Reading another Boomer narrative about how school shooter drills are like the nuclear bomb drills they endured as children and how it's the same trauma and I am always frustrated by this because nuclear war was not something that ever happened. But school shootings happen ALL THE TIME.
My mom would go on about the trauma of duck and cover and it's like I get that was stressful for you but imagine it except now a school is blown up by a nuclear bomb dozens of times every year? It is a fundamentally different experience.
That is, not to minimize her trauma, but saying it's "just like" what kids are saddles with today i.e. active shooter drills is like comparing eggplants and shoes.
It's also often brought up in a way that's meant to minimize kids' fears like "we prepared for nuclear attacks and they never happened!" i.e. "you're anxious about nothing!" Which would be soothing if, like, school shootings didn't literally happen all the time.
Agree- I do use my memory of the fear and dread around nuclear war as a way of understanding my students' lives under today's conditions (esp. climate change), but our nuke/tornado drills were nowhere near as directly terrifying as shooter drills. Shootings seem as inevitable as climate change now.
Deaths from school shootings have gone up lately but there's on the order of 100 deaths annually which is 0.00018519% of about 54 million students. I'm fully in favor of gun control, but I'm also for keeping the amount of worry proportional. Students shouldn't believe that shootings are inevitable.
That presumes the dread comes from fear of personally being involved, not the uncertainty of individual risk along with the (virtual) certainty of more attacks. I think we agree shooting drills are more harmful than helpful.
The active shooter drills themselves are traumatizing. And (not only at schools but in public places and private homes) there is a mass shooting event in the United States pretty much every day.
I mean my kids high school got locked down at least 4 times because someone showed up with a gun. Nobody got killed, partly because of the lockdowns, but it's not a distant possibility.
I agree with you that it's totally different! The duck and cover drills never scared me--they were like fire drills. I don't remember any of my classmates being afraid. I'm sure I would have been scared of shooter drills though, especially if there were school shootings happening then.
I remember the teachers being annoyed that we weren't scared of the dirty commies coming to kill us, but I don't remember any of us being afraid. All of us in my school in the DC suburbs had folks who worked for the Federal government & knew the risks.
And if sometime the friggin police came into the school without telling the young boomers ahead of time and pretended the world was actually blowing up
My school playground just outside DC adjoined the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. I knew that if the Bomb fell I'd be vaporized, duck & cover be damned. But seriously, it just didn't seem real except briefly in 5th grade, during the 1960 missile crisis. Not at all like school shootings.
Nuclear devices were much smaller. You could survive outside the radius of the fireball, which was about 3 km, but blast injuries from exploded windows and etc were very common. And of course the first thing most people do without any training is run outside to look. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_an...
Thanks! That makes sense—like getting in a closet won't help if the tornado reaches one's house but it'll stop shrapnel injuries if the tornado hits the neighbor's place.
Safety theater, like removing your shoes and only carrying tiny bottles of shampoo on planes. I think a lot of us kids knew (I know I did), but kids do what their teachers tell them, knowing much of it is irrational. Or so it seems at the time.
One of my kids was really proud of how well he did during an unscheduled active shooter drill -- first one up and moving, got the door blocked and everything while other kids froze. He was happy. I was trying real hard to appear happy and not sick.
Yrs ago, I was going thru the basics during a drill, explaining where we'd go/how we'd leave if we could. I had pre-assigned leaders. I told them, "and I'll be the last out." A very assured boy (11) said, "No, Mrs. C. You would need to go with everyone. I'd go last." I wonder if he remembers this. 😭
GenX with a parent who told me EVERY NIGHT "I'll see you in the morning if the Soviet Union doesn't Push the Nuke Button" and it fucked me up bad
But nowhere nearly as bad as active shooter drills and the possibility of being shot every time I go to school would have. No contest.
And even if we accept their premise that they're the same thing and that they understand better than anyone, that just leaves it all the more infuriating that they're not bending all their political might to do something about what kids now are going through.
I'm in the UK. We banned pretty much all guns (without strict licences) after a school shooting in Dunblaine, Scotland. Never had one since. So all of this sounds bloody terrifying.
And 40,000 Americans did not die every year at the hands of nuclear weapons. And people did not walk casually around with nuclear weapons strapped on their bodies.
Maybe I’m showing my age but even here we got the whole Cassie Burnall shit. Seems like theres a weird pressure to be like, a good victim?
If it went down no one was expecting Boomers to Rambo their way out of a nuclear war? You werent getting someone else killed if you freaked out? Y’know?
It's definitely a different trauma. THAT BEING SAID, if you grew up traumatized by duck and cover drills, that's a damn good reason to want better for your grandchildren.
And tornado drills are nothing like either of those! Natural disasters are different from confronting human evil!
Another difference is that during the cold war the whole country was unified against the USSR and was actively trying to prevent nuclear war. Kids today are told we can't do anything to stop school shootings.
I went through them - called "civil defense drills," which meant that I really had no image of what the drills were supposed to be defending me against.
a kid in my class who was a real wise ass but also smart as hell once asked our teacher how on earth putting our heads between our knees was going to make the difference in the chance that we were about to be vaporized. she was not happy.
No matter what the issue, Boomers have to have been through, endured, or suffered more. "I paid off MY [$2,000] student loan debts! Kids these days are moochers."
Just doesn't matter what the issue. Boomers are just the most spectacularly selfish generation.
Also you’d think the boomers would be more anti-nuke because of that shit. Instead, half of them think the solution to foreign problem is to just drop a nuke on a country they couldn’t even locate on a map.
Also, right up until they wanted to weaponize it, the story I always heard about those nuke drills was about how awful and terrifying they were, and how angry the teller was that people acted like it was normal and okay…
But also.. we had no control over whether another country was going to nuke us. But our country would do everything to stop it!
Our country COULD do MANY things to prevent more school shootings and the adults are like.. it's not worth it.
Yup. Like, they absolutely never had these things happen and my eldest had a murder at her high school last year. I was in a lockdown at my last university. It's... a lot. (And in the end neither of those were mass shooters. That's where we've reached, where we differentiate.)
"Thank god this was just a regular gun murder instead of a mass shooter." (or in the case of the university - someone with an automatic weapon trying to commit suicide by police - which was only clear like an hour in when *somehow they'd magically not hit anyone with their chaotic shooting*)
Solution: Arm all the kids. Then, if an active shooter appears then our 3 year old can defend herself.
Or, move to Europe and leave the batshit insanity behind. 👍
