Earlier this year, my child got to experience this. An anonymous tip led to a lockdown and police investigating an area of the school. During that investigation, one of the officers accidentally discharged their weapon. That, of course led to numerous calls to 911 about shots fired and a full-on response. The first I heard about any of this was getting a call from my child, who was running to the woods to hide.
The proper term here would be a negligent discharge. Nobody ever accidentally fired a gun. They either meant to or they were handling it in a negligent manner. The general lack of training and professionalism with American police is appalling. They rarely get sufficient range time to be proficient with their weapon. let alone stress inoculation so they can perform when the time comes.
There are cases of weapons discharging due to malfunctioning weapons, holsters and ammunition instead of negligence. This is why the first rule is, never point your weapon at something you do not wish to destroy. Typically they mostly happen while loading or unloading a firearm. These are typically called "Accidental Discharges" instead of "Negligent Discharges."
germany records every single bullet its police officers fire.
do you want to know the number of bullets fired?
According to a research brief by the Center for Homicide Research1, there were 11 cases of accidental discharges by police officers in Germany from 2000 to 2012, resulting in one death and six injuries. This means that on average, there were less than one accidental discharge per year in Germany during this period.
gpt
The injury rate seems extremely high - 11 accidental (assuming includes negligent) discharges and 7 of those results in injury or death. Unless those are self-inflicted (glock foot), that seems really high.
> germany records every single bullet its police officers fire.
I really wish we hadn't blocked this level of record keeping in the USA. All our data has to be gleaned from other sources. The FBI tries to collect this data, but 40% of law enforcement agencies don't provide it.
Indeed and discharges due to malfunctions are usually called accidental discharges. Assuming it's the first time of course. If you continue to knowingly use a broken gun after you've learned its broken then it becomes negligence.
If you follow the rules of firearms safety you will never have a negligent discharge, but you may have an accidental one. Personally my favorite personal rule is "Don't need a firearm, don't have a firearm." The dang things are more dangerous than a pet Boomslang. Some people are willing to take the risk, but I'm not.
On average cop training with firearms in the US is quite minimal. Most cops are extremely bad shots when intentionally firing their guns.
There's a long, long history of cops negligently firing their guns, even after gun safety tech progressed to the point where true accidental discharges are neigh impossible. It's always negligence now.
"Glock leg" was a common trope among cops, because so many of them were shooting themselves in the leg. They sued both Glock and Sig multiple times because cops were convinced it must be the guns fault. Spoiler alert, it wasn't (well, some hand waving on a certain sig issue, but glocks are impossible to fire without pulling the trigger).
I shoot competitive 3p rifle, and the closest range to me is a cop range. I've seen cops struggle for 5 minutes trying to figure out how to put their targets up. We have rules against drawing from holsters because cops have shot themselves in the leg so frequently (though the cops are still required to do it for testing lol). I've seen cops shooting rifles at the pistol range, which destroys the backstop. I've seen cops shoot at targets on the wrong range.
Like literally other people's targets, up in the air, from a different range. In the direction of an interstate freeway, at an upwards angle. I've seen cops (with aforementioned rifles) shoot groups at 50 yards while rested on a bench that are straight up worse than what I can do at 200 yards while standing up. (For an average non-olympic-tier competitor, you'd expect 200 yard standing groups to be 4-5x larger than 200 yard bench groups, and closer to 20x+ larger than 50yd bench groups).
The average cop doesn't know shit about guns, and doesn't care. And largely that would be fine because most cops will never draw their guns in the blind of duty. Unfortunately we've built up a law enforcement ethos in the US where every cop must be armed even though they really shouldn't have to be.
"but glocks are impossible to fire without pulling the trigger"
Not exactly true. See the gen1 and early gen2 slam fire issues. The fact that it is not widespread knowledge is just kudos to their "safe fire" marketing. And of course mechanical failures in any make/model could be a factor too. But as you said, it's almost always negligence and not a true accident.
Yea, very similar issue with early Sig p320. But the lawsuits still keep coming in after it's mechanically impossible now.
(And in sig's case their firing pin block interacts with a lug attached to the pin, which could hypothetically shear, and since it's fully cocked striker then it's a single point of failure)
Still half cocked. It's a big part of why Glock triggers feel so crappy.
But imo the relevant part here is more that Sig decided to have the firing pin block... not block the firing pin itself, but a lug attached to the firing pin. A lug that can, extremely rarely, shear off.
