Teachers Stage Fake Gunman Attack On Sixth-Graders
“Involved Poor Judgment”?! Ya think? :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
What on earth was the purpose of this?
They better check if those staff members played video games, those things are root cause of all evil.
Reminds of those “Get under your desk” nuclear drills of the 1960s.
People are stupid.
If only all those 11 year olds had been packing heat, things would have turned out just fine.
I know this is Recreational Outrage, but…I cannot believe the things people think of! Maybe it’s because I’m an elementary school teacher and now I’m pictuing my students huddled under their desks, crying. What the fuck? Who on earth thought this was a good idea? Even five minutes of scaring the shit out of little kids is five minutes too long.
Oh can you imagine the RO threads if the kid had shot the teacher-in-disguise ? That’d be poetic justice. (The shooting, not the threads)
There’ll be more angst from the parents than from the “poor tortured children” and a whole lot more on message boards around the world.
The most surprising thing is that there are still teachers out there willing to risk their careers over this stuff. With the level of outrage in the world so high they really should have seen a back-lash coming from this.
Of course if they’re so stupid that they didn’t see it coming they probably shouldn’t be teaching.
This is the new fire drill, I guess.
Fuckin’ stupid, beyond words.
Why were teachers doing this, anyway? This is the sort of thing that administrators are supposed to… administrate. Hell, I couldn’t even conduct my own fire drill - the principal was responsible for doing that.
Idiots. Do your job, which is to teach, and leave the administrivia to the administrators. Who, presumably, would have realized what a terrifically bad idea this was. In all fairness, any teacher with brains would have figured that one out…
Principal’s press release: http://cityschools.net/schoolsites/se/index.html
School’s Code of Conduct: http://cityschools.net/schoolsites/se/PDF/CODE-OF-CONDUCT.pdf Have to wonder is the teachers will be held to the same standards as the students.
Ah yes, the old “get on the floor and pray your number isn’t up” defense. When the fuck will people realize that in such a situation your only real chance is to rush the person with the gun?
Now, if there were drills to teach that kind of behavior I might not be as disgusted by this story.
Are you kidding? Running at someone forces them to fire, hiding under a desk if you’re not the intended target is much safer.
Many shootings are targeted at specific individuals - jilted lovers etc - and aren’t mass spress killings.
Mass spree killings - THE KIND THIS DRILL WAS CLEARLY TESTING - aren’t targeted at specific individuals. Go online and read the minute by minute events in the Columbine library, or what happened at Virginia Tech. For MINUTES people huddled under tables and prayed “please not me, please not me.” In Columbine, Harris and Klebold took their time, casually going around the room picking new victims at random while the kids under the table did NOTHING.
In such a situation you need to realize that you have to options:
- Hide there and die
- Fight back against the person with the weapon, which may also get you killed, but at least you’ll have a fraction of a chance. And if 20 people had rushed the gunman at Columbine, 3 or 4 may have died while the rest overwhelmed them. Make no mistake, in such a situation, people WILL die, but the number of deaths can be minimized if people act smart.
Bollocks… there’s no easy way to guarantee that it’s a spree killing until you see people getting shot in front of you, at which point rational thought is likely to go out of the window, especially for 11 y/old kids.
Anyone who’s judgment is that poor shouldn’t be put in charge of children, I think.
I’m vaguely reminded of the time one of my teachers casually dropped a racial slur into the lecture, and then told us later (after the only student in our class who belonged to that particular racial group was basically in tears) that it had been a test to see if any of us would object. Personally, I didn’t object because until that day I’d never heard the word before. It’s always nice to learn new things in school. :rolleyes:
That said, tricking someone into beliving they’re about to die seems rather worse than tricking someone into believing you’re a racist.
Which is exactly why a drill like this (which I think shouldn’t have happened to begin with) should have emphasized a fight back response, which would have had to involve certain students or teachers as “plants” to lead the response. What makes this drill so worthless and disgusting is that it taught the “get under your desk before the nuke goes off” response.
Y’all need to look at both sides of the issue.
On the one hand, sure, the teachers traumatized the students in an awful way. On the other hand, they were trying to ensure that kids took the situation seriously and practiced good safety. And now, thanks to this training, if the kids are ever in a real-life rampaging-gunman situation, they won’t be sure whether it’s actually happening or whether it’s another sadistic hoax perpetrated by idiot teachers. Go go safety training!
Daniel
After Columbine, my old high school (and a lot of other high schools from what I’ve heard) started a new drill. The school goes into “lockdown” and everyone has to huddle in the corner of their classroom, out of view of the big glass window in the middle of every door.
The greatest part about it is, if the gunman is a student (which, 99% of the time they would be), they too are familiar with the drill and all they have to do is break through the glass, unlock the door, and you’ve got 20 to 30 perfect targets all bunched in the corner. Literally like shooting fish in a barrel.
I can’t agree with you there, Soapbox Monkey. First of all, I think you underestimate the degree to which people in that situation know what’s going on. If you’re told “there’s a gun in the school, everyone stay in your rooms” (or perhaps just “there’s some kind of emergency, everyone stay in the room”) you don’t have any way of knowing whether the gunman is after someone specific or just trying to kill as many as possible. Usually they don’t announce over the PA (“Attention students, a gunman is trying to kill as many of you as possible, please act accordingly.”) Even the students who’d already witnessed the shootings wouldn’t be likely to stick around and watch long enough to assess the gunman’s motive.
Anyway, even if you know it’s more along the lines of a random killing spree, that doesn’t mean you know the gunman will systematically walk around looking under desks until he’s killed everyone – as opposed to just firing on whichever targets he sees. If that’s what he’s doing, your best bet is to stay out of sight.
I’ll conceed that in some situations (possibly not identifiable at the time) the loss of life will be minimized by charging the gunman – but I’d be pretty dubious of the claim that it rasises the odds for the ones doing the charging. And how do they know that the police aren’t right around the corner, about to gun him down (in which case they’d be sacrificing themselves for nothing)?
In any case, it’s a stupid thing to be training kids to do when there are much more manageable dangers that they are much, much more likely to face. Take whatever time you spend on “maniac with a gun” drills and spend it teaching kids healthy eating or teaching teens defensive driving and you’re a lot more likely to save someone’s life.
(EDIT: My “I can’t agree” refers to your suggestion that they teach them to charge, not to your most recent post criticizing your high schools drill. I agree, that sounds stupid – but I’d argue such drills are a waste of time regardless of how they’re conducted. The most I’d suggest is familiarizing the students with evacuation routes and proceedures, which can be useful in a whole host of other circumstances.)
School door windows aren’t made of reinforced glass anymore?