This is a good point. The US Army increased it's level of first-aid training to soldiers during the 90s and the result is that during the GWOT the percentage of soldiers who die from battlefield injuries has dropped to the lowest of any conflict on record. Whether it's training on how to apply a tourniquet or how to initially treat a sucking chest wound (eg: being shot) the average soldier today has more medical training than a lot of WW2 combat medics had.
Bringing this back to the work place: it's far more likely that the average office worker will come across an opportunity to use medical/first aid training than whatever passes as active shooter training. Moreover, if I am working in an office where I know my coworkers have a general idea how to apply a chest dressing or stop bleeding and generally stabilize injuries until EMTs arrive I'll be more likely to charge an active shooter to try to end the threat knowing that even if I'm hit in the process my chances for survival are good.
a stop-the-bleed kit is about a hundred bucks, buy a few. keep one in your home, one in your car, and a small one in your personal bag. there are groups in every city that offer free training, oriented mainly towards activists and firearms hobbyists, but it's available. the training is useful for many kinds of bleeding, not just gunshot wounds.
You'll likely never need one and it will be lost/defunct after a few years (due to heat & moisture). Kit or no, you need a first aid class and a first aid kit. Rather than another expenditure and one more gadget to keep track of, stay with the basics.
Otherwise people will buy a "bleed kit" on Amazon and toss it in the trunk, thinking that they're fully prepared for an automobile accident or such. When an accident does occur, they may or may not remember the kit, take it out and read the instructions manual. Meanwhile someone will die b/c the kit owner wasn't educated enough to "apply pressure to the wound."
[Cue spammers citing questionable personal anecdotes where a "bleed kit" in a car trunk saved them from amputation/death.]
This whole concept is just bizarre to me as a Brit. I get the US is a different country with its own culture around firearm ownership but how on earth did widespread "active shooter training" become a thing and society went along with it?
At least the author recognises this in the first sentence, but it still blows my mind.
I went to school when Irish bombers will blowing up my home town and killing kids. I remember having a fire drill once at school which might have doubled as a bomb-threat drill.
Far more danger from the car drivers outside the front gates.
I think because it is a tangible thing one can do. Regardless of opinions on constitutionality of firearms ownership, nobody wants to see attacks and shoots. But what can be done? Changing the laws is not likely because of both disagreement and gridlock, though political activity is one avenue one can take with hope for longer term impact. Policing or mental health policy and programs in the in the local communities also might have some impact, but again most individuals won't be able to make an impact (not that they couldn't but won't in practice without a high degree of engagement).
But hosting a class? That is something everyone organization has full autonomy to successfully accomplish. It is within the organizational and budgetary resources of small companies, big ones, churches, schools, local community centers, etc.
Think about the duck and cover training for surviving a nuclear blast. You might not be able to do much as the average individual to avoid nuclear confrontation, but you can mitigate it on the margin with some tangible steps.
It's insane, especially since the kind of serial shooter thing (not an attack targeted at a specific person, not an argument in a parking lot that turns deadly but then stops there, none of that) it's meant to defend against is rare—as rare as one might hope? No, of course not. Rare enough that widespread training against it is unjustifiable? Yes.
I'd not have expected it beforehand, but it turns out that even fairly mild & common versions of the training (not the extreme sorts that occasionally make the news) can leave adults literally shaking. It's really hard on some people. Yet we subject a huge percentage of our children to it. The risk does not justify that.
I'm American. What I can say is that pretty much all firearms based murder is rare in the US. Across any demographic in the US, there is a much less than 0.1% chance that you will be murdered by a firearm in the US in any given year. Far more likely to die in a car accident,a nd you have a much larger chance of dying in a household accident. Don't even get me started on heart disease or cancer.
Our problem here in the US is that we overreact to dealing with that <0.1% chance. We make people jump through hoops to get a firearm to even go hunting. We flood our neighborhoods with police who raid homes using grenades and armored personnel carriers. (Usually killing innocents in the process, because, you know, we throw grenades in the windows of some baby's nursery.) And, we have active shooter drills for our children, probably traumatizing some of them for the rest of their lives. The list goes on and on actually.
In America, we pretty much overreact to everything. Which is why you probably hear so many crazy stories about the US. When faced with what we perceive to be a threat, no matter how remote the reality of the threat, we are unable to moderate our responses. In fact, you could argue that we are trained from an early age, via things like active shooter training, NOT to think too deeply about our responses.
Agreed on the overreaction thing. When I explain America to non-Americans, I tell them that most of our weirdest behaviors and practices make sense if you assume everyone's main concern at all times is never to ever be, personally, blamed for or responsible for anything—external costs of bringing about that state of things, be damned.