I've noticed that any product that markets it doesn't have a problem I hadn't thought of ("runs silent", "rust-proof can", "doesn't randomly fire") inevitably has exactly that problem.
Oh yea I'm pretty sure that for decades new york intentionally issued guns with 2.5x heavier triggers because cops couldn't keep their fingers off the trigger. Like in the 10+ pound range.
This of course very much hurts accuracy when intentionally firing the gun, and makes bullets more likely to go places they shouldn't.
There were a number of accidental discharges in Norway while police were temporarily (for more than a year?) permanently armed.
Partly because training assumes guns will be locked away until going into imminent dangerous situations - so when carrying - the training/instruction dictates a round should always be chambered.
AFAIK this how you get Glock foot too - drawing a weapon with round chambered, rather than draw-load-fire.
> AFAIK this how you get Glock foot too - drawing a weapon with round chambered, rather than draw-load-fire.
Not quite - it's usually on the reholster, not the initial draw. Crucially, this means that the policy of carrying without a round in the chamber can still yield the same failure case, because if the weapon is fired, it'll be loaded when you go to reholster unless you intentionally clear the gun every time. Which, for a failure case caused by literally keeping your finger on the trigger while reholstering, is not gonna be avoidable if that's your bar. Someone who hasn't trained enough to meet the most basic of 8-year-old kid-level gun safety isn't going to be reliably clearing before reholstering either.
It’s common advice to keep a round chambered and I’m sure (almost) all cops in the US do. You might not have both hands free to chamber the round and it takes time when you may not have any.
It really shouldn’t matter as long as your finger isn’t on the trigger until you’re ready to fire. Personally, I still like guns that have a safety lever. I understand that people in a stressful situation might forget to flip it but training should largely circumvent that.
Yes, it's very simple. If you do not wish to shoot the gun, do not put your finger on the trigger. Firearm safety really is that straightforward, which is why it's so stupid when stuff like that happens.
The NRA used to be mostly focused on gun safety, and not lobbying for gun manufacturers in DC. Their courses were much more involved than "don't pull trigger if you don't want to shoot".
Other pieces of advice included "keep the safety on", "never aim at a person" and "always assume the gun is loaded, especially when cleaning it".
My high school in Iowa had a shooting range (not sure what type) that had long been coordoned off. In 2007 it was unthinkable that people used to be able to come to school and practice shooting.
I don't think we've figured out a good way to prevent this sort of thing while also making is possible to be able to fire the gun quickly when needed.
The easy answer is "more training," but I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that police in many places don't find themselves in dangerous situations that often and training only goes so far.
But put poorly trained people in the most terrifying moment of their lives with a dangerous weapon in their hands, and you better believe there are going to be some accidents. Thus: the whole problem.
Some unarmed kid running for their life down the halls is gonna get shot by a police officer sooner or later.
It definitely shouldn't happen. By all accounts, including video surveillance available of the incident, the officer's finger wasn't on the trigger, but was on the side of the barrel, which was pointed downward.
Oh, believe it, every time a police officer suffers an inadvertent firearm discharge there is plenty of "auditing". He'll likely be off for at least 3 days and undergo additional training and be kidded for years.
But if no one was harmed he'll be allowed to carry a fully loaded firearm again, unlike Barney Fife:
When I was a school-aged child in the 80s and 90s here in Canada, we used to get routinely evacuated because people would "phone in" bomb threats.
"Swatting" to me just seems like a nuanced evolution of that same phenomenon. Only I thought it was that targets were now peoples' homes and the Internet has made it so that targets and perpetrators could be much farther apart from each other.
Other than that, given that "reporting a false threat against a school in order to trigger a response" was happening when I was in school 30+ years ago, I can't help but wonder "what's the 'news'?"
With a bomb threat you are gonna get a evacuation and a bomb defusal team. With a shooter you are gonna get a SWAT team on edge, ready to shoot someone who might have a gun. Much more dangerous.
I doubt it happens "a lot". Accidentally shooting deaths are about 900/yr and I assume dogs are rarely the trigger. Even for hunting accidents, shootings are not the main culprit (it's usually falls).
I like to say that accidents don’t exist and this is a great example. Everything people do happens for a reason, and calling things accidents just gives us excuses to not find the underlying reason most of the time. We should not accept “accidental” weapon discharges, especially by police. If you’re not able to control yourself inside a school you have not earned the responsibility of being a police officer.
