Fire drills are a regular occurrence in schools despite school fires being very rare, and fatalities even rarer. That being said, active shooter drills are abject bullshit, just like “Duck and Cover” drills, which are no longer practiced.
“Duck and Cover” seemed to mostly be a political move to keep awareness of the Cold War and the Soviet Nuclear power, so maybe we can help this little girl (who probably doesn’t give a shit about the drills, and is just being exploited for her blood-dancing single-mother) by crushing the anti-gun political movement.
Plus by ending the “Gun Free Zone” status of Schools, active shooters will likely not bother with schools in the first place.
**UPDATE** Several in the comments have pointed out that “Duck and Cover” does have some validity to preventing injuries to people outside the primary blast radius of a nuclear blast. I will admit I lead with some per-concived notions I had and discounted what I read about the effectiveness of the technique.
Still my point remains solid, I have NEVER done a duck-and-cover, and frankly I don’t think many lives will be saved in the event of a nuclear blast because the technique is no longer taught. Now the risk of being caught in a nuclear blast is no less great now than in the heart of the Cold War. Just now rather than a Ruskie ICBM we’re looking a nukes from China or North Korea, or from a less advanced placement of a device from an Islamic state.
Why are Active Shooter Drills being practiced and not “Duck and Cover”? POLITICS and AGENDA, so I think the above article still stands! Thanks to all who left comments about my error.
Actually duck and cover had a valid use under certain ranges.
Far enough from the epicenter you’ll have a lot of wounds due to flying debris, especially glass. With warning duck and cover can be helpful against that.
Now what this image shows is that the antis are against even precautionary methods… when it suits them. Where in the previous image that John Oliver sure did love TSA rituals.
Yeah, the duck and cover drills would actually have saved a lot of lives and, by reducing a the number laceration and impact injuries, freed up medical personnel to deal with more critical cases. The argument that it doesn’t work is exactly analogous to claiming that tornado drills are pointless because no one can survive the eye-wall of a category 5 tornado, or that fire drills are useless because no one can survive being thrown into a furnace.
That said, you’re completely correct that the image is total bulls**t. Then again, why should you trust me? Captcha thinks I’m a robot 😉
Duck and cover = not silly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor#Injuries_and_damage
“A fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk, Yulia Karbysheva, saved 44 children from potentially life threatening imploding window glass cuts. Despite not knowing the origin of the intense flash of light, Karbysheva thought it prudent to take precautionary measures by ordering her students to stay away from the room’s windows and to perform a duck and cover maneuver. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated when the air blast arrived and window glass severed a tendon in one of her arms; however, not one of her students, who she ordered to hide under their desks, suffered a cut.”
I am on the Emergency Training and Emergency Planning group at the university where I work.
All they want to do is active shooter drills. I keep trying to tell them that role-playing what we do when the server room gets flooded and no one can get to youtube or facebook would be more productive, but those scenarios are not sexy so we do shooter drill after shooter drill…..
Do they do fire/arson drills? Because many more people have died from school fires/arsons than from school shootings. (Case in point: Bath School disaster, the worst school massacre in U.S. history. Though a gun was used, nobody was shot; it was used to set off explosives and incendiary devices.)
How about the various natural disaster drills (depending on your location: earthquake, flash flood, volcano, tornado, sharknado, etc.)? I’d have to check the records, but IIRC, in the past couple decades around here there’s been more in-school destruction/injury/death caused by earthquakes than by school shootings (and no, I don’t live in California). Plus, the scope of a natural disaster is larger: a school shooting immediately affects the school and the few-hundred-to-few-thousand people in it, but a sizable earthquake immediately affects everyone in a two-county radius. Which will strain emergency services?
But you’re right: those drills aren’t as sexy as the mis-named “active shooter” drills. Even if the scenario is more damaging and more likely to actually happen.
I threw an update onto the post, thanks to all who submitted information on “Duck and Cover”.