Quit Scaring the Kids

People should be ashamed of themselves for taking this horrible tragedy in Newtown Ct. and using it to scare little kids.

Why did so many school districts in the United States rush to practice their security drills immediately after the shooting?  What real purpose did is serve except to scare the kids?

Explain to me how scaring elementary school age kids is going to make them safer?  I remember as a kid in third or fourth grade having to get under my desk in school, or "duck and cover" while on the playground in a exercise that was supposed to prevent us from being vaporized if a nuclear bomb were to go off in the neighborhood.  Even as kids, we knew these drills were futile, the TV people told us so.  So, we went to bed at night dreaming about being vaporized.

Would we have dreamed about it anyway?  Maybe, as it was all over the news.  But the schools were the only real re-enforcement that such an incident was possible.  If you are a kid, you do not understand probability, or risk analysis, you only understand what adults tell you.  And if you are told to practice something, you, as a kid, assume that practice is for an upcoming event.  This is not to mean I am against practicing emergency drills, but let's be careful about how we explain them to the kids.

I would like to see a quick poll of how many elementary kids think they are in danger of being shot and killed while at school.  Unfortunately, I would bet that number is extraordinarily high while the chances that a kid would be shot at school are microscopically slight.

I know people say "We must do anything to protect the children, there is no limit."  Well friends it is time for the adults in the room to stand up and say, yes, there are limits and we need to analyze and understand our actions and what the unintended consequences are before we implement something.

Tom, how can you say we do not do everything we can to prevent children from being killed?  I will give you a couple of examples and you can go from there:

1.  Cars, we allow kids to ride in cars traveling 75 mph in Texas.  Many parents drive much faster than that, even with speed being the number one cause of traffic accidents.  Parents still run red lights with their kids in the car.  Parents drive with kids in the car after having a drink or two.  A quick, kneejerk fix:  at a national level, we could reduce the speed limit to 20 mph.  At that speed traffic deaths would be minimal, if there were any at all.  Hello, I am talking about saving lives here.  In 2009 there were 1,314 kids under 14 killed in automobile accidents, and over 179,000 injured.  Where is the outrage?  Lower the speed limit to 20 mph?  Save the kids.

2.  Swimming pools.  Swimming is one of the top killers of children.  Yet, fly over Laredo and look at the swimming pools.

Both of the above are examples of risk.  Both have bad consequences if abused foolishly.  Yet both are legal and are practiced with the understanding that children will die in accidents that could be prevented if very strict laws and bans were put in place.

So, after all this, my point is, do we put our children in school prisons, with metal detectors, razor wire, steel doors with no windows, playgrounds surrounded by 20 foot high walls with armed security guards manning towers?  Or do we learn to understand risk and make adjustments to our security without scaring our kids?

What say you?