Passing any sort of gun control is impossible for political reasons. Republican legislators and judges block gun control whenever they can. It's about one third moneymaking for manufacturers and two thirds culture war at this point. The hardline opposition mainly dates to the Obama administration, when the Republican legislative strategy became blocking anything that Obama wanted to do.
Many Republicans will tell you that there is an absolutely vital constitutional right to own, carry, and stockpile all kinds of firearms. Some of them believe it. But this doctrine was only popularized in the 1970s and still does not have majority support today [1].
When you tell people universal background checks a.) effectively require a registry for enforcement, and b.) don't work at all [0], their opinions tend to change. The not-working part is a feature of every "common sense" gun control measure, especially if we're talking about specific mass shootings.
If we actually want to curb gun-related deaths, start with the war on drugs and reforming urban culture — but that's hard and risky for politicians, so instead they choose to go after legal owners.
> By the time we enter the corporate world we are accustomed to this training. This is the training we receive in school. It starts in elementary school and nearly every school teaches some form of active shooter training
What. The. Fruit.
Where is this normal??? I have never once received active shooter training. It’s been a few years since I was in grade school (class of 2004, baby!) and two years since I worked in an office but, still, this sounds extremely foreign.
I’ve lived and worked in Canada and Australia but not the US. Is this actually normal in the US?
Forget first-aid kits. How could anyone be okay with this being normal?
This is very normal in the US. Many schools prevented classrooms from opening the doors to improve ventilation during covid, because it would violate their policy about keeping the doors shut in case there was a shooting.
And yeah we have a relatively high amount of shootings, but they are still rare in an absolute sense. A lot of this is driven by an industry that sells bulletproof desks and junk, and needs to keep people afraid because it's profitable.
Edit: I should also point out that shifting responsibility for active shooter response to the individual, the victim, is a way to avoid discussions about actual policy change or to hold people with real power accountable at all.
> And yeah we have a relatively high amount of shootings, but they are still rare in an absolute sense. A lot of this is driven by an industry that sells bulletproof desks and junk, and needs to keep people afraid because it's profitable.
Let me correct that for you: all of this is driven by a gun industry that sells actual guns and bullets and has for decades lobbied gun safety laws practically out of existence in the US, and needs to keep gun owners afraid of their "second amendment rights" being taken away because it's profitable.
That's true, but it's also true that, separately, the responses and mitigation efforts often aren't rational and are preyed on by opportunistic business people with an interest in misleading folks, just like anything else.
That's definitely not the right way to assign blame. There's absolutely room to blame all the stuff you've mentioned here and also acknowledge that doing active shooter training is a massive over-response that does a lot more harm than good.
Active shooter training is what happens when you try to make active shooting situations happen never again, and yet people stand in your way such that they keep happening over and over and over again, year after year, decade after decade. Columbine was 1999. And it's not just standing in the way such that we do a little bit at a time and act cautiously and conservatively in implementing changes to preserve everyone's rights, but standing in a way such that absolutely any action whatsoever is impermissible.
At some point if your goal is to protect children who are subject to active shooter situations (which in fact do happen), then perhaps training people to make the best of them when they inevitably occur is all we can do, given the political climate. When a school full of first graders turns up shot dead and literally nothing is done, maybe active shooter training doesn't seem like a bad idea. This massive over-response is a reaction to the preceding massive under-response.
If you really don't want active shooter training to be a thing, make active shooters a thing of the past. Other places don't have this problem. If you want to make a change, call your congress people, and don't vote for them if they won't support sane gun measures, even if they're from a party you typically vote for.
I don't think active shooter drills are that helpful. I think they are mainly "useful" as a political tool to take pressure off politicians and prevent any change in the "political climate".
"And yeah we have a relatively high amount of shootings, but they are still rare in an absolute sense."
To be clear on what that means: In a country of 350-400 million people, these are rare enough that each one can afford to be a media feeding frenzy. The media are constantly on lookout for anything that can cast as a school shooting because it's big ratings for them.
And they still happen only rarely. Months & years between them.
The only reason anyone thinks they happen at all is 100% that the media is constantly vigilant for any trace of a school shooting to bring to you. If the stories were ignored instead, or put out only locally and treated as any other item, it wouldn't even enter your mind to consider them a big threat.
Now, let's contrast that with the number of people helped each year by someone with First Aid training. Let's even discard the ones who are emergency responders. Heck, let's discard the ones done by people who have any other medical training at all, and just look at the people helped by people whose only medical training is their First Aid training. That happens so often it's not news at all. Probably happening right now somewhere in this country even as I type this.
