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Teachers Fake Gunman Attack
Anti_Climax writes "Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.
It'll be interesting to see what happens to these teachers after the charges brought against students in recent months."
With fear of stating the obvious I'll say this: How could teachers show such bad judgement, maybe practising for this type of situation could be a valuable experience, but with professional help and advice as well as parental consent, otherwise it seems like professional suicide and being in the states certain to cause tons of lawsuits.
Was it really smart to say it was not a drill? It sounds, you know, like crying "wolf"...
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Well, at least they have started their education in not trusting authority, and learning that those in authority will lie to you. This is one of the lessons that most people don't get, until much later in life.
Besides just stupid. Why anyone would think this is a good idea is beyond me. We are truly making ourselves insane.
"Principal Catherine Stephens declined to say whether the staff members involved would face disciplinary action, but said the situation 'involved poor judgment.'"
You think so, Doctor?
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
How can they be so stupid? These kids won't trust teachers ever again ... and they'll probably have trouble with authority figures for the rest of their lives.
I say we take the asshats responsible for this and lock them in the school's auditorium with all the angry parents and let the asshats see how it feels to fear for their lives.
It'll be interesting to see what happens to these teachers after the charges brought against students in recent months.
No it won't. Not much will happen to them. Unlike the student who was arrested a while ago for completing his essay assignment as sked, these teachers will not be arrested. At best they may be fired after a couple months of looking in to it. They will probably only get a slap on the wrist. Don't forget that America in not interested in protecting children. This is a perfect example. By pulling this stunt, the teachers were able to scare the kids and permanantly brand the image of terrorists into the Children's minds. It doesn't matter that the thing turned up to be a hoax, the less educated/experienced of the kids will live with fear for quite a while, perhaps their whole lives. The teachers are acting much as the rest of America acts. It more important to mold children into the "American Cog" than to treat them fairly, or to give them an education. I mean, after all, what about the terrorists?
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Gotta start teaching them to be scared at an early age, y'know...
This guy's the limit!
Doing a drill where students are taught what to do and try to react in a controlled environment might be reasonable. Whether or not the underlying idea has merit, training has to be right to have value. Executing a drill for the purpose of finding out how kids will respond is just sick amusement.
Telling the kids that it wasn't a drill and they had to fear for their lives was counter productive at best. The teachers and administration that were involved in this should all be locked up. The purpose of this act was to terrorize the children. At a minimum, each person involved should be charged with one count of child abuse for each child affected by this incredibly retarded action. The closest any of them should be to a child for the rest of their lives is asking "do you want fries with that?"
In how many of those drills were you told it wasn't a drill and that the Soviets really were on their way to bomb the school? Or how many fire drills have you had where the teachers yelled that it's not a normal fire drill, the school really is burning down and you might burn to death?
What these teachers did was equivalent of yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater.
make world, not war
Completely! It makes me really angry to read, thinking of what my own daughter would feel in this situation. The only real reason that I can imagine these teachers doing this is that they are a fundamentally sadistic. It is incredibly cruel.
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And the accompanying fear-mongering only enhances the probability of such attacks in the future.
Still, in terms of number of lives saved, the resources would be better spent on educating kids about things like basic traffic safety, good nutritional habits, and not sniffing paint.
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If there is one thing that the American populace has never failed to shock me on is their lack of common sense. We are blanketed by tons of laws that are nothing but common sense laws. IMHO, even without the Virginia Tech events in such resent memory, this was a bad idea, and common sense should tell you this.
I think that there are ways to tackle issues such as this. One is probably the most obvious, talk about it. I think if you want to do something like this, you have to contact parents to alert them you want to do this, and give them the option to remove their kids from this class (and/or field trip).
These teachers probably cost themselves their jobs as well as any chance to ever work in their field again. And considering their actions, that is probably a good thing.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Common sense isn't. Anywhere.
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Isn't it interesting that schools need parental approval for sex education but no approval for violence education?
One of the larger problems with a drill like this as I see it, is that you rely cant prepare for it. You can tell the kids what to generally do in such a situation, but as no incident will be alike, it is very hard. With a fire drill, it is simple, evacuate the building using designated escape routes, if they for some reason are blocked you can discover that and select another route. Whereas in the event of a gunman in the hallway, if your escape route could very well be shooting at you befor you realize its a hinder. What happens during a drill where th students dos the smart thing and jumps from the 3. floor to get away? Bottom line is; if these drill where to be preformed, they NEED to be drills made out by someone who has some clue of what they are doing, which I severely doubt your general teacher do in this situation.
