“Active Shooter” Drills: Craziness Upon Craziness

September 20, 2025

American school kids undergo frequent “active shooter” drills — New York law requires them four times annually. Not only reducing actual learning time (which they can ill-afford) but upsetting and scaring them.

To what purpose? Is there any evidence that these drills reduce harm in actual school shootings? Has anyone ever said afterward, “Good thing we had those drills”?

Conceivably teachers should get pointers for handling such situations. But why involve students? Need they be instructed to hide from gunfire? They’ll anyhow simply do what teachers say. So just train the teachers.

People in general are poor at rationally assessing risks. An air crash influences many to drive rather than fly — though driving is hundreds of times more dangerous. So how great is the school shooting threat, actually?

Here are the top causes of U.S. childhood death. The biggest is injury; a big component of that being car crashes. Then there’s illness or other health issues. Then suffocation; drowning; and drug overdoses or poisoning. Those things all feel sort of normal. Unlike school shootings. So over them we go haywire, out of all proportion to the true danger, compared to the others.

Now, within the injury category, there are also gun injuries. By some reckonings the biggest child killer. But overwhelmingly occurring outside schools (commonly involving guns families own for “protection”). In fact, in the several sources I looked at, school shootings did not even make it as a listed subcategory of gun deaths. In a nation with over 100,000 schools and around 75 million students, school shootings are exceedingly rare. Only the teensiest percentage of kids will ever experience one. A classroom is just about the safest place children can be.

Meantime, a recent Albany Times-Union report said that for all the overdone panic about school shootings, with ubiquitous drills, many educators actually try to shield students from understanding what’s afoot. Part of our societal “child safety” obsession, coddling kids against all life’s vicissitudes or having their equanimity disturbed — emasculating their ability to actually deal with stuff.

So on the one hand we go overboard seeking to protect against school shootings while on the other trying to protect kids against even knowing about school shootings.

Hence they’re typically not even told the reason for all those drills. Shooting is an unmentionable shibboleth. Instead, they’re often told the threat is wild animals! Not, heaven forbid, armed humans.

Thought to be scarier. One elementary school sent parents a letter urging them to avoid the word “gun” in talking with their children. And school shootings are rarely covered in history classes. (History can be upsetting.)

Can kids be so sheltered from reality in today’s world? They can figure it out. Teacher secretiveness about the reason for drills makes things seem all the scarier. And it’s not good if they see teachers as lying to them. Wild animals indeed.

How does any of this “protect” anyone’s “safety?”

The best answer for school shootings (not to mention urban crime) is to keep guns out of the hands of deranged psychopaths and criminals. No other country allows that, and no other has mass shootings like ours. That’s the deepest craziness here.