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Posted on 04/29/2026 5:40:29 PM PDT by DoodleBob
There have been 63 school shootings – meaning any time there is gunfire on a school campus – so far in 2026.
They happen so often that preparing for one has become normal. Students as young as 4 years old routinely practice for the possibility of a school shooting with lockdown drills – typically, hiding in the corner of a dark classroom, behind a locked door.
Pauls Valley High School in Pauls, Oklahoma, went into lockdown on April 7, 2026, after an armed gunman fired shots inside the building. Kirk Moore, the school’s principal, tackled the gunman and got shot in the leg.
The lockdown and Moore’s heroism clearly prevented any further violence in this rare school shooting situation with a positive ending. But by and large, do lockdowns typically work to keep students safe?
As a criminologist who studies violence and mass shootings, I think it is important to keep in mind that there are no federal requirements guiding how often, or even how, lockdown drills should be conducted across schools in the U.S.
Most states have some sort of requirements for a minimum number of lockdown drills a year. In Minnesota, the number is five. New York mandates four, while Arizona law calls for three.
There’s also a lot of variation in how schools interpret the term “lockdown drill.” In some places, it’s used loosely to cover a range of situations – everything from a medical emergency to an animal loose in the building. But that broader usage can obscure what these drills are actually designed for.
In practice, lockdown drills are synonymous with preparing for an active shooter or similarly serious threat of violence. That’s why many people refer to them directly as “active shooter drills.”
Guidance from the I Love U Guys Foundation reinforces this point. Its widely adopted Standard Response Protocol defines a lockdown as locking doors, turning off lights, staying out of sight and remaining silent – measures intended specifically to maximize time and distance from a violent intruder until first responders arrive.
In 2025, Minnesota, where I live, passed the first law in the country that defines an active shooter drill as a form of lockdown, and distinguishes it from an active shooter simulation.
A drill, in this law’s context, “means an emergency preparedness drill designed to teach students, teachers, school personnel, and staff how to respond in the event of an armed intruder on campus or an armed assailant in the immediate vicinity of the school.”
That is different from an active shooter simulation, which incorporates “sensorial components, activities, or elements mimicking a real life shooting.” The law says that students can be mandated to participate in the former, but not in a simulation, where you might have crisis actors involved or the sights and sounds of a real tragedy.
Based on my research, any drill must be conducted in a measured, age appropriate and trauma-informed way, so children are not harmed by the practices. There is a difference between a teacher calming walking students through the procedure, versus having a police officer in tactical gear pounding on the door or jiggling the handle to check if it is locked.
Most schools started doing lockdowns after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012 and at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in 2018. This is the first generation of students who have practiced what to do if a school shooter comes to kill them – and they have been practicing since pre-K. We don’t yet know what that does to a person over a lifetime.
So far, the available research shows mixed evidence on whether these drills help students feel more prepared or whether they scare them. Studies looking at the mental, emotional and behavioral health outcomes of school active shooter drills tell us that there are short-term gains of reduced fear when drills are carefully designed, and that they do build procedural knowledge that can reduce panic. At the same time, research has captured heightened fear, anxiety and other trauma responses to these drills, especially among children and staff that already have developmental disabilities or have trauma histories.
Most school shooters are current or former students at the school. They know where kids hide because they themselves were trained in lockdown response. The shooter at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis in 2025 even wrote in their journal about how active shooter drills were “useful” because of the lessons they learned from them.
Another issue is that drills tend to assume a single type of scenario, even though school shootings can unfold in very different ways. Practicing for only one eventuality could unintentionally put students in greater harm. The 2022 Uvalde School shooting in Texas is a good example. Children were placed behind a locked door, but then the shooter was in the room with them and murdered them all. The better response, in hindsight, would be to evacuate the building.
More than anything, I think there is a risk that drills normalize school shootings. We have handed school safety to teachers and students with the lights off. Hiding presupposes a seeker. Even young children understand the logic of hide-and-seek (someone is looking for you, and if they find you, you lose). Drills cast students as prey being hunted. That reality alone is a tragedy for American society.
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ARM THE TEACHERS & SEE THIS ALL HALT IMMEDIATELY
NO MORE “SOFT TARGETS”
A lot of us FReepers were taught to get under our desk to protect us from an atomic bomb.
Teachers by and large would be worthless soldiers.
There’s no safety in running from an atomic bomb.
There are simple inexpensive and low-tech devices that are available to effectively barricade a classroom door from the inside. As long as your local fire marshal approves, these might be considered.
I would rather put the football player-rapists and cheerleader types in work study. They are the most likely to bully their other kids.
And the burnouts should simply go right to jail.
Send them out into open playgrounds. Too many targets that way.
“There’s no safety in running from an atomic bomb.”
Of course not...adults know that. But easing the fears of little kids by telling them they’d be safe under the desk really worked as I remember from 80 years ago.
>> ARM THE TEACHERS
Thank you, EXACTLY what I was going to post.
Here in rural Texas some schools DO allow certain of their teachers to carry. They even post that fact on signs on school property, highly visible to those who enter the building.
Why aren’t the kids taught the same thing?
“…an armed gunman fired shots inside the building.”
>> Why aren’t the kids taught the same thing?
Should schoolkids (or corporate drones, for that matter) be taught to fight an armed intruder with a baseball bat?
As I wrote earlier, who gets to pick the teachers that'll pack heat?
Will it be some school board-designated committee (because we know how they LOVE justice)?
Will it be union goons?
Maybe it'll be the librarian who just added a bunch of Antifa books to the catalog.
Maybe it'll be these Fearless Ladies.
Or that collection of sex ed specialists pushing the latest claptrap on children.
It sure won't be the parents, who are "domestic terrorists" in the eyes of the DOJ.
I'll go a few steps further....let's say some leftist agitator-teacher who did 4 years in the Army's is deemed "competent." He sees a bunch of conservative students and monitors their online activity, decides they're a threat because they wrote "Let's Go Brandon" and FJB and posted pictures of them at gun shows on Instagram, and draws his weapon on them in class and calls the cops.
He will argue (and, I submit to you, be supported in the press and by the school board vociferously) that he stopped a possible disaster. The parents of these students will sue, the NEA will protect the teacher at all costs, the parents will spend thousands on legal fees and their kids will be doxxed and have a hard time getting in to college or trade school.
The teacher will keep his job and become a celebrity for 20% of this nation, and be loathed by 30-40% of the Deplorables. The remainder/ballast will waffle. Meanwhile, another school shooting will happen because that's part of the systematic risk in a free nation.
For a nation like Israel where the citizenry has experienced this palpably, and where the threat is probabilistically high (way higher than in America), it seems to work. I also suspect "competence" isn't as politically defined in Israel. Israel isn't America, and America isn't Israel, just like adopting the gun control policies of Europe won't work here.
In contemporary America, this is a nice idea on paper. In practice it'll fail, because the local government and DOJ will make the call on "competency." And then this guy will carry...
Viable options include Homeschooling and private schools. But as long as in loco parentis reigns supreme, this is a futile situation.
I would limit it to teachers whom are willing and able to carry a firearm and use it when necessary. It would be bad policy to mandate that every teacher be armed and accept the responsibility of taking out a school shooter.
I mean, teach the kids run, hide, and if no other choice, fight.
They should not shelter in place. Get the heck out of school.
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