Mass shootings so far only use more and more innovations to kill better.

[RobinA]

12. I Was Petrified

of fire drills as a young elementary student. I have no idea why. I dreaded fire prevention week, because I knew we would have a fire drill or several. I don't know what it was, but my fear was as if I saw fire approaching down the hall towards me and I had nowhere to go. I can't even imagine what I would have been like with active shooter drills and actual sounds of gunfire.

[GoCubsGo]

17. It was the tornado drills that got to me.

My town tested their Civil Defense sirens every first Tuesday of the month. That's when we did our "Go out into the hallway, get down on the floor, head toward the lockers, and cover your neck" thing. I dreaded that day, to the point where I was on the verge of getting sick from it. By the 10:30 AM drill, I was ready to puke. I hated the way the thing sounded, and since tornadoes are already a scary thing, that just exacerbated my fears. It wasn't until I was well into high school before that day stopped causing me major anxiety. To make matters worse, I had to walk past that damn siren on my way to and from school. My biggest fear that it would start going off as I was walking past it.

Fire drills never scared me. My grade school was one story high, and we could open the windows and safely climb out of those, if we had to.

I can't imagine the active shooter drills, either. Having a guy coming in and shooting up the school never occurred to me. That kind of thing never happened back then. Mass shootings were rare, in general.

[enough]

6. There is an analogy, but I think there's a big difference psychologically.

I too lived through years of those nuke drills in elementary school. That was something that, if it happened was going to happen to everybody. There was nothing personal about it. It was basically a drill for the end of the world. There’s no doubt it had psychological and cognitive effects on our generation. And, for a long time it had an effect on the actions of politicians and nations. (Apparently the idea of nuclear arms control is becoming obsolete it the current climate).

But this mass shooting preparation is preparation for ones own personal individual death, and the message to kids is that we don’t care enough about that to prevent it. We’d rather have you children take your chances than figure out what do do about it.

[SHRED]

8. They simulate gunfire

The children aren't told it isn't real.

Wake up.

[Newest Reality]

9. We had duck and cover...

And I don't think that was useful or appropriate at all.

Developmentally, children basically pick up their survival skills and mode of being from their early development and the factors involved in that. It makes sense that, prior to all this rapid change and mobility, the environment you were in was going to tend to be the one you needed to adapt to.

Are we, in effect, living in a protracted WAR ZONE? Well, then yes, children would benefit from the inculcated fear and hyper-vigilance that would require and they would not consider the world a necessarily friendly or safe place to live.

Are we living in a WAR ZONE and is that the way this is going? I don't expect those who expect the Second Amendment to protect their right to be paranoid and terrorists to get the importance of the trade off here, but if they did, then they might weigh the criteria and outcomes better about what takes precedence concerning the future of the country, lest their concerns about holding automatic weapons above the value of human life become a self-fulfilling prophecy of things to come.

So, I think it is psychologically unhealthy and disruptive in regards to the Cold War days and just as much for the current environment of assault weapons and mass shootings.

[SHRED]

10. It was useless

I remember as a kid under my desk thinking that those lead curtains and under the desk will make a strange coffin.
I knew in second grade we'd all be killed.

[dlk]

13. One Important Difference Between Air Raid Drills and Active Shooter Drills

There weren’t ever any actual air raids on schools, so children felt protected and safe. We have active shooter, mass murders in our schools on a regular basis, with their ongoing carnage, which terrorize and traumatize our children. There’s no real comparison between the two.

[cvoogt]

15. you all survived

but these kids are not all surviving. It is a big difference

[Act_of_Reparation]

16. And look at how awesome your generation turned out.

[SHRED]

24. I resemble that remark...

[SHRED]

25. At least we vote

[Act_of_Reparation]

26. Yeah, but for who?

[SHRED]

27. Dang

How did you know we old farts vote for the wrong people en masse?

[demmiblue]

29. Not even closely comparable.

There are not enough eyerolls for your continuing comments on this.

[kimbutgar]

14. Children are being taught that they are not safe anywhere from a lunatic gun humper

I did an active shooter drill with special needs kids. They had a hard time recognizing the difference between a fire drill, earthquake drill and then this new active shooter drill.

We are creating a next generation of fearful people who can easily be more manipulated by ruthless people. Being fearless can lead to you being shot in broad daylight.

Those AR guns need to be brought back, outlawed, and confiscated. And if you are caught with one you can be prosecuted and sent to jail. I got no problem with hand guns, and rifles but these war like death killing AR’s need to be gone from our streets like yesterday.

[SHRED]

21. So 😢 sad

[G_j]

18. exactly right

our children abused on so many fronts!
Unacceptable, unforgivable

[kimmylavin]

19. Jesus.

What happened to designing schools for better LEARNING?

[appalachiablue]

23. Where's the money in that?! /s

This is a bonanza moneymaker for some and sheer exploitation, sorry to say.

[Johnny2X2X]

20. Dave Chappelle had a good point about this

So, you're showing the students what to do if there's a shooter... aren't you by definition also then showing the shooter what you're going to do when he comes in to shoot? "Sure, so we all run over there right? Ok, ok, thinks to self 'that would be like shooting fish in a barrel'".

This is madness. Get the damned assault rifles out of everyone's hands. Get all guns out of the hands of unstable people. We need a return to sanity.

[SHRED]

22. Excellent point!!

Teaching future killers where the weak spots are.

[Eliot Rosewater]

30. I would even go one CRAZY step further and suggest we do what the rest of the civilized world

does...get rid of the guns period.

[Eliot Rosewater]

28. And I want a prez and party that will REMOVE guns from our society.

I want a prez and party that will indict and imprison rump and pence and mcconnell and nunes and on and on.

First and foremost I want a prez who is not a traitor, so ANY of the current dems will fill that bill.