Speaking as someone who has the inside scoop about how kids have been reacting to these incidents, it’s not the drills that traumatize them. It’s the school shootings.
I’m aware that the statistical likelihood is low, but I also know it’s cold comfort when you are a kid trapped in a potential slaughterhouse, and the adults around you are entirely unwilling to do anything meaningful to protect you. Kids are generally not able to run the numbers or meaningfully understand risk.
I still remember when Columbine happened, it was a big fucking deal because those sorts of events didn’t get much attention until that shooting, and they had camera footage and the 24-hour news cycle. I was terrified. I know I already had PTSD so it probably magnified the effect of how I reacted, but I never felt safe at school again. I was so stressed out I developed an esophageal hernia.
But kids these days aren’t seeing just one incident in the news, they are seeing it happen all the time, and they can also see that nothing is being done about it. That consistent and repeated failure to protect has a deleterious impact on their mental health.
I suspect that causes a lot more anxiety than the drills.
We all know what you (the US) could do to put your # of school shootings at the same level as other countries. That is what I would consider doing something.
The rest is thoughts and prayers.
Part of the worry is that people view these assassinations as are necessary because there is no other accountability. How are “evil” CEOs held accountable? Golden parachutes? Raises while workers are fired? Making money by hurting the public? How are people like Charlie Kirk held accountable for their hate speech? How is Trump (referring to his assassination attempt) held accountable for what he is doing.
I am not advocating for assassinations, but I fear many see it as the only alternative.
I see lots of kids of all ages. Lots of anxiety. Increased numbers recents years. Speaking from that perspective… it has been extremely rare that I’ve seen news reports of school shootings as a factor in childhood anxiety. That’s my “inside scoop” with pretty big sample size.
Not disputing your experience but it isn’t the typical current one.
I do hear of anxiety after drills. The stuff that is “being done about it.” Putatively to “protect them.”
@The_Librarian gun control, my assumption what you mean, is certainly part of it, for school shooting and the other bigger piles of gun deaths. It isn’t selling as well.
Yes that mindset that killing someone who represents what I hate is an alternative, let alone the only option, be that someone who is “woke”, liberal, part of the medical cabal forcing vaccines on our children, threatening my religious values, denying or delaying medical care, saying things I feel are hateful, being of a group I associate with too much power or committing genocide … whichever … is increasing and that increase, the support that option gets from too many, is worrisome.
To be completely fair, my “inside scoop”, is also just my impressions. So I looked for data. And the data from Luries in Chicago is revealing: damn lots of parents are somewhat or very worried about school shootings, and by their report their kids are worried too, albeit less than they are. But the revealing part? In both cases there is more worry about shootings in non-school public places. And not surprisingly less worry in areas with less crime than areas with more. Parents and kids overall have an understanding that schools are if anything less risky for gun violence than the rest of the public world. Now probably than political gatherings…
Another study, by Pew, of teens in immediate aftermath of Parkland Florida shooting, found a majority of teens at that time endorsed being at least somewhat worried about a shooting at their school. No data on how afraid they were of shootings elsewhere. What do they want done about it?
86% of teens say that preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns and that improving mental health screening and treatment would be effective, including majorities who say each of these proposals would be very effective. Roughly eight-in-ten teens (79%) say that having metal detectors in schools would be effective and 66% say the same about banning assault-style weapons.
Minority students were endorsing more concern over gun violence than white teens.
While looking for that data also found this that I think informs a bit on the harms from the shooting of such a public figure.
Kirk’s followers had a fictive relationship with him. They felt like he was a friend. A parasocial relationship. His death by gun violence is experienced minimally at the level of violence in your neighborhood.
Neighborhood exposure was most prevalent at 22 percent, followed by knowing a shooting victim (19 percent), being threatened with a gun (13 percent) and being shot (2 percent).
Indirect exposure had nearly as big an impact as direct victimization. Witnessing or hearing about neighborhood shootings predicted decreases in overall quality of life as well as physical, psychological, social and environmental well-being.
To me Kirk was a name of someone who I now understand to have been a vile person. Just a name. To these very many people his death measurably decreases their well being. That is cause for worry.
If fire drills were the only way we had of protecting kids from fires, we’d be in trouble. Clearly we have sprinklers, safety checks, regulations, etc., that make us safe.
When I was a kid we would every so often troop into the hallway, sit against the corridor walls, and prepare to get nuked by the Russians. Living in New York, this wasn’t an impossible event, We managed.
The real problem is that if a kids asks what adults are doing to prevent school shootings, besides metal detectors and cops all over the place, it is thoughts and prayers.
It would be nice to not need this anymore. It would nice to not need TSA checkpoints at airports.
To far too many Republicans, the murder of anyone that pushes their messages is more important than the murder of any number of children that cannot vote for them.
Yup. The parallel here is apt. “What are adults doing to prevent my school getting vaporized in a nuclear attack, Daddy?” “We are drilling ‘duck and cover’ in school kids!”