So, naturally, it's important to pour All The Money into active shooter training. Even though for about the same amount of money and time you could train all those people in First Aid instead, which, by the way, is also useful in shooter situations.
This is part of why I have such loathing for the news media. This is an example of where they make Big Bucks pushing a particular gripping story, at the cost of distorting the entire society's views of what is going on and pushing out a merely "mundane" problem that affects hundreds or thousands of people a day. But, precisely because it happens so many orders of magnitude more often, it's not news, so the perception of society is that it's not worth dealing with.
> To be clear on what that means: In a country of 350-400 million people, these are rare enough that each one can afford to be a media feeding frenzy.
> And they still happen only rarely. Months & years between them.
The latest school shooting in the US was fewer than 30 days ago: 1 dead, 2 injured. It hardly made the news. There was another 3 days before that. In February there were 3 shootings. In January, 7 shootings. That's just this year. Hardly any of the shootings on this list even made national news, let alone were media feeding frenzies:
Is it batshit crazy though? Because if we all say it's batshit crazy and no one does anything about it, seems to me that's just a symptom of a sick society. It's not like we're all insane. Yes, some people are in fact batshit crazy with theories of "crisis actors" but no one really takes them seriously. At least not people in positions of real power. The batshit craziness is not the reason that nothing gets done year after year. As far as I can tell, the reason nothing gets done is because it's politically inconvenient and it will cost a lot of money, which leads to inaction -- because the people who could act would be working against their self interest (more money and power). That's just typical banal evil that thrives in sick societies, not insanity.
I did secondary school in the US, and there are lock-down drills that are mostly motivated by school shootings. In fact the first time I experienced practicing one was shortly after Columbine in a school not that far from Columbine. That said, the only time we actually had real lock-downs were for things like phony bomb threats, or dangerous criminals being pursued by police nearby.
On the other hand, I did some primary school in New Zealand and we had what I would now call a lock-down for the same reason, where school shootings really aren't a thing. I think schools ought to plan for that kind of thing for safety. I think the kind of first aid they teach you in active shooter training if you happen to take them as an adult (I did because I had a buddy trying to start a business after leaving the military doing it) is actually also really good first aid for anyone who's doing extreme sports, or going in the wilderness, or working around heavy machinery, etc.
I don't think any of that means that people shooting up schools is accepted as normal.
edit: Now that I've read TFA, I'll also add that I've worked in the US my entire adult life and I've never had active shooter training that was mandated at work, or heard of anyone I know having that.
Same here, lock-down drills started after Columbine in elementary through high school.
My employer does offer an Active Shooter optional training course. It also includes a first aid part to it, but its basically how to control someone from bleeding out before paramedics arrive. So it's still coming from a pretty dark place.
I thought my employer did offer a general first aid training separately from this and apparently I was wrong. So yeah, it turns out I'm in the same position as the author of the article...that's depressing.
And also seems dumb, because I understand the fear and low probability/high risk that motivates the active shooter training. But the far more common scenario is something like carrying some old equipment around and it slips out of your hands and a metal edge cuts your arm. Or someone starts choking on a piece of popcorn and you have to help get it out. Both of which have happened at my job and where general first aid training is very helpful.
Edit: It turns out we have specific CPR/AED classes because we also have AED machines. But it costs money and you can't charge company training time for it, so its not really any different than going and getting a certification somewhere else.
I think it's worth remembering that the world can be a pretty dark place anyway, and being prepared for stuff can make it less dark. The training I did was basically a civilian adaptation of the TCCC course taught over a weekend, taught be ex-military PMC types, so I expected it to be a bit of a stretch to apply it to civilians. And yeah, it's pretty dark: we practiced dragging limp bodies out of a building while they played loud sounds of gun fire. We put chest seals on dead pigs.
But a lot of the videos they played to demonstrate various conditions that you could treat with an IFAK - the basic military first aid kit - were totally civilian situations. We went over car accidents, camping mishaps, failed suicides. And as someone who overthinks and worries about potential problems - can I just say how good it feels to go on a road trip or go camping with my kids and know "hey - I have a trauma kit in the back of the car and I know how to use it". As dark as all those things are, I'm far better able to help people going through those things than I was before.
It really sucks that school shootings are so common that they influence policy like this. But... I think school shootings shouldn't be the only reason. I think far more people should do things like go get the Red Cross First Aid / CPR / AED course and practice those skills every couple of years. And not just because of shootings.
Worked for a state agency (nothing enforcement, just dealing with state level stuffs), and we did have mandated lock-down drills once a year. Mostly I assume because we shared a state building with other depts. that might have been targeted, but I assume it was likely a state gov't thing.
