“A new high school will have sleek classrooms — and places to hide from a mass shooter”
This is where we are now. 
God bless America!
The curved hallway idea is genius. Only problem is, I imagine it would also hamper CCTV surveillance or police trying to respond, as well.
Not to mention plain everyday supervision and discipline. All those hiding places will quickly be filled by high school students doing things the Administration would disapprove of like smoking and drinking and sexing.
I do worry, though, that by publicizing how “shooting-resistant” such schools are, they are drawing undesirable attention - maybe even inviting a shooter to make this school his preferred target, as a way of showing spite. This isn’t necessarily good to publish all over the news. Kind of like how the Aurora theater gunman may have targeted that theater ***because ***it advertised itself as a gun-free zone.
I wonder if it would be more cost effective to just invest in bullet-proof school uniforms?
It makes me a little sad as well but I attended a school for a while that had an attached fallout shelter and we did the usual duck-and-cover drills. And I taught in one where one of our 5th graders was busted for selling dope and all of us teachers were given “special training” in spotting such commercial events. What we fear as threats at our schools have changed over the years but I think we may have always had one of some kind.
That was my first thought too.
I thought about the duck and cover thing, too. But the real and immediate threat of today’s school shootings trumps (excuse the expression) the bygone potential threat of a Soviet bomb.
Indeed we may be coming full circle. From “Design Secrets of Medieval Castles:”
How is it genius? It’s pretty rare for WW-I aircraft to strafe hallways. The [del] students [/del] shooters are in no way restricted from moving through a hallway. It’s not like they can’t work out the best way to achieve their goal and are suddenly flummoxed by a curved wall.
probably a lot more than it would cost to teach kids not to kill their classmates.
Curved hallways mean a shorter range of vision for shooters and more time moving to find targets. More time moving is less time shooting and more time for responders to arrive.
That doesn’t make any sense at all. Distance isn’t a factor in close-order random shootings. Curved walls aren’t going to stop even the slowest person from firing as many rounds as can be fired as they walk. Not one person saved.
If anything it will delay first responders from engaging at a distance.
The curved walls mean that more victims will be out of sight. In a straight 100-foot long hallway, the gunman can theoretically mow down anyone in the entire hallway, especially if he has an automatic weapon. With a curving hallway, the gunman would be unable to shoot anyone who is, say, more than 20 feet ahead of him at any given time. That means a few more seconds for the would-be victims located in the 80 feet beyond his vision to scatter, flee and take cover.
For another example, you might read about how Sandy Hook Elementary School was rebuilt. The classroom doors can be locked from the inside or the outside, the windows adjacent to those doors are bulletproof, and the landscaping is designed to keep people away.
You must have missed the original point. You can’t effectively shoot people you can’t see. If they’re around the curve, they might only be thirty feet away and still safe. In a straight hallways, that safe distance can be a hundred feet or more.
How many school shooters come from the same school that they are shooting up, and thus will be able to plan around such obstacles?
Well, the point of such obstacles is that they can’t really be planned around. A shooter may know them but simply be forced to accept their effect on him. A curving hallway limits the shooter’s shooting no matter how familiar he is with them.
A bank robber may know that the bank vault is secured with such-and-such a security system. That knowledge doesn’t necessarily make the robbery any more do-able.
No, I got the idea. It just isn’t practical.
If a shooter was trying to assassinate one specific person it might help that person. But if the idea is to create a stack of bodies then the fantasy begins up close. There’s no point shooting someone far away when there are people nearby.
You should call this school and/or the contractor that consulted on security, and tell them that their idea just won’t work.