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As students face more active shooter drills, anxiety on the rise

Students interviewed this month in Washington, D.C. said they are frustrated and anxious about the almost daily occurrence of active shooter drills, which have been on the rise at public schools over the last two decades.

Meanwhile, researchers are divided over whether the drills actually add to teenagers’ anxiety or are needed to help students understand how to cope with the threat of a shooter at school.

Eric Perless, 20, a student at American University, recalled his experience with lockdown drills as a teenager.

“We would have active shooter drill lockdowns once every two months,” Perless said. “It was scary especially since sometimes they didn’t tell us it was a drill so it was definitely traumatizing.”

In remembrance of Columbine’s deadly shooting of 1999, students nationally protest school gun violence on April 20, 2018. (Photo by Michael Fleshman courtesy of Creative Commons)

Colton Browder, 18, a student at the University of North Carolina, also recalled active shooter drills at his high school.

“Our lockdown drills at our school were horrible procedures,” Browder said. “I remember thinking that the lockdown drills weren’t even helpful to prepare you for an actual active shooter.”

In Washington, D.C., school leaders have a School Emergency Response Plan and Management Guide, signed in 2009. It says that drills are “essential to practice” to familiarize school personnel, staff and students with what they would do in case of a natural disaster or “manmade” threat.

School shootings in America have become almost a common occurrence and so have active shooter drills.

In a 2018 master’s thesis from California State University, researchers wrote: “The research found that participants, on average, are moderately anxious about the possibility of an active shooter situation at school and their internships.”

Other research from the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry written by Dewey Cornell, a professor at the University of Virginia, stated that: “Massive public attention to school shootings has created the misperception that schools are dangerous places, even though crime statistics show that schools are one of the safest places in the United States.”

Ana Ferrer, 19, a student at the University of Puerto Rico, had a school shooting threat at her school and was scared to attend school because of this.

“It made me feel uncomfortable to know I couldn’t go to my own university,” Ferrer said.

Brittani Riddle, a staff member at American University, said she’s never been in an active shooter drill, but she understands the fear and the potential impact of drills on mental health.

“I think it may unfortunately cause a sense of fear, but it also teaches people to be mindful that things can happen because unfortunately this is the world that we live in,” Riddle said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 7.4 percent of high school students in 2011 reported being threatened or harmed with a weapon on school grounds. Those day-to-day events are what Cornell writes that school safety should prioritize.

“School safety should focus on the everyday problems of bullying and fighting,” Cornell wrote in the 2015 study.

 

 

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Background checks big issue after U.S.’s worst mass shooting

After traveling to Switzerland, Australia, China, Japan and Germany, Stephanie Viehman arrived back to America noting one substantial difference between those countries and her own: gun control.

“They can’t conceptualize why anyone would need them,” said Viehman, of Ohio, about people in other countries with stricter gun laws.

In the week after the June 12 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, the U.S. Senate addressed several issues related to background checks and, once again, found itself nearly divided along party lines with some legislators and Washington, D.C. residents saying special interests are once again in charge.

Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy introduced a measure that would have strengthened background checks for those trying to acquire guns. Further, the amendment, known as S.Amdt. 4750, would have put in place research on criminal and mental health history, immigration status, indictment status and drug use as a part of its background provisions.

It failed, garnering only one Republican vote.

“I’m disappointed by the results tonight, but far from surprised,” Murphy wrote in a news release on his website in June. “We knew breaking the NRA’s stranglehold on this Congress would be a long, uphill climb.”

On the Republican side of the aisle, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced an amendment that sought to “address gun violence and improve the availability of records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System,” according to Grassley’s website. Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein vetoed it saying it didn’t go far enough to protect the public.

“If we use very narrow lists, if we do that, we’re left with a bill that has no teeth and misses many individuals who shouldn’t be able to purchase guns,” Feinstein wrote on her website.

Residents and visitors interviewed this week in Northwest Washington, D.C. said they don’t trust adequate legislation addressing gun control will happen this year–an election year in which 23 Republican senators are up for reelection–and said many leaders use the Second Amendment as a shield to stop what they see as important next steps in the gun control movement.

“Today’s lobbying world is clearly why they’re against it,” Washington D.C. resident Paul Alagero, 57, said of background checks.  “As much as everybody has the right to guns, it doesn’t mean everyone should have a gun.”

Many believe special interests and lobbying have taken over the debate and make it nearly impossible for conservatives on the Hill to take a stand on any issue related to the Second Amendment.

“It’s crazy,” said Rick Landry, 22, an American University law student.

The National Rifle Association each year donates millions to candidates in both parties although that money largely goes to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which wrote on its website that the NRA “is opposed to virtually every form of gun regulation.”

That powerful lobbying influences legislation, but a majority of Americans actually favor universal background checks.

A June 2016 Quinnipiac University poll showed 93 percent of Americans support gun background checks. That’s up from 86 percent who favored them, according to a 2015 Gallup Poll.

Viehman argued that a strong group like the NRA should be expected to have a lasting influence on the government. She said if they are that strong and wield that much power, they must represent the views of many Americans.

“Lobbying is what our country was founded on,” Viehman said.