The parallel extends. For the nuclear threat what adults could do was lower the heat of the rhetoric, have actions to decrease the amount of weapons of mass destruction … What is happening now is elevating the rhetorical heat and no action to regulate the weapons.
During all the cheers that Luigi got, surprisingly from hurt and stressed out Americans from all sides of the political spectrum, I always thought: wtf! This was a human being, no? If so many Americans hate their health insurance providers this much (so much, that they cheer for the blood of the CEOs) Why can’t they change their laws to provide health care universally?
In the end, killing stone cold evil CEOs won’t give Americans health care. Only legislation will do this. Just get it done. Things are so odd over there. Like an entire wild wild west nation.
Mental health screening ain’t gonna do it. First of all, we already do that a lot. Every time I go to the doctor I get a mental health screening. Second of all, there’s currently no way to predict when ideation is going to result in an actual act of violence, since it’s such a small percentage of people. Unless you (general you) think every person who has a remotely violent thought should be locked up against their will, at a time when mental health emergency treatment is already in short supply - and even if we had the capacity, I don’t think we have great evidence that this would work. People know what to say and do to get out of psych ER. Also, people who have these thoughts often hide them from therapists and school officials.
So the kids are wrong about this as a solution, I think. It’s what gun advocates point to in order to avoid talk of restricting gun ownership, but it has no real basis in reality. Also, a lot of gun advocates don’t actually think people with mental health problems should be denied access to weapons, even in the event of violent ideation, which we know because of virulent opposition to red flag laws. We have such laws in my state with regard to domestic violence, and they are so controversial that many police departments refuse to enforce them.
Because there is no political will. Insurance companies are a major part of the US economy and have strong lobbyists so politicians don’t want to do anything meaningful to address the problem. Obama tried. The Affordable Care act actually had great potential but Republican state governors refused to enforce it. The Republican MO in this country is to sabotage anything public and then argue that public services don’t work. They also do this with public education.
Last I checked, most Americans are opposed to universal healthcare. But it seems to me that a lot could be done to improve the system outside of full universal healthcare. To the extent that Republican voters want the system to change (and many do) there is a lot of disagreement about how to improve things. My understanding is that the celebration of that CEOs death was surprisingly bipartisan - but that doesn’t mean there is agreement about the solution. (Also, there is no easy solution. The way health care works in this country is Byzantine. It’s a very complex system.)
A Gallup poll taken in December of 2024 found that 62% of Americans believe the government should ensure that all Americans have healthcare coverage. Back in 2013 it was just 42%. So public opinion seems to me moving in the right direction.
Agreed. Kids are not necessarily the experts on what actually would work, just what they want to see being done about it.
Mental health screening, coupled with resources to address what is found, is its own good, but it cannot be 100% and the number slipping through doesn’t need be substantial…
That said they are on to something there: school shootings, mass shootings, targeting CEOs and political influencers, is often a manifestation of emotional and psychological decompensation with both inadequate safety net and a model that shooting up people is an option, and the means to do so, available.
Root cause analysis. Less of a disconnected society, better social supports, better resources, less easy availability of highly effective weaponry, might help some. Less anger.
I definitely don’t want to live in a culture where violence is normalized. About twenty years ago my husband was working for an aggression research lab and a lot of the stuff coming out of there indicated we had seen an increase of retaliatory aggression. One of the features of retaliatory violence is it’s often disproportional to the original harm. Someone cuts you off in traffic, you threaten to kill them. Researchers were sounding the alarm about it.
This was a problem then, but I never imagined it would grow to the extent that average people could watch a graphic video of someone getting shot and express happiness about it. Or openly cheer the death of a CEO.
Exactly. These are signs and symptoms of the same illness are culture is suffering with a worsening course. That is what worries me, not the one murder or the horrible school shooting, but that overall illness trajectory with no effective treatment plan in place.
This article seems on point here about how the this or that is really all this.
the deliberate trail of public evidence that this suspect allegedly left behind, specifically with the bullet casings, also echoes a pattern increasingly seen among perpetrators of mass and school shootings. In those cases, the attackers appeared to be fluent in the cultural script that has developed in the U.S. around mass shootings, such the common choice of weaponry, messaging inscribed on firearms and through journals or other written materials, and digital presence. But in those cases, the attackers typically lacked any political or ideological motive, instead striving to be remembered among figures who had committed similar atrocities in the past.
Senters said he worries that the duration of discussion about Robinson, his potential political leanings and a motive, may have illustrated a more potent way for aspirants to this disturbing legacy.
“If you look at how long we’ve been talking about the Charlie Kirk shooting, there is perhaps a worrisome thought that can form that, oh, if someone is looking to sort of make their name in this online shooter space, then maybe a targeted political shooting is now a better way to do that than a mass shooting,” he said, “because we’ve become so sort of like inculcated to to the tragedy of mass shootings that [they take] up space and the mass discourse for a handful of days before we all move on to the next thing.”