The article is interesting and informative, it also points to why we are seeing the death of the open internet, and of the anonymous internet.
> Over the past year, more than 500 schools in the United States have been subjected to a coordinated campaign of fear that exploits the all-too-real American danger of school shootings, according to a review of media reports and dozens of public records requests. The Washington Post examined police reports, emergency call recordings, body-camera footage or call logs in connection with incidents in 24 states.
It also puts a hole in the fact that any of this surveillance is "to protect the children" as I'm sure the NSA has enough info to track this guy down but just don't.
If there is a coordinated campaign of fear, then there must be somebody that benefits of it.
Criminals, like those that started a wildfire again in Tenerife (Spain) this week, casually in the same week of the Meeting of the European Political Community in Spain, can't avoid to reverberate the same patterns of behavior, and left traces.
Traces that could be feed to train an AI system and propose a list. We live in the age of full surveillance so here is a situation where AI could earn some pride, waiting for the correct team.
Years ago the bomb threats and stuff were just kids wanting to get out of school and stuff. I wonder what the benefit could be for organized groups - stock manipulation, political reasons, foreign actors (but for what end goal), something else?
The Russians are punching above their weight these days. If you'd like to read about how they're so successful (based on real-world case studies) consider reading the executive of "The Kremlin Playbook", from CSIS in Washington DC:
tl;dr (from page ix): Our work has determined that Russia has cultivated an opaque network of patronage across the region that it uses to influence and direct decision-making. This web resembles a network-flow model, which we describe as an "unvirtuous circle" of Russian influence. The circuitous flow can either begin with Russian political or economic penetration and from there expand and evolve, in some instances leading to "state capture." Russia seeks to gain influence over (if not control of) critical state institutions, bodies, and the economy and uses this influence to shape national policies and decisions. Corruption is the lubricant on which this system operates, concentrating on the exploitation of state resources to further Russia's networks of influence.
Other tactics (usually in earlier phases of the plan) involve getting control over portions of the media, or (failing that) undermining news outlets' credibility. This conditions the population to put up with the stuff mentioned in the text I quoted. "Well, they're all corrupt, so it's not surprising that (insert any recent federal scandal here)."
The NSA's mission is dictated by the government, and NSA is not authorized for domestic surveillance, as far as we know publicly. That duty falls on agencies like DHS and FBI, depending on the specific case.
And while the NSA technically could, and maybe even does so, on the down low (Google "parallel construction"), they aren't going to reveal, and thus burn, their TTPs in a domestic civil/criminal trial, when they could be using them to save large numbers of lives globally.
The NSA doesn’t perform domestic intelligence. Even in a conspiratorial world where they do: operating outside of their legal mandate would mean that they wouldn't involve themselves with things like this.
The article talks about calls tracing to Ethiopian IP addresses. A man was recently arrested in Peru for calling in bomb threats to US schools[1]. This is not a domestic intelligence problem.
That’s an entirely different sentence: specifying the NSA puts the claim into the territory of conspiracy, while specifying domestic federal LEO is essentially a question of capacity, reach, and competency.
(Moreover, I don’t think anybody wants to live in a world where the FBI is 100% accurate in detecting school shooting hoaxes. That would imply other abilities that we’d consider unacceptable.)
According to the article, whoever is behind this is using some web site that lets anybody with an email address spoof a US phone number to send fraudulent messages. The phone system badly needs to be upgraded so that people can't make calls or send text messages from somebody else's phone number. Doing that would not only stop the shady service that people are using to send these hoaxes to schools but would also stop the spam calls that come from people with the same first 6 digits as your number.
There aren't really legitimate use cases for phone number spoofing and even hiding your number so it shows up as unknown on caller ID is a good way to ensure the person you're calling won't answer the phone. When somebody makes a phone call, you should be able to trust that the caller ID shows the actual phone number that is calling you.
Does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN and the regulatory requirement that all providers implement it by June 2022 not cover text messages? If not, that's a massive hole.
There is no blocking enforcement, yet. On Apple devices with some major carriers such as AT&T and Verizon, it provides a check mark beside a validated number (mostly, other mobile subscribers). The expansion of interoperability with the rest of US carriers, landline operators, and the international expansion will take years. And before blocking unsigned calls can happen, it will need to be phased-in and validated.
There are absolutely legitimate use cases for phone number spoofing, especially for businesses (many locations but single contact number as an identifier), but that doesn’t mean it can’t be made a lot more resilient to bad actors.
