I Am Well Versed in Active Shooter Training. What About First Aid? (opens in new tab)

This is very normal in the US. Many schools prevented classrooms from opening the doors to improve ventilation during covid, because it would violate their policy about keeping the doors shut in case there was a shooting.

And yeah we have a relatively high amount of shootings, but they are still rare in an absolute sense. A lot of this is driven by an industry that sells bulletproof desks and junk, and needs to keep people afraid because it's profitable.

Edit: I should also point out that shifting responsibility for active shooter response to the individual, the victim, is a way to avoid discussions about actual policy change or to hold people with real power accountable at all.

I did secondary school in the US, and there are lock-down drills that are mostly motivated by school shootings. In fact the first time I experienced practicing one was shortly after Columbine in a school not that far from Columbine. That said, the only time we actually had real lock-downs were for things like phony bomb threats, or dangerous criminals being pursued by police nearby.

On the other hand, I did some primary school in New Zealand and we had what I would now call a lock-down for the same reason, where school shootings really aren't a thing. I think schools ought to plan for that kind of thing for safety. I think the kind of first aid they teach you in active shooter training if you happen to take them as an adult (I did because I had a buddy trying to start a business after leaving the military doing it) is actually also really good first aid for anyone who's doing extreme sports, or going in the wilderness, or working around heavy machinery, etc.

I don't think any of that means that people shooting up schools is accepted as normal.

edit: Now that I've read TFA, I'll also add that I've worked in the US my entire adult life and I've never had active shooter training that was mandated at work, or heard of anyone I know having that.

Active shooter training is one of the weird cultural phenomena that comes out of the US that I've only noticed fairly recently and so haven't been numbed to it yet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_... lists 12 school shootings in 2022 until now!

Mass shootings are apparently treated not as symptom of an ininimal social environment or deficient access control to means but more like the inevitable change of weather. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

The US has, on average, slightly more than one mass shooting a day[1] (where mass shooting is 4 or more victims). Training to be able to deal with that seems prudent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

Class of 2012. I think we did one of these once. But it was like 5 minutes. When a shooter situation is declared you stand against the wall with the door and turn off the lights to make the room appear empty to someone in the hall.

That’s about it.

The train stations also have these on tv screens nonstop which are basically leave if you can, hide otherwise, and if there’s no option left, swarm the shooter as a group.

Edit: wait, no I remember something that was insane to everyone. The teachers all had keys to the rooms that locked from the outside, and were required to lock them and then leave on their own. That was wild, both from the perspective of putting all the teachers in the open hallway and filling everyone’s head with this imagined scenario of a guy blind firing at the class through the door window.

Yep. It's common in the US. I wouldn't call it normal by any stretch (at risk of normalizing this bullshit), but it's definitely common. My kids have gone through it every year. Heck, I think they've had more shooter drills than fire drills.

When my oldest kid went through one for the first time in 1st grade, they came home and broke down about it. Said they didn't want to die at school and was afraid the bad men would attack. We ended up going through therapy with a child play-therapist which helped my kiddo a lot (in case anyone might be running into this issue and is unsure of what to do).

Somehow this is considered OK, but the "trauma" of wearing a mask to prevent an airborne illness was too much to bear.

I've had elearning on it working for an investment bank in the UK. The US and UK version of the training is subtly different. For the UK version it says run and hide. For the US version it says run and hide and if you can't then fight back.

Class of 2010 here in the US and I don't know anything about these trainings. I'm also interested to hear if this is a thing now.

Very normal. Also class of '04.

When I graduated, they had just started doing them. But the baseball field was still unfenced, and little kids from the neighborhood could still use the outside hallways to play tag in.

By the time my youngest sibling graduated in '11 training was every year, the school was no longer public property that anyone could hang out on, and there were armed police patrolling it.

We had one in Quebec, Canada (~2012). It was in high school though and we did not do an actual drill, only had a police officer come and explain the situation, what could happen and how to handle it, etc...

Each door had a little cardboard thing to cover the window in case of an active shooter situation to prevent them from peaking in.

As everyone else has said, these are common in the US. Generally, they happen once a year. These kinds of "physical safety" trainings are pretty common in the US. Fire drills are conducted once per quarter. Anti-bullying/harassment training is conducted once per semester.

I should add (as a current high school student in Washington State) a couple days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, the DHS asked high schools to practice "chemical lockouts": ensuring all students are inside, sealing externally facing doors, etc.

Also, at least in my state, in the mandatory physical education class for high schoolers (which is only for one year), we do learn CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, and a few other first-aid techniques. However, by the time students graduate, they will have forgotten all of that training.

Looking at my required annual list of "generic" corporate training now: Active Shooter Training, Security Awareness, Diversity, Emergency Awareness, Violence Prevention, Fraud Awareness, Sexual Harassment Prevention. All are 1/2 hour to hour video based trainings.

Even in Canada, we did this when I was in high school 7 years ago. How to hide, barricade doors, refuse to open the door after it is closed no matter who is outside as they might be a hostage, etc.