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Reality? Where are you from? Bosnia? Iraq?
I attended school in the US and have been in school when tornadoes where in the area and have been in the school when it caught fire. Gunmen attacking isn't something that generally happens in US schools. Furthermore, in all those drills it was clearly stated that they were in fact drills and not the real thing.
Such a drill has no basis in reality and goes against fairly well reasoned and tested methods of conducting such drills. A gunman attack isn't something that is likely to happen to a student in their entire school lifetime, including if they go through a doctorate program, and even if it was what reason is there to pretend that such a drill is the real thing?
The problem with incidents like these (the actual ones) is that it is difficult to collect the necessary information you would need to determine which dots to follow in order to safely evacuate. Who knows where the assailant is? How many of them are there? How are they equipped?
I've been on patrols that were ambushed. These were well trained well disciplined professional soldiers and the first minute or so was still total pandemonium and I really have no recollection of specifically what any of us did. Until we were able to assess the situation the best thing anyone could do was get behind solid cover and figure out the nature of the threat.
The last thing I would want some teacher doing is making tactical decisions about how to get a classroom full of students out of as building, particularly when the teacher has no way to know what is going on anywhere else in the building. The portion of the VT incident that happened in the classroom area lasted 9 minutes. No time to determine the specifics of what was going on and where, consult a building plan to determine evacuation routes, communicate them to the professors in the classrooms, then have them execute the plan. Doing anything other than barricading oneself in a safe room in a situation like this is a tactical mistake.
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So you are claiming that duck and cover is equally as bad a choice, as someone taking a direct approach and stopping the shooter? Seriously?
I think he was suggesting more to get the hell away from the area via a safe route, or otherwise get somewhere the gunman can't get to (i.e. blockade yourself into a room much like the students that survived Virginia Tech did).
Right. That's how at least one of the professors got killed, by him shooting through the door. Better chance than sitting and waiting, sure, but so much less effective than if he'd had the means to effectively defend himself.
Both your suggestions are prime examples of what the person you were responding to meant when he mentioned lemmings - people who just sit and die and people who, well, go and die. Both are equally stupid when there's another more blatantly sensible option - get to safety and let well trained police/soldiers wearing bulletproof vests and armed with flashbangs deal with the guy with a gun.
In the case of VT, there wasn't a _get to safety_ option, was there. The hallways were occupied by a gunman, the exits had been chained shut. Waiting for professional help is what got them killed. ONE teacher with a gun could have stopped it at something less than 32 deaths. Even knowing that his intended victims were allowed to carry if they so chose might have deterred his entire rampage - it was obviously directed at helpless people. If he didn't know his victims were forced by law to be helpless, maybe he wouldn't have started in the first place.
Lemmings aren't the ones fighting the killer and dying, lemmings are the ones dying while hoping that "well trained police/soldiers" will show up in time to save them.
(Note: While I live in UT -- as Red as they come, these days -- I'm a liberal-leaning person with a strong belief in personal responsibility. I proudly own and use several firearms.)
I'm one of those pro-gun folks who does (and did, after VA Tech) suggest that if everyone (or a non-trivial percentage) was packing on campus, that there may have been fewer deaths. I won't mod you down for having a difference of opinion, though. That's just lame -- discourse is a cornerstone of any civilized community.
Anyway, as to what I quoted from your post... I can't speak for anyone else, but if I were to "go postal" (and were still in control of my mind, as it were) I'd actively seek out a place where I *knew* everyone would be disarmed if they were good law-following citizens. That is, post offices, courthouses, any K-12 public school grounds, many churches (being a private property), and gun-free college campuses like the University of Utah and, say, VA Tech.
While many would see the logical conclusion to arming *everyone* as a recipe for anarchy and accidents waiting to happen, those of us on the other side of the issue believe that it is wrong (and downright silly) to place law-abiding people at an inherent disadvantage by default for simply following the law. After all, criminals don't give a flying fig about the laws, so they will always have an advantage. There's a good Dark Helmet quote a about Good vs Evil that addresses this very issue. ;)
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I concede to this point. However, we allow these same people all sorts of other privileges. We let them navigate large masses of steel at high speeds (yes, there's registration -- won't touch that one for now), we let them purchase other dangerous substances (compressed gases, chemicals, poisons, etc.) w/o any oversight, and we even let them *breed* unchecked.
If you believe that the State should not meddle in your procreation, travel, or shopping habbits, then you should reasonably conclude that your own self defense (even with a weapon of deadly force) should fall into this category as well.