This is a mostly solved problem when it comes to the internet. We've figured out how to legitimately have an arbitrary number of computers appear as one single domain online and do so in a way that can be trusted. The issue with phones is a case of outdated technology and infrastructure.
Exactly, phone systems can easily have an internal system and an external number. Very similar to internal vs external IPs. Nobody needs to care about internal numbers/IPs, but registering the external is beneficial. Treating phone numbers like IPs or even better domains could work.
> There aren't really legitimate use cases for phone number spoofing
Very valid reason, I want to sign up for an internet account somewhere, Google, Facebook, etc and not have it be traced back directly to me because I value my privacy.
If you're argument is that I shouldn't need to do that, well then you're just arguing against privacy in that case.
I’m in my mid-late 20s, and went to entirely public schools. My partner is a few years younger than me, also went to public schools, and the difference in our experiences consistently surprises me: while school shootings were a concern while I was in school, I never experienced a hoax. Meanwhile, she experienced multiple hoaxes each year in high school.
More generally, my (slightly) younger friends have independently described having nightmares over school shootings. It makes me very sad to think that generations of young adults have those kinds of associations with our educational system.
The thing that I don't get is that when I was growing up on Argentina, I never saw anything like that. We heard about the shootings and bomb threats in the US, but once a teacher got stabbed in an Argentinean school and was national news. And that was the biggest event in years. Why do these kind of things only seem to be prevalent on one country? Gun prevalence explains the medium of choise these past 25 years, and one thing that needs to be tackled, but there seems to be other factors at play as well.
> Gun prevalence explains the medium of choise these past 25 years, and one thing that needs to be tackled, but there seems to be other factors at play as well.
People blame guns exclusively, but I think the real causes are:
1. Some kind of societal dysfunction that's leading deeper levels of anger and isolation in some people.
2. Massive national advertising campaigns by the media reminding angry, isolated teenagers that shooting up their school is an option they have.
People don't blame guns exclusively, but it's obvious to anyone (except gun owners) that the scale of gun violence and ease of access to firearms are related, so guns are part of the problem. Unfortunately they are a part of the problem which is existentially impossible to address in any effective way, because any gun control or regulation which could effectively lower gun crime would be unconstitutional in the US, so even bringing it up is futile.
>1. Some kind of social dysfunction that's leading deeper levels of anger and isolation in some people.
This happens everywhere. You should ask yourself why school shootings aren't also a problem everywhere.
>2. Massive national advertising campaigns by the media reminding angry, isolated teenagers that shooting up their school is an option they have.
Maybe you should ask yourself why it's an option they have.
"but it's obvious to anyone (except gun owners) that the scale of gun violence and ease of access to firearms are related,"
No, it's obvious to gun owners as well. Obviously if one is concerned with "gun" violence, guns are a factor. The difference with gun owners is the perspective - a focus on other factors, a focus on overall violence/crime and not solely on the subset of gun violence, trying to find causation instead of correlation, regulations that would work while still providing protections, etc.
Probably the biggest issue preventing support for additional access restrictions is how shitty the justice system is and how the enforcing agencies routinely break the laws they are supposed to abide by. Things like ex parte hearings, lack of legal representation, lower standards of proof (and then judges violating the law by erring on the safe side), ammending previous agency regulations capriciously (and sometimes in volation of statute), etc. There's no genuine debate or search for compromise by either side. It's turned into a religious war.
> This happens everywhere. You should ask yourself why school shootings aren't also a problem everywhere.
Because people in those other places have fewer rights.
Taking away rights and adding restrictions are a time-tested solution to many social problems. America should try it. Get rid of the First and Second Amendments, and you solve school shootings, extremism, Trump, the threat to democracy, all in one blow.
The problem isn't really that society fucks people up and doesn't bother to help them, the problem is those people aren't impotent enough.
The fact that you consider shooting up schools to be a right and equate a lack of guns with impotence demonstrates why it's impossible to have rational discussion on this topic. The degree to which gun violence itself fucks people up in the US doesn't even occur to you.
To some degree it might. There are some instances of school attacks in other countries. I would guess that socioeconomic factors are a main driver in lower school violence levels in other countries. Even within the US, socioeconomic factors are main factors in localized variances. I would also guess that media coverage is much different in other countries, where the event is reported without being sensationalized and without constant coverage for days or weeks on end.
To be fair, in the European countries I've visited, the media coverage is less sensational, and less relentless.