Even in Canada, we did this when I was in high school 7 years ago. How to hide, barricade doors, refuse to open the door after it is closed no matter who is outside as they might be a hostage, etc.
Usually Police officers come through with a school administrator or maintenance worker and unlock the doors and give the all clear classroom by classroom.
We had one in Quebec, Canada (~2012). It was in high school though and we did not do an actual drill, only had a police officer come and explain the situation, what could happen and how to handle it, etc...
Each door had a little cardboard thing to cover the window in case of an active shooter situation to prevent them from peaking in.
If the cardboard doesn't always cover the window wouldn't it be clear that only rooms with people inside would have the cardboard cover applied? It's not like you could rely on everyone having gone to every door to apply the cardboard cover to all rooms that don't have people in them.
Oh, I don't think it's an especially good idea, I just think that's the notion behind it. I expect most of what goes on with these is marginally helpful in a real situation, at best, and few measures pass even a very generous cost/benefit analysis, and that's before you factor in psychological harm.
If this particular effort is effective, I expect it has more to do with discouraging shooters from firing in the first place (they may hesitate to "waste" shots on a window if they aren't sure people are behind it) or to slow them down. For exactly the reasons you note, I don't see it being very effective against someone who's decided that they definitely are going to shoot into that room.
Also, I don't think there's a lot of schools out there with some sort of abundance of empty rooms that the shooter can eliminate this way. Rooms tend to end up used.
From what I can recall, their tips were questionable at best. I remember the police telling us that the shooter thought he was playing Call of Duty in real life and that by covering the windows it meant he "couldn't go into that room" or something.
In another class, the police officer was like "eh it's just so it's not obvious that there are 30 easy targets in your class, if I wanted to enter I could just blow up that lock with my gun".
I wonder what kind of briefing they had before presenting.
Active shooter training is one of the weird cultural phenomena that comes out of the US that I've only noticed fairly recently and so haven't been numbed to it yet.
Mass shootings are apparently treated not as symptom of an ininimal social environment or deficient access control to means but more like the inevitable change of weather. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
I've had elearning on it working for an investment bank in the UK. The US and UK version of the training is subtly different. For the UK version it says run and hide. For the US version it says run and hide and if you can't then fight back.
Class of 2012. I think we did one of these once. But it was like 5 minutes. When a shooter situation is declared you stand against the wall with the door and turn off the lights to make the room appear empty to someone in the hall.
That’s about it.
The train stations also have these on tv screens nonstop which are basically leave if you can, hide otherwise, and if there’s no option left, swarm the shooter as a group.
Edit: wait, no I remember something that was insane to everyone. The teachers all had keys to the rooms that locked from the outside, and were required to lock them and then leave on their own. That was wild, both from the perspective of putting all the teachers in the open hallway and filling everyone’s head with this imagined scenario of a guy blind firing at the class through the door window.
There were earthquake drills, shooting drills, "lock down" drills and bomb threat drills throughout school.
Basically all of them consisted of "Sit under your desk and play thumb wars quietly with classmates and listen to your teacher or the classroom speakers instructions"
It isn't normal, I don't know anyone that has had such training, but it does exist as a thing (mostly in elementary schools). Frankly, I think "active shooter training" is neurotic and a waste of time, considering how extremely rare it actually is.
The US has, on average, slightly more than one mass shooting a day[1] (where mass shooting is 4 or more victims). Training to be able to deal with that seems prudent.
Looking at my required annual list of "generic" corporate training now: Active Shooter Training, Security Awareness, Diversity, Emergency Awareness, Violence Prevention, Fraud Awareness, Sexual Harassment Prevention. All are 1/2 hour to hour video based trainings.
Yep. It's common in the US. I wouldn't call it normal by any stretch (at risk of normalizing this bullshit), but it's definitely common. My kids have gone through it every year. Heck, I think they've had more shooter drills than fire drills.
When my oldest kid went through one for the first time in 1st grade, they came home and broke down about it. Said they didn't want to die at school and was afraid the bad men would attack. We ended up going through therapy with a child play-therapist which helped my kiddo a lot (in case anyone might be running into this issue and is unsure of what to do).
Somehow this is considered OK, but the "trauma" of wearing a mask to prevent an airborne illness was too much to bear.
When I graduated, they had just started doing them. But the baseball field was still unfenced, and little kids from the neighborhood could still use the outside hallways to play tag in.
By the time my youngest sibling graduated in '11 training was every year, the school was no longer public property that anyone could hang out on, and there were armed police patrolling it.