There were earthquake drills, shooting drills, "lock down" drills and bomb threat drills throughout school.

Basically all of them consisted of "Sit under your desk and play thumb wars quietly with classmates and listen to your teacher or the classroom speakers instructions"

It isn't normal, I don't know anyone that has had such training, but it does exist as a thing (mostly in elementary schools). Frankly, I think "active shooter training" is neurotic and a waste of time, considering how extremely rare it actually is.

I did these drills in Canada sometime before 2005 (when I graduated).

This became very common after Sandy Hook, afaict.

Have you just not been watching the news for the last 15 years?

Absolutely not okay with it being the normal, if you have any ideas for solving the US guns problem, let me know.

I think because it is a tangible thing one can do. Regardless of opinions on constitutionality of firearms ownership, nobody wants to see attacks and shoots. But what can be done? Changing the laws is not likely because of both disagreement and gridlock, though political activity is one avenue one can take with hope for longer term impact. Policing or mental health policy and programs in the in the local communities also might have some impact, but again most individuals won't be able to make an impact (not that they couldn't but won't in practice without a high degree of engagement).

But hosting a class? That is something everyone organization has full autonomy to successfully accomplish. It is within the organizational and budgetary resources of small companies, big ones, churches, schools, local community centers, etc.

Think about the duck and cover training for surviving a nuclear blast. You might not be able to do much as the average individual to avoid nuclear confrontation, but you can mitigate it on the margin with some tangible steps.

It's insane, especially since the kind of serial shooter thing (not an attack targeted at a specific person, not an argument in a parking lot that turns deadly but then stops there, none of that) it's meant to defend against is rare—as rare as one might hope? No, of course not. Rare enough that widespread training against it is unjustifiable? Yes.

I'd not have expected it beforehand, but it turns out that even fairly mild & common versions of the training (not the extreme sorts that occasionally make the news) can leave adults literally shaking. It's really hard on some people. Yet we subject a huge percentage of our children to it. The risk does not justify that.

Passing any sort of gun control is impossible for political reasons. Republican legislators and judges block gun control whenever they can. It's about one third moneymaking for manufacturers and two thirds culture war at this point. The hardline opposition mainly dates to the Obama administration, when the Republican legislative strategy became blocking anything that Obama wanted to do.

Many Republicans will tell you that there is an absolutely vital constitutional right to own, carry, and stockpile all kinds of firearms. Some of them believe it. But this doctrine was only popularized in the 1970s and still does not have majority support today [1].

[1] https://www.pollingreport.com/guns.htm

It's not like we don't have violence in the UK. We don't have active shooters but we have more than a few active stabbers and active bombers.

It isn't. The number of children that die in school shootings is an average of 35 per year. That is of course horrible, but in comparison to other sources of childhood death it's tiny. 150 a year die of food allergies. Eight are killed by lightning every year. Does lightning get 1/4 as much attention as school shootings despite causing 1/4 as many deaths?

Even comparing, very specifically, intentional firearm homicide of children outside of school to school shooting deaths shows that, per hour, schools are fantastically safer than when kids aren't at school. The US has a gun violence problem but school shootings are just a barely-audible echo of it.

It seems like it would increase the number of shootings by putting the idea in children's heads.

Some of the "anti-training" sentiment comes from concern that the drills themselves can be very traumatic for children who are already trying to understand the real shootings that they hear about.

It's very hard to measure/analyze the risk from drills vs. the risk from no drills, especially if the rate of shootings is changing over time.

I neither disagree with the practice, nor am upset by it. In fact this HN thread is the first time in my life (I'm in my 30s) that I've even heard about it. And I have worked in the past with firearm training companies. It's just something entirely new to me right now, if you can believe that.

I am upset that this is necessary, and even more upset that everybody accepts this "status quo" as normal and the (usually very timid) calls to do something about it only lead to more guns being sold.

Are "bleed kits" worth the cost?

You'll likely never need one and it will be lost/defunct after a few years (due to heat & moisture). Kit or no, you need a first aid class and a first aid kit. Rather than another expenditure and one more gadget to keep track of, stay with the basics.

Otherwise people will buy a "bleed kit" on Amazon and toss it in the trunk, thinking that they're fully prepared for an automobile accident or such. When an accident does occur, they may or may not remember the kit, take it out and read the instructions manual. Meanwhile someone will die b/c the kit owner wasn't educated enough to "apply pressure to the wound."

[Cue spammers citing questionable personal anecdotes where a "bleed kit" in a car trunk saved them from amputation/death.]

That stinks. I used to work for a major public utility, and it was the complete opposite. Mandatory drills for all sorts of contingencies, fully stocked disaster cabinets on every floor, influenza vaccines offered onsite for free, heck they even had a pandemic ops center where they could lock in a bunch of healthy people to keep the lights on while everyone else has the plague. We made videos on how to lift things without getting hurt — and this was the infosec group! The company even did stuff like give out small free flashlights,

At the time it was a little tiresome, but after the fact I appreciate the time and resources spent on it.