I agree with the courthouse thing, though. I didn't think through my list well enough in my example. A courthouse is probably the *last* place I'd "go postal" at. :)
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The ones that aren't responsible and upstanding don't care about the law, by definition. Therefore, they will carry concealed weapons anyway!
.44 Magnum to school in order to protect his students. Makes perfect sense, except he isn't a particularly good shot (although he likes to think he is), and isn't trained to safely fire a gun in a crowded area, as is the case with police. He went to a shooting range once when he was a teenager, but hasn't been back since. He likes to carry a big gun, so people see it and know not to mess with him, but it's not a great choice when dealing with a crowd, because the .44 has a lot of penetrating power. One day, a student walks in with a realistic looking toy gun, says "bang bang, you're dead"...not a wise decision, but kids do stupid things...the teacher quickly draws and fires, killing the student, and the completely innocent student who just walked in the door behind him. He had the best of intentions, but does it sound *responsible* to you?
It's quite possible to be irresponsible, but still abide by the law. For instance, if guns are allowed into public schools, a perfectly upstanding teacher might carry his
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This is a terrible argument for a gun advocate to make. Comparing gun crime crime statistics for the UK vs. the U.S. greatly supports the notion that gun controls make you less likely to get shot. Of course there are still shootings in the UK, but they are a tiny, tiny fraction of what they are in the U.S. Essentially what is a common occurrence in the U.S. (tens and thousands of gun deaths each year) is a freak occurrence in the UK (negligible in number: 100s, for a country around a quarter of the size of the population of the U.S.).
The entire gun advocate position is based on making up stories, using powerful imagery like that of a teacher or student taking the VA Tech shooter down. It's based on the idea that we must protect ourselves against the exceedingly rare but sensational (the VA Tech shooting), at the expense of the common (theft of firearms, use in crimes of impulse, etc.).
It's the same kind of argument we see when we have discussions about what to do about terrorism. These security discussions are characterized by the description of sensational past and future events, and how to deal with this or that specific attack ("What if they attack the Super Bowl? Or they could put ebola in the water supply!"). Bruce Schneier writes eloquently about "movie plot" threats and the way they lead us to make irrational securty decisions, born of fear, out of all proportion to the actual risk that we're dealing with.
It's pretty simple: The actual risk of being shot by Seung-Hui Cho or someone like him is vanishingly small. The risk of being shot by some yabbo who's pissed at you and happens to have a gun handy is, relative to that, pretty high. Making the former less likely and the latter more likely is bad trade-off. It's too bad so many people are seduced by the cinematic scenario of getting into a shoot-out with the bad guys to notice this, or allow rationality, rather than their power fantasies, to dictate public policy.
demi
A whole lot of realism right up front isn't always a good thing when you're training for contingencies. I could see the logic if the teachers had gone through an incremental training process with increasing realism and randomness. If their intent was to terrorize young kids while minimizing the learning value of the drill, then, Mission Accomplished!
If you hit someone in the side of the head with a heavy object (book, large stapler, laptop, chair, etc...) there are a few things that can happen. You may succeed in knocking him out if you hit him in the temple. You may succeed in breaking his nose, causing his eyes to tear up and making it nearly impossible to see. You may hit one of his eyes, causing partial blindness and extreme pain. Or you may just cause him to try to cover his head, giving you or someone else a chance to rush him.
Any of those are better that laying there and hoping that you're not next. I agree with the GP post, it doesn't seem like anyone even tried to fight for their life.
There is no question that having drills for situations like this can save lives when and if the real thing happens. But there is a difference between having a drill and the real thing. What was done here is like having a fire drill that involves setting the school on fire.
For the students involved in this "drill" there is no difference between the trauma they experienced and what they would have experienced in a real situation. By the time the students were told that it was all just pretend, it was too late... they were scared for their lives, crying, hiding, wondering what was going on. Whatever sense of safety they felt in their school (or, in this case, on a school-related trip) was taken from them, and I'm guessing the nightmares are going to last a long time.
Kids soak up information like a sponge... a drill in this situation should have been announced and prepared for, down to the minute, so the students knew exactly what to expect. When the drill is done in a calm, orderly fashion, the kids remember that sense of calm and order when the real thing happens, and things go much better. Ideally, if a gunman enters a school, most of the school should be evacuated in such a way that the students are never entirely sure if it's the real thing or just another drill.
This stunt is, in my mind, a tragedy equal to that of a real gunman situation. The only difference is that this one had no physical injuries...