As everyone else has said, these are common in the US. Generally, they happen once a year. These kinds of "physical safety" trainings are pretty common in the US. Fire drills are conducted once per quarter. Anti-bullying/harassment training is conducted once per semester.
I should add (as a current high school student in Washington State) a couple days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, the DHS asked high schools to practice "chemical lockouts": ensuring all students are inside, sealing externally facing doors, etc.
Also, at least in my state, in the mandatory physical education class for high schoolers (which is only for one year), we do learn CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, and a few other first-aid techniques. However, by the time students graduate, they will have forgotten all of that training.
There are a couple comments confounded by the normalization of active shooter training, but (as is often the case with these comments), I can't tell from the wording if they disagree with the practice or are merely upset (understandably) that such a thing is even necessary.
I guess the answer in both cases is the same, though: An unfortunate reality is still a reality.
Some of the "anti-training" sentiment comes from concern that the drills themselves can be very traumatic for children who are already trying to understand the real shootings that they hear about.
It's very hard to measure/analyze the risk from drills vs. the risk from no drills, especially if the rate of shootings is changing over time.
I am upset that this is necessary, and even more upset that everybody accepts this "status quo" as normal and the (usually very timid) calls to do something about it only lead to more guns being sold.
It isn't. The number of children that die in school shootings is an average of 35 per year. That is of course horrible, but in comparison to other sources of childhood death it's tiny. 150 a year die of food allergies. Eight are killed by lightning every year. Does lightning get 1/4 as much attention as school shootings despite causing 1/4 as many deaths?
Even comparing, very specifically, intentional firearm homicide of children outside of school to school shooting deaths shows that, per hour, schools are fantastically safer than when kids aren't at school. The US has a gun violence problem but school shootings are just a barely-audible echo of it.
The problem is that a child getting killed by lightning doesn't leave behind a community of survivors and loved ones who go on a crusade against lightning. School shootings lead to political activism, and that activism has been met with a stone wall for decades. Hardly an inch has been given, and the school shootings continue.
They're now finding creative ways around the wall that was constructed, to do something -- anything -- and again it's treated as a big, unnecessary inconvenience. The longer people stand in the way of reasonable reform, the more creative (read: unreasonable) the proposed reforms will become.
I neither disagree with the practice, nor am upset by it. In fact this HN thread is the first time in my life (I'm in my 30s) that I've even heard about it. And I have worked in the past with firearm training companies. It's just something entirely new to me right now, if you can believe that.
I recently watched this video about assembling a first aid kit for a shop (https://youtu.be/A0EmfREhgRw) and I bought many of the suggested items. Some of the links no longer worked - here is what I bought:
There are First Aid courses offered everywhere that cover CPR, AED and even how to provide oxygen. I take them every 2 years to stay fresh and get some sudo practice. Nothings stopping you from doing this on your own!
I grew up in the UK so never had anything other than fire drills, but I’m in the US now it’s pretty sad when your kindergartner tells you they had to pretend there was a lion in the corridor and the teacher locked the door and asked them to hide in the corner of the classroom.
Totally agreed. I've long believed that first aid should be taught in school at every level and that every graduating high school student should come out first aid and CPR certified. IMO it just makes sense to create a better society all around.
Personal Finance + First Aid/CPR should be an expectation of everybody that graduates high school in the US but for some reason, neither are.
That stinks. I used to work for a major public utility, and it was the complete opposite. Mandatory drills for all sorts of contingencies, fully stocked disaster cabinets on every floor, influenza vaccines offered onsite for free, heck they even had a pandemic ops center where they could lock in a bunch of healthy people to keep the lights on while everyone else has the plague. We made videos on how to lift things without getting hurt — and this was the infosec group! The company even did stuff like give out small free flashlights,
At the time it was a little tiresome, but after the fact I appreciate the time and resources spent on it.
the articles author seems to conflate the context and purpose of either. Active shooter "training" is designed solely for self-preservation in an emergency situation and shouldnt be combined with first-aid as it by definition means youre at imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm. Its the same reason the emergency protocol for a gas alarm is to evacuate. you cant help people when youre dead.
that having been said check out your local YMCA or library for first aid/red cross events that will teach you CPR/AED/O2 administration as well as the heimlich maneuver and how to properly use a fire extinguisher. your facility safety coordinator (if your company is large enough) should be hosting volunteer trainings for the AED devices, but if not your local fire department likely hosts a fire safety event that includes the devices as part of CPR training.
get into the habit of identifying exit signs and make it routine to use the stairs at work so you can guide others to safety in a fire. locate extinguishers and familiarize yourself with emergency numbers at your office but be prepared to take down information to relay to responders such as the nature of the event, victims age, any medications they consume as well as any environmental hazard that exists.