That said, I do agree the gp's explanation is simplistic. There's clearly some kind of quest for transcendence involved in school shootings (not unlike e.g. Islamic terrorism); recognition for the act is definitely one element of that, but I think there's got to be more.
There is an anger in the US that a lot of people don't understand, including most Americans (and myself). It is very, very multifaceted. There is no single cause. Everything from politics to car culture and the way our cities are designed promote a strange kind of anger. When I travel abroad, I don't see this… like, hardly at all.
Decades ago, guns were even allowed in schools. As in, students could bring a gun to keep in their vehicle or even sometimes locker for use in after school activities like a hunters safety course, or various competitive shooting leagues.
Some schools still have shooting teams on school grounds. It was less than 20 years ago I knew students who would leave guns in their cars to later go hunting. It wasn't allowed, but nobody said anything and it was never a problem. I assume this still happens in some areas today.
It's a social contagion thing. A place or country that has never had such a thing happen might well go for decades with it continuing to "not happen". But if it starts happening, you get copy cat crimes. People who were apparently too dim to think it up on their own are inspired by the first criminal act, and repeat it. These secondary acts inspire yet more of the same. If the rate gets high enough (likely passed that threshold decades ago), it becomes self-sustaining.
It might even be how some riots boil up out of nowhere. Tends to happen alot with teen suicides too.
They might be news, but I doubt that cover each shooting for weeks like they do here. The media practically makes some of the shooters into celebrities.
Similar experience in the UK. I'd never even heard of a "lockdown" until I read about them on the American internet. Though apparrently they do exist here now. Our gates were also usually wide open, and you could then enter the building by numerous doors (apparently there was no gate or fence at all until a few years before I started). And definitely no security personnel
There is of course the notable exception of the Dunblane massacre in 1996, which effectively lead to a ban on handguns. AFAIK we haven't had any school shootings since then
Same, we even had one where IIRC it was just that someone wrote "the bomb goes off at 3:00" in a bathroom an unknown number of days before they noticed. I think they made us turn in handwriting samples.
You would think they'd want the prior samples so the attacker doesn't change their writing for the sample. Or perhaps they could more easily identify it by comparing the samples to the prior samples and looking for who is disguising their style?
Almost 30 years ago, I attended a college prep high school in Santa Clara County that allegedly removed all of the lockers because of pipe bomb explosions in the 1970's. The safety rationale was "lockers plus bombs equals shrapnel." The concrete footings for the lockers were still present throughout the school's outdoor halls. The campus was completely open and each classroom was a free-standing building.
When I was younger I worked at a restaurant and someone called in a bomb threat. Super fun. We all stood in parking lot looking at the build while we asked each other when it would blow up. I never did.
As I remember the guy who called in the threat did it from a convenience store pay phone where a cop was parked. They said they caught him minutes after he made the call.
For me it was the mid-90s and my sister the late 80s. She had school cancelled on final exam day due to a bomb threat. The first half of 11th Grade, for me, students were put in "lock down"[0] and then dismissed early due to a bomb threat.
When I went to High School the doors were left unlocked during school hours. It was normal for past students to "pop in" during the school day or in the afternoon for social visits to teachers. We had hall monitors who would question why you were roaming the halls if you looked young enough to be a student but a simple "I graduated last year and stopped in to catch up with my programming teacher" was all that was required all but one time I stopped in (they made me get a pass from the office all of once). I'm not saying "it was safer this way" but I often wonder if the increased security -- sometimes approaching "prison security" -- has the side-effect of some segments of the population "behaving accordingly."
There were school shootings "in my day" but those were limited to rough schools in the inner city. They were reported along-side all of the other crime happening "in the high-crime areas of the city", brushed off by most of us.
Weapon policy was much more lax when I attended school. I routinely carried a 3.5" pocket knife to school because I was irritated with dullness of the various wire cutters/tools in my electronics class. My electronics teacher regularly borrowed my knife without questioning "why in the hell a HS student is bring what looks like a switch-blade to school" (I was always seen as "one of the good kids", though).
We lived about ten miles from a large rural High School, as well. I remember picking up a cousin at his school around hunting season and being surprised, back then, to see pick-up trucks with gun racks proudly displaying scoped rifles in both the staff and student parking lots. This was, of course, "prior to Columbine" and I suspect they put a stop to that shortly thereafter.
