Again and again there are rampages in US schools with many deaths. Almost all schools in the United States conduct drills to prepare students to deal with violent crimes. But how useful are these “drills”?
When 17-year-old Lucinda Dougherty talks about the lockdown exercises at her school, two things are noticeable: routine, a piece of normality, after all the exercises are part of everyday school life – and concern, a bit of uncertainty at the thought that it is also at her school there could be a mass shooting, she cannot and does not want to get used to it.
“I remember doing these exercises when I was little, six or seven years old,” she says. “Lock the door to the classroom, darken the windows as much as possible, and crouch in the corners of the room, sit under the desks or crouch against the wall below the windows so that nobody outside can see us.”
Exercises with simulated gunfire and banging at the door
“Usually they announce over the speakers that a lockdown exercise is coming,” says Lucinda’s brother, 14-year-old Caio, who also goes to school in Montgomery County, Maryland. But from school district to school district, sometimes from school to school in the United States, these drills are conducted in very different ways, with or without warning, from the drastic-realistic with banging at the door, to the mock gunfire played over loudspeakers, to the sensitive-empathetic with Preparation and follow-up in class, accompanying discussions.
Were there any real dangers at your school? “Once someone was seriously injured with a knife, it was outside but still on the school grounds,” says Lucinda. “We had a threat situation this year when someone saw a person with a gun in the park right next to the school,” says Caio. “It was early in the morning. When I got to school, the state of alarm was already in place. I hid behind a car with a few other students until the lockdown was lifted.”
In a study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers have criticized the wildly inconsistent practice practices in US schools. There was a lack of well-founded instructions for implementation and data on the effect and thus the usefulness of these “lockdown drills”.
Torn between important and torn
“I think they’re important,” Lucinda says, “because most students don’t know what to do when there’s danger. It helps to be at least a little prepared, just in case.”
Her father, Carter Dougherty, says he is conflicted about lockdown exercises: “Of course, your first feeling as a parent is that you want the school to do everything it can to keep your children safe. But at the same time, I get angry every time that these exercises are necessary because of the possibility that someone could enter your children’s school with a semi-automatic weapon and kill dozens of students.”
These demonstrators in front of the Capitol in Washington are also angry. For a week they demonstrated for stricter gun laws. “My cousin was killed in the Parkland, Florida shooting five years ago,” said Sam Schwartz, now 19, one of the group’s spokespersons. “None of the politicians who pass us here on the way to the Capitol have spoken to us.”
According to statistics from the Gun Violence Archive website, there have already been 320 mass shootings in the United States this year alone, with at least four people dead or seriously injured, in shopping malls, on the street – less frequently, but again and again: in schools.
Practically anyone can buy weapons suitable for war almost anywhere in the country, even criminals or people with mental health problems, Sam Schwartz complains: “You just go into the shop, no background check, from 18, in some states from 21, you can have a semi-automatic in no time at all Bought a gun, literally ten minutes in some places.”
“The gun culture is part of the DNA of many here”
“It’s a cultural problem,” says Patricia Oliver. She lost her own son, Hakeem, in the 2018 Parkland school mass shooting and also came to Washington to protest. “Think of the early commercials with the Marlboro Man or all the movies with the macho image of the cowboy with the gun on the horse. The gun culture is part of the DNA of a lot of people here.”
When asked about the lockdown drills in American schools, she says, “I think the drills traumatize the kids. Also, part of the problem with the Parkland shoot was that a lot of people thought it was a drill, not reality. I’ve been with a lot Spoken to parents and children about these lockdown exercises. They do more harm than good, one hundred percent.”
Sam Schwartz, on the other hand, says: “We still need these exercises in schools because assault weapons are not yet banned. Of course it would be better if we tackled the problem at the root. But that takes time, far too little is happening with gun laws is shameful.”