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I love how you've never even been to the United States, yet you characterize a nation of 300 million people by talking to a few people who were exchange students. There is probably more difference between a feminist living in Berkeley California and a Baptist living in Alabama, then there is between someone living in Poland and someone living in Germany. If stereotyping millions of people through ignorance is your great example of "European common sense", maybe it isn't such a bad thing that Americans have none.
The more you know, the less you understand.
I agree that if everyone had guns, you probably would not see these multi-kill massacres much, however you probably would have many more smaller shootings. If everyone has guns, simple bar fights, road rage, annoying neighbours, and the like can all turn into deadly situations because someone gets stupid and pulls out their gun.
You forgot "you might miss, he'll see you, and you'll get shot long before you get a second throw off".
I've thankfully never been in such a situation, but I don't know if I'd be able to find something heavy, stand up, throw that thing across the room, and hope I don't get in his line of fire in the process.
The difference in your situation and that one at Virginia Tech is that in the restaurant, a guy went in to rob it, probably not to kill anyone. Just because someone is waving a gun around is not necessarily a reason to throw something at him. Give him the money, your watches, jewelry, whatever he wants.
But when he's already demonstrated that he's willing to kill with no provocation, all bets are off. You're next whether you're 10th or the very next one to be shot.
BUT DAMMIT I WILL DECIDE WHEN AND HOW MY 2 CHILDREN LEARN THIS! NOT YOU! NOT SOME ROGUE TEACHER!
Preventing unconscionable acts like this is not over protecting our children. Yes, children will face times of emotional distress and
They are children -they will quickly learn and know how to react and they will become stronger and stronger (if you have a family shaping those conflicts correctly, of course)
But this atrocity is not simply emotional distress or conflict it is NOT indicative of the type of emotional distress and situations that people face regularly as a part of life. This is a cruel subjection of children to a emotionally and psychologically TRAUMATIC experience.
You want to see what kind of damage this insanity, that you seem eager to justify, can do? Go and talk to the kids that were at Columbine. For that matter, why don't you look up and see what effect any of these school shootings have had? And pay close attention to those that occurred at elementary schools. And before you go and cite some post in this thread where 'Joe Bob' says that something similar didn't have any effect on him in no way precludes it from having a dramatic effect on others. Do just a tad bit of research before you open your mouth and utter uninformed and possibly damaging opinions. Skim over this article on emotional and psychological trauma. Read the common elements of a traumatic situation: 1) it was unexpected 2)the person was unprepared 3) there was nothing the person could do to prevent it from happening. A key here is that it doesn't have to be real threat to life but is perceived to be real. Look at the table of effects that this can have.
Are you advocating subjecting children to this? Or did you just knee jerk and spew a poorly thought out opinion taking an easily agreed to premise of not sheltering children from reality and using it completely inappropriately?
And if you want to be so arrogant as to challenge this material or these concepts surrounding the impact of traumatic events I'll be happy to introduce you to a couple war buddies that will set you straight. Or a couple professors I know in the Psych department who practiced child psychology for several years prior to teaching. I'm sure they could quickly point you to plenty of sound research (i.e. not baseless opinions) on this topic in addition to their own observations.
PREPARING my child for these situations is different from intentionally CREATING a NEEDLESS traumatic experience!! Why in hell would I purposefully traumatize them in a calculated way?!?! That's just sick, wrong and stupid.
This is a SCHOOL where I expect that teachers behave ETHICALLY and follow the mandate they have been given. They are there to provide knowledge and understanding of the world around them. And at times this means teaching students to be prepared for dangerous situations. But fire drills, tornado drills (historically bomb drills) are not used to scare the sh*&t out of the kids but to give them the practice at doing the things that will redu
I did like the way you railed on someone for assuming the states in USA are homogenous, and then referred to 'down South' :-)
Easy to process that information when you are behind your desk picturing yourself in the situation. But I know how I used to be in early morning classes. Zonked out, thinking about going back to bed. If someone kicked in the door and started shooting and killing people I know I'd probably freeze up. I haven't seen any "real" blood before, I haven't seen anybody die before, and the whole process would just be information overload. I doubt many people would be able to assess the situation and act within the time required to save their lives. And the people who could do it, would probably have had some military training to get them there.
Also, the paintball guy above is crazy to compare moving around a paintball field the same as moving around a battlefield. I am willing to bet that 75% of the tactics used on the paintball field wouldn't fly when real bullets are in the air. In paintball you sit out a round. In the real world, you're done, and people know that, and I'm sure act very differently because of it.
But whatever, we are all internet tough guys. It's all easy to make the logical choices back out of the situation, but when your life depends on what you do next, thats a hell of a lot of pressure to be thinking clearly.