With news attention on school shootings and not bombs, it makes sense that hoaxes tend to focus in that direction. School shootings get a lot of coverage with the focus then usually shifting to legislation aimed at restricting gun ownership[1]. The issue is that it's caused people to identify "the problem" as "school shootings" rather than "mass casualty events."
Bearing in mind that the perpetrators of these sorts of things are often of the mindset of "taking out as many people as possible while committing suicide", if it were actually possible to "ban all firearms" in the US, the problem would not be solved. As a High School kid who's parents do not/would never own a gun ... extremely conservative, yet pro-gun control parents[2] ... I had no access to a firearm and no clue how I would acquire one. However, the summer before my senior year in HS, myself and a few friends went off into the woods with a pipe bomb I had made out of things from my Dad's basement and "black powder" salvaged from Independence Day incendiaries. We wanted to make "the mother of all M-80s." The device was smaller than most handguns, easy to conceal and easy to ignite. It would have been devastating if exploded in a hallway.
To this day I have never seen such a powerful explosion in person. "Fingers plugging ears" was not enough to prevent dampening of our hearing by 90% instantly. Despite being an "empty pipe bomb" (lots of "powder" but no screws/bolts/other shrapnel), pieces of it flew -- easily -- twice as far as the distance we were standing from it. Had any of us been positioned at the right angle there would have been no time to react and I have no doubt anyone in the direct path would have been killed/injured in a manner at least as seriously as if they'd taken a large caliber bullet.
About the only solution I have heard that would make a difference is "more high schools with fewer students." The school I attended was designed with about a 750-total-student capacity in mind. My graduating class was 850. We were packed into hallways so tight that you basically squeezed your way to class with the running joke being that if you were too tired, just lift your feet off the ground and let everyone else take you there by force. Putting a high-trained police officer in that situation and asking them to "hit the shooter" would be practically impossible. Even assuming they hit the target, the bullet would travel through several other students before its settled into a wall/other sufficiently dense object capable of ending its journey.
[0] Something we didn't drill for back then except for tornado drills.
[1] Which, despite generally being a supporter of second amendment rights, I find myself supporting some of the more sensible approaches. Incidentally, I am not in support of "arming the teachers" -- the probability that adding another gun to the situation won't just result in more students being caught up in cross-fire isn't an adequate solution.
[2] I live in a blue collar community that fits well into the category of "Reagan Democrats" -- so much so that until my late teens I had no idea Republicans were pro-gun and Democrats were anti-gun. Every Democrat I knew was a card carrying member of a union (usually one specific union) and every one of them had a firearm collection of a small militia. Nobody in my family/extended family -- all conservatives -- owned a firearm.
Contemplating the risks and vulnerability this produces is itself part of the terror.
It's possible state-level actors could use public safety hoaxes to cripple an economy in the short-term with panics and interruption of events and in the long-term by preventing published in-person meetings of people for any purpose, including education.
Domestic criminal mischief, by teens or adults, scaled by technical means could also accomplish the same ends.
Perhaps police departments and education institutions will need to filter emergency comms to require origination from a STIR/SHAKEN-valid source.
> Following a query from The Post, Instagram removed the accounts for violating its policy against inciting violence, said a spokeswoman for Meta, which operates Instagram and Facebook.
Am I reading this right - that the Post interfered in an on going investigation by reaching out to Instagram about the accounts?
I assume if the FBI wanted the accounts closed they would have reached out to Instagram themselves, they were already issuing subpoenas to Google et al. The bans could have clued in the perpetrator to the extent of the investigation.
Instagram might be large enough of an organization that it can both cooperate with law enforcement investigators and handle press inquiries from journalists. And if they weren't large enough, hopefully their legal team is competent enough to direct the employs to attend to law enforcement first, everyone else second.
It is not just the hoaxes that scare kids and even the teachers, it is also the random shelter in place alerts. We had an incident at my neighborhood school where a guy on drugs drove into a school parking lot. This generating alerts and announcements in the school. One teacher starting barricading her classroom door.
I agree. I think it's mostly the overreactions that drive even more hysteria and fear. We had lockdowns due to a vehicle theft on the property, due to random drug sweeps, being inside with the blinds closed due to a sniper, etc. Nobody panicked or talked about nightmares, just as nobody did when taking precautions for things like fires with fire drills. They need to be providing context if these drills and hoaxes are causing these sorts of issues. Like here is the statistical likelihood of this happening to you vs that, at school vs at home, etc.