I've worked in the USA at numerous companies for 30 years and never was sent to "active shooter training". I have had anti-harassment training, suspicious person training, security training, safety training, and then some but not active shooter, ever. Not that it would bother me, but then again what exactly is there to learn? "Duck"?
More than first aid, you need trauma classes. Stop the bleed, things like that. Then you need eq. Does your org have TQs? Israeli bandages? Celox? Rolls of gauze to pack wounds with?
If things get awful, you need all those things.
Personally, I carry a TQ, and have taken trauma classes.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadBringing this back to the work place: it's far more likely that the average office worker will come across an opportunity to use medical/first aid training than whatever passes as active shooter training. Moreover, if I am working in an office where I know my coworkers have a general idea how to apply a chest dressing or stop bleeding and generally stabilize injuries until EMTs arrive I'll be more likely to charge an active shooter to try to end the threat knowing that even if I'm hit in the process my chances for survival are good.
You'll likely never need one and it will be lost/defunct after a few years (due to heat & moisture). Kit or no, you need a first aid class and a first aid kit. Rather than another expenditure and one more gadget to keep track of, stay with the basics.
Otherwise people will buy a "bleed kit" on Amazon and toss it in the trunk, thinking that they're fully prepared for an automobile accident or such. When an accident does occur, they may or may not remember the kit, take it out and read the instructions manual. Meanwhile someone will die b/c the kit owner wasn't educated enough to "apply pressure to the wound."
[Cue spammers citing questionable personal anecdotes where a "bleed kit" in a car trunk saved them from amputation/death.]
At least the author recognises this in the first sentence, but it still blows my mind.
- In the year ending March 2021 there were 41,000 instances of recorded knife crime in the UK.
- 224 deaths as a result of a stabbing in the same period.
- Since 1970 there have been 3,395 deaths (total) from any form of terrorism in the UK.
Source: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04...
In the US:
- 19,384 deaths as a result of a shooting. (2020)
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
Sure, we have violence, but it's on a whole different level.
Far more danger from the car drivers outside the front gates.
But hosting a class? That is something everyone organization has full autonomy to successfully accomplish. It is within the organizational and budgetary resources of small companies, big ones, churches, schools, local community centers, etc.
Think about the duck and cover training for surviving a nuclear blast. You might not be able to do much as the average individual to avoid nuclear confrontation, but you can mitigate it on the margin with some tangible steps.
I'd not have expected it beforehand, but it turns out that even fairly mild & common versions of the training (not the extreme sorts that occasionally make the news) can leave adults literally shaking. It's really hard on some people. Yet we subject a huge percentage of our children to it. The risk does not justify that.
Our problem here in the US is that we overreact to dealing with that <0.1% chance. We make people jump through hoops to get a firearm to even go hunting. We flood our neighborhoods with police who raid homes using grenades and armored personnel carriers. (Usually killing innocents in the process, because, you know, we throw grenades in the windows of some baby's nursery.) And, we have active shooter drills for our children, probably traumatizing some of them for the rest of their lives. The list goes on and on actually.
In America, we pretty much overreact to everything. Which is why you probably hear so many crazy stories about the US. When faced with what we perceive to be a threat, no matter how remote the reality of the threat, we are unable to moderate our responses. In fact, you could argue that we are trained from an early age, via things like active shooter training, NOT to think too deeply about our responses.
Many Republicans will tell you that there is an absolutely vital constitutional right to own, carry, and stockpile all kinds of firearms. Some of them believe it. But this doctrine was only popularized in the 1970s and still does not have majority support today [1].
[1] https://www.pollingreport.com/guns.htm
If we actually want to curb gun-related deaths, start with the war on drugs and reforming urban culture — but that's hard and risky for politicians, so instead they choose to go after legal owners.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10472...!
What. The. Fruit.
Where is this normal??? I have never once received active shooter training. It’s been a few years since I was in grade school (class of 2004, baby!) and two years since I worked in an office but, still, this sounds extremely foreign.
I’ve lived and worked in Canada and Australia but not the US. Is this actually normal in the US?
Forget first-aid kits. How could anyone be okay with this being normal?
And yeah we have a relatively high amount of shootings, but they are still rare in an absolute sense. A lot of this is driven by an industry that sells bulletproof desks and junk, and needs to keep people afraid because it's profitable.
Edit: I should also point out that shifting responsibility for active shooter response to the individual, the victim, is a way to avoid discussions about actual policy change or to hold people with real power accountable at all.
