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Last month, a principal in Winter Haven, Fla., was suspended for allowing police to stage an unannounced “school shooting drill” in his school’s classrooms:
It took frightened teachers, students and parents all by surprise last week when armed officers swept through classrooms with guns drawn during the drill at Jewett Middle Academy Magnet School in Winter Haven.
Now, there’s fallout. Principal Jacquelyn Moore has been suspended and a school resource officer has been reassigned to road patrol. It sparked an internal investigation and changes to district policy.
Superintendent Kathryn Leroy is apologizing to students and parents for the scare at the school and claiming the principal used bad judgement, when allowing officers to use guns during the drill. Leroy promises it will never happen again.
Parents say it better not. “I have never requested an active shooter drill be performed with students present and officers having weapons in their hands,” says Leroy.
Leroy told school board members even she didn’t know that a school resource officer would draw his loaded pistol, and a patrol officer would be armed with an AR-15 during the unannounced lockdown drill at Jewett Academy.
It had students ducking for cover as if an active shooter was in the building. Parents were never notified.
That no one involved even considered the unnecessary terror the drill would inflict on students demonstrates just how ridiculous the panic over these shootings has become. And it isn’t just in Winter Haven. Consider this utter insanity in Troy, Mo.:
In a cramped, carpeted amphitheater in the basement of Troy Buchanan High School, 69 students are waiting to die.
“You’ll know when it pops off,” says Robert Bowen, the school’s campus police officer. “If you get engaged with one of the shooters, you’ll know it.”
“When you get shot, you need to close your fingers and keep ‘em in,” adds Tammy Kozinski, the drama teacher. “When the bad guy and the police come through, they’ll step all over you, and who will be saying they’re sorry?”
“Nobody!” the students cry in unison.
This isn’t a bizarre, premeditated mass murder or some twisted sacrifice led by a student cult. These are the 20 minutes preceding an active shooter drill, the 13th one Missouri’s Lincoln County school district has staged in the past year.
All but 69 students have gone home for the day on early dismissal. These volunteer victims, mostly culled from the school’s drama class, are outfitted in fake-bloody bullet wounds, still wet and dripping down their foreheads, necks and chests. Bowen tells them what to expect: They’ll see “bad guys with AR-15s” shooting blanks during a simulated “passing period”—the moments when one class ends and the other begins. PVC pipes will be dropped on the floor to approximate IEDs. Crystal Lanham, a baby-faced freshman with long, gently-crimped brown hair, receives the dubious honor of being chosen as one of the gunmen’s hostages. She’s thrilled.
“I just really wanna get shot,” she jokes. “Is that weird?”
Yes, it is. And it isn’t healthy. It’s twisted and obsessive. I mean, 13 times in one year? The odds of your average school seeing even one on-campus homicide is one in several thousand — never mind an actual mass shooting. Yet these drills are getting more common. In one Chicago school, officials fired blanks in the hallways, apparently to “make students and teachers familiar with the sound of gunfire.” When the parent of a third-grader complained about the intensity of an unannounced shooter drill in Cahokia, Ill., last year, the principal responded: “I’d much rather your children be a little bit scared and alive.” In another unannounced drill at a special-needs school in Harlem, a panicked faculty member called police. Browse the media write-ups of these stories and you’ll see children who volunteered as “victims” posing as corpses, complete with bullet holes in their heads and shirts soaked with blood. We’ve lost our minds.
In September, the Wall Street Journal reported on a rash of lawsuits from terrified victims of mass-shooter drills across the country, not just at schools but also at businesses and nursing homes. Some were announced, others were not. The paper reported that six states require such drills. At least four of those (Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Missouri) have lax concealed-carry laws. What happens when someone who wasn’t in on the planning decides to stop one of these fake shooters?
