Are School-Lockdown Drills a Good Idea?
By Eden Riebling
I’ll never forget my first school-shooting lockdown drill. I was told to stay in my seat and remain silent, to hold my backpack against my chest to protect my vital organs. My experiences with these well-meant drills over the years have led me to wonder whether they do more harm than good.
On the surface, lockdown drills seem a rational response to the threat of school shootings. Preparing for an emergency is usually prudent, and dry-runs can impart knowledge needed to respond and survive. Yet in practice, these exercises may instill compliance and complacence, rather than preparing us for emergencies. In fire drills, we’re taught to leave the scene of danger. In school-shooting drills, we’re taught to be sitting ducks. Are lockdowns merely the latter-day equivalent of Cold War nuclear duck-and-cover drills – the hide-under-your-desk-during-a-nuclear-attack exercises now widely seen as having imparted a false sense of security while masking deeper policy issues?
The psychological impact of these drills should concern us. While some students feel reassured that school administrators are thinking about the unthinkable, in others the drills induce anxiety and fear. They did in me; and according to one recent study, active shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%). Fears of death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills trending on social media in school communities in the 90 days after a lockdown drill. Moreover, might not the drill itself even put the idea of violence in the minds of suggestible, unstable people?
The minds of those troubled people are the real battleground, and lockdown drills distract us from that crucial truth. With rare exceptions, school shooters fit a profile. They’re male students at the school they attack; have suffered early-childhood trauma and exposure to violence; are suicidally triggered by a recent event; have studied other school shootings; and have access to guns, often at home.
Staging lockdown drills is obviously easier than profiling potential shooters and intervening before they act. Teachers cannot look at a seating plan and know which students are troubled and with access to guns, and few principals want to tackle the tricky moral-legal issues of profiling students. Yet, absent meaningful gun-control, only mental-health intervention can avert school shootings in the first place. Isn’t that what we all want?
What the school shooters want should also be considered – so that we can deny it to them. In their minds, the shootings make sense, because violence bestows a sense of significance they cannot otherwise obtain. The trend in mass shooters live-streaming their crimes tells us much about their motives. News outlets withhold the names and images of rape victims: why not of mass shooters? Wouldn’t we remove the notoriety-incentive if we stopped making these criminals instant celebrities? Wouldn’t that do more to prevent school shootings than telling us to clutch our bags to our chests and stay silent?
Eden Riebling is a high school Junior from New York City.