Let me correct that for you: all of this is driven by a gun industry that sells actual guns and bullets and has for decades lobbied gun safety laws practically out of existence in the US, and needs to keep gun owners afraid of their "second amendment rights" being taken away because it's profitable.
At some point if your goal is to protect children who are subject to active shooter situations (which in fact do happen), then perhaps training people to make the best of them when they inevitably occur is all we can do, given the political climate. When a school full of first graders turns up shot dead and literally nothing is done, maybe active shooter training doesn't seem like a bad idea. This massive over-response is a reaction to the preceding massive under-response.
If you really don't want active shooter training to be a thing, make active shooters a thing of the past. Other places don't have this problem. If you want to make a change, call your congress people, and don't vote for them if they won't support sane gun measures, even if they're from a party you typically vote for.
To be clear on what that means: In a country of 350-400 million people, these are rare enough that each one can afford to be a media feeding frenzy. The media are constantly on lookout for anything that can cast as a school shooting because it's big ratings for them.
And they still happen only rarely. Months & years between them.
The only reason anyone thinks they happen at all is 100% that the media is constantly vigilant for any trace of a school shooting to bring to you. If the stories were ignored instead, or put out only locally and treated as any other item, it wouldn't even enter your mind to consider them a big threat.
Now, let's contrast that with the number of people helped each year by someone with First Aid training. Let's even discard the ones who are emergency responders. Heck, let's discard the ones done by people who have any other medical training at all, and just look at the people helped by people whose only medical training is their First Aid training. That happens so often it's not news at all. Probably happening right now somewhere in this country even as I type this.
So, naturally, it's important to pour All The Money into active shooter training. Even though for about the same amount of money and time you could train all those people in First Aid instead, which, by the way, is also useful in shooter situations.
This is part of why I have such loathing for the news media. This is an example of where they make Big Bucks pushing a particular gripping story, at the cost of distorting the entire society's views of what is going on and pushing out a merely "mundane" problem that affects hundreds or thousands of people a day. But, precisely because it happens so many orders of magnitude more often, it's not news, so the perception of society is that it's not worth dealing with.
> And they still happen only rarely. Months & years between them.
The latest school shooting in the US was fewer than 30 days ago: 1 dead, 2 injured. It hardly made the news. There was another 3 days before that. In February there were 3 shootings. In January, 7 shootings. That's just this year. Hardly any of the shootings on this list even made national news, let alone were media feeding frenzies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
And yes, it's batshit crazy.
On the other hand, I did some primary school in New Zealand and we had what I would now call a lock-down for the same reason, where school shootings really aren't a thing. I think schools ought to plan for that kind of thing for safety. I think the kind of first aid they teach you in active shooter training if you happen to take them as an adult (I did because I had a buddy trying to start a business after leaving the military doing it) is actually also really good first aid for anyone who's doing extreme sports, or going in the wilderness, or working around heavy machinery, etc.
I don't think any of that means that people shooting up schools is accepted as normal.
edit: Now that I've read TFA, I'll also add that I've worked in the US my entire adult life and I've never had active shooter training that was mandated at work, or heard of anyone I know having that.
My employer does offer an Active Shooter optional training course. It also includes a first aid part to it, but its basically how to control someone from bleeding out before paramedics arrive. So it's still coming from a pretty dark place.
I thought my employer did offer a general first aid training separately from this and apparently I was wrong. So yeah, it turns out I'm in the same position as the author of the article...that's depressing.
And also seems dumb, because I understand the fear and low probability/high risk that motivates the active shooter training. But the far more common scenario is something like carrying some old equipment around and it slips out of your hands and a metal edge cuts your arm. Or someone starts choking on a piece of popcorn and you have to help get it out. Both of which have happened at my job and where general first aid training is very helpful.
Edit: It turns out we have specific CPR/AED classes because we also have AED machines. But it costs money and you can't charge company training time for it, so its not really any different than going and getting a certification somewhere else.
I think it's worth remembering that the world can be a pretty dark place anyway, and being prepared for stuff can make it less dark. The training I did was basically a civilian adaptation of the TCCC course taught over a weekend, taught be ex-military PMC types, so I expected it to be a bit of a stretch to apply it to civilians. And yeah, it's pretty dark: we practiced dragging limp bodies out of a building while they played loud sounds of gun fire. We put chest seals on dead pigs.
But a lot of the videos they played to demonstrate various conditions that you could treat with an IFAK - the basic military first aid kit - were totally civilian situations. We went over car accidents, camping mishaps, failed suicides. And as someone who overthinks and worries about potential problems - can I just say how good it feels to go on a road trip or go camping with my kids and know "hey - I have a trauma kit in the back of the car and I know how to use it". As dark as all those things are, I'm far better able to help people going through those things than I was before.
