[mlizzy]

Happening in our neck of the woods tomorrow:

CHICAGO (CBS) — A school shooting drill planned for tomorrow in the far northwestern suburbs has many parents upset.

According to a letter from Cary-Grove High School principal Jay Sargeant, there will be a code red drill at the school on Wednesday.

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/01/29/cary-grove-drill-to-include-shooting-blanks-in-hallways/

[familyop]

Yes. I suspect that drill in the Chicago area will be done by civilian police and other civilians.

It appears that the Texas school building used in the exercise mentioned in the post above this thread is no longer used as a school building. I once drilled in and around an old, unused hospital building with the National Guard during the ‘90s (light combat unit). While in uniform, we tended to stay out of the way of civilians, although our community (small town in the Midwest) loved seeing us train on the rare occasion (e.g., a yearly demonstration in a public park for recruiting).

[familyop]

Excerpt from the article from Chicago:
"It will include somebody shooting blanks from a gun in the hallway 'in an effort to provide our teachers and students some familiarity with the sound of gunfire.'"

Hopefully, they'll use blank adapters, even though those would muffle the sound of "gunfire." Blank adapters prevent discharges from killing or wounding people who might be within a few feet of the muzzle (can happen with blanks). Blank adapters can also blow off, sometimes, so trainees should be a certain minimum distance from others in front of them and divert muzzles a little to be sure to miss.

Army organization, training and tactics (including reserve components like the Guard) are vastly different from those of police organizations in many ways. I've done both in the past. Police organizations only try to emulate some appearances seen in military forces on TV. Police are competent for making civilian arrests of civilian criminals, while combat soldiers (combat soldiers comprising probably less than 5% of whole forces) are mentally, physically and tactically fit for killing enemies in warfare.

There are MP units in the Army, but they are trained more specifically for securing things (e.g., equipment) and arresting military personnel (including Uniform Code of Military Justice considerations). There are also civilian SWAT teams, but those are trained for arresting civilians in civilian environments--not fighting enemy combatants.

I won't go into tactical details here. But suffice to say, civilian training is very different from combat training (re. real, infantry-related combat soldiers--not the vast majority in military forces).