Braden Kling, an eight-year-old from Middletown, Ohio, knows what to do. His school has prepared him for the moment of reckoning. “We have this big board and we hide behind that. If he comes in, we start throwing stuff,” he explains. “Pencils, chairs, boxes, books, markers. And then we escape.”
In the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, politicians and educators have debated fiercely about how our nation should protect school children—with some schools turning to controversial tactics. Soon after the National Rifle Association’s spokesman Wayne LaPierre proposed stationing armed guards in every school in America, an Ohio school board approved plans to arm janitors. South Dakota recently passed a law allowing teachers to pack heat in classrooms. A high school in suburban Chicago held a drill in which police fired blanks in the halls in order to give staff and students “some familiarity with the sound of gunfire.” Unsurprisingly, these kinds of measures have brought with them risks, accidents, and negative reactions.
Perhaps the most controversial approach has been instructing school children to fight back. After Newtown, one commentator met with derision when she suggested that kids should be trained to “gang rush” a mass shooter rather than to hide from him. The US Department of Homeland Security recommends hiding or fleeing if possible when faced with the threat of a gunman, and fighting back only as a last resort.
Ever since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High, K-12 schools in many states have been required by law to have emergency management plans; often these include lockdown drills for dealing with a violent intrusion, although such an event is statistically rare. The majority use “passive” procedures in which students and teachers are told to lock their classroom doors, turn off the lights, and evacuate when possible.
But after a terrible year of mass shootings, the idea of teaching school kids to respond aggressively has gained some fresh attention. One training program used in schools called “A.L.i.C.E.”—which stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate—has drawn unprecedented interest since Newtown, according to its creator, Greg Crane, a former SWAT officer and school teacher in Texas.
Should We Really Teach Second-Graders to Attack Mass Shooters?
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