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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Duck & cover...what a joke.
I remember Kennedy’s Cuban missile crisis speech like it was yesterday. I was sure that we were gonna get nuked. The next day I was in 8th grade homeroom looking around the room thinking I can’t die without getting laid. I wonder if any of the girls feel the same.
Given the rarity of these events, I strongly suspect the school shooting drills are simply there to terrorize students and their mothers to push for gun control.
And since most of the shootings seem to involve current or disgruntled former students (and now trannies), we might pause to ask WTF is going in the schools?
There’s PLENTY of safety in taking steps to mitigate personal injury from minor structural failure caused by a near miss. Are you not aware that this is standard procedure in earthquake zones?
Remove all students who talk about shooting up the school
Yes - I think it was ‘61 or ‘62.
Every time the fire house siren went off I was scared.
Same for me in the ‘50s and ‘60s in school near Buffalo. No duck and cover. But we went to the hallway walls, stood up facing them, with our head in crossed arms.
The only thing separating our house from the air raid siren was a church and a town hall. THAT sound was terrifying!
My professor friend said that teachers got together to discuss their collective strategy and they all decided the solution was for everyone to keep a bucket of rocks under their desk but out of sight from students for fear it would traumatize them.
Perhaps we should REOPEN THE MENTAL HOSPITALS closed down in the 1970s. lock up for “Observation” those showing aberrations of behavior toward others.
How many school shootings took place back before the 1968 gun control law went into effect? I remember and read of ...none, except during the Indian Wars.
And semi-auto rifles have been around since 1903.
My wife, as a small child in school once asked the teacher “Do you really think hiding under a desk is going to protect us from an A-bomb?”
The teacher immediately took a dislike to her as the teacher knew it was just a moral booster and nothing more.
There were mass killings before 1968, but they were usually labor conflicts, gang warfare, and race riots. There was a school bombing in Michigan in 1927 by a man who was probably deranged. There was a massacre of 13 people in New Jersey. Within one month in 1966, there were the Richard Speck murders of eight nurses in Chicago and the Charles Whitman killings from the University of Texas tower. The Speck and Whitman crimes were the beginning of the wave of mass murders continuing to this day.
A lot of us FReepers were taught to get under our desk to protect us from an atomic bomb.
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