It really sucks that school shootings are so common that they influence policy like this. But... I think school shootings shouldn't be the only reason. I think far more people should do things like go get the Red Cross First Aid / CPR / AED course and practice those skills every couple of years. And not just because of shootings.
So how do you end this after a shooting scare is over?
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/4/9850572/gu...
Each door had a little cardboard thing to cover the window in case of an active shooter situation to prevent them from peaking in.
Most of this is security theater. Consultants get paid millions of dollars to come up with this nonsense that doesn't hold up to an ounce of scrutiny.
If this particular effort is effective, I expect it has more to do with discouraging shooters from firing in the first place (they may hesitate to "waste" shots on a window if they aren't sure people are behind it) or to slow them down. For exactly the reasons you note, I don't see it being very effective against someone who's decided that they definitely are going to shoot into that room.
In another class, the police officer was like "eh it's just so it's not obvious that there are 30 easy targets in your class, if I wanted to enter I could just blow up that lock with my gun".
I wonder what kind of briefing they had before presenting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_... lists 12 school shootings in 2022 until now!
Mass shootings are apparently treated not as symptom of an ininimal social environment or deficient access control to means but more like the inevitable change of weather. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
That’s about it.
The train stations also have these on tv screens nonstop which are basically leave if you can, hide otherwise, and if there’s no option left, swarm the shooter as a group.
Edit: wait, no I remember something that was insane to everyone. The teachers all had keys to the rooms that locked from the outside, and were required to lock them and then leave on their own. That was wild, both from the perspective of putting all the teachers in the open hallway and filling everyone’s head with this imagined scenario of a guy blind firing at the class through the door window.
Basically all of them consisted of "Sit under your desk and play thumb wars quietly with classmates and listen to your teacher or the classroom speakers instructions"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
When my oldest kid went through one for the first time in 1st grade, they came home and broke down about it. Said they didn't want to die at school and was afraid the bad men would attack. We ended up going through therapy with a child play-therapist which helped my kiddo a lot (in case anyone might be running into this issue and is unsure of what to do).
Somehow this is considered OK, but the "trauma" of wearing a mask to prevent an airborne illness was too much to bear.
When I graduated, they had just started doing them. But the baseball field was still unfenced, and little kids from the neighborhood could still use the outside hallways to play tag in.
By the time my youngest sibling graduated in '11 training was every year, the school was no longer public property that anyone could hang out on, and there were armed police patrolling it.
I should add (as a current high school student in Washington State) a couple days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, the DHS asked high schools to practice "chemical lockouts": ensuring all students are inside, sealing externally facing doors, etc.
Also, at least in my state, in the mandatory physical education class for high schoolers (which is only for one year), we do learn CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, and a few other first-aid techniques. However, by the time students graduate, they will have forgotten all of that training.
I guess the answer in both cases is the same, though: An unfortunate reality is still a reality.
It's very hard to measure/analyze the risk from drills vs. the risk from no drills, especially if the rate of shootings is changing over time.
Even comparing, very specifically, intentional firearm homicide of children outside of school to school shooting deaths shows that, per hour, schools are fantastically safer than when kids aren't at school. The US has a gun violence problem but school shootings are just a barely-audible echo of it.
They're now finding creative ways around the wall that was constructed, to do something -- anything -- and again it's treated as a big, unnecessary inconvenience. The longer people stand in the way of reasonable reform, the more creative (read: unreasonable) the proposed reforms will become.
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Personal Finance + First Aid/CPR should be an expectation of everybody that graduates high school in the US but for some reason, neither are.
- We are required to complete an active shooter training course annually
- No training in first aid is offered, even after employees requested it
- We are forbidden from purchasing first aid kits using company money, the reason being that none of us is certified in first aid
At the time it was a little tiresome, but after the fact I appreciate the time and resources spent on it.
that having been said check out your local YMCA or library for first aid/red cross events that will teach you CPR/AED/O2 administration as well as the heimlich maneuver and how to properly use a fire extinguisher. your facility safety coordinator (if your company is large enough) should be hosting volunteer trainings for the AED devices, but if not your local fire department likely hosts a fire safety event that includes the devices as part of CPR training.
get into the habit of identifying exit signs and make it routine to use the stairs at work so you can guide others to safety in a fire. locate extinguishers and familiarize yourself with emergency numbers at your office but be prepared to take down information to relay to responders such as the nature of the event, victims age, any medications they consume as well as any environmental hazard that exists.
If things get awful, you need all those things.
Personally, I carry a TQ, and have taken trauma classes.