Kids are a lot smarter than adults often give them credit for, and talk about things like these and other stuff among themselves. Is it better to let them figure it out by themselves, or is it better to give them reliable information? I vote for the latter. Even though no-one can ever really be prepared to get into middle of something like this, and in the panic everything learned can just fade away, it gives some kind of sense of (false, maybe) security to have at least theoretical information about what would be the best course of action in case something happened. I'm certain that every time something like this happens it's the topic in school corridors, and everyone is asking "what would you do".
Kids in most of the world have no idea of the true horrors that were perpetrated in Norway. They hear some stuff on the news about something that happened far away, they are not sitting at home panicing that a gunman is about to come barging through the door of the school. Now - if you start to teach them about the logistics of such attacks and how they should react etc., then they will assume the danger is very real and be very frightened.
Look at the numbers, look at the statistics, the events in Norway are very news-wortyh but very rare. Even in the USA, what is the percentage of school kids who have been killed in school shootings? It's going to be a millionth of a percent or something shockingly small like that. Then look at the numbers affected by accidents on the roads, or who get kidnapped. Those percentages are also small because we live in a very safe time relative to our past, but those small numbers are almost certainly much bigger than the number of kids who die in events like last weekend's.
Simply put, there are many much more important things we need to teach our kids that have a much better chance of saving their lives. Just off the top of my head I think it's vital that kids be thought road safety, that is where they are most likely to die early. I also think kids need to be thought about basic safety when they're out in public. Don't accept gifts from strangers, don't get into cars with strangers etc.. And of course, kids need to be thought to look after themselves online too. Not to mention the truths about drugs and sex. Kids are much more likely to overdose on something, get pregnant, or contract an STD than to be caught up in a school shooting.
You only have so much time, and kids only have so much attention, so you need to be sure to spend the limited storage space in their little heads wisely, and I don't think filling them with fear of gunmen is wise or helpful.
There is also the fact that you can't TELL someone how to react in a panic, you have to TRAIN them. Unless you've been trained the adrenaline rush will overpower you, and anything some teacher said will vanish from the mind in a millisecond.
Finally - if you kids ask you questions about stuff they hear on the news, you should answer their questions truthfully, but you shouldn't volunteer more than they ask for. That goes for anything adult really.
We said the same thing here in Finland before the school shootings. We have had pretty liberal gun laws, but they've never been a problem before these modern heroes saw what happened in USA and decided to go with it too.
Doesn't teaching kids about how to react and what to expect in shootings not make them more likely to happen? Wouldn't that create infinitely more copycats than just the US influence already has?
We can't really prevent it from happening again. I know Whisper doesn't like me going into politics so much, but we can't really ignore that one of the reasons here (in Finland) is that when the state cut funding in youth mental health care, it did a huge huge huge disservice to everyone. They have taken some actions back because of the fairly big raise in the suicide rates in teenagers, but the fact remains that it's not enough. When more and more children grow up in families that have unemployment and other social issues, the more there is need for real help for them. It's not only the poor children who suffer the impact.
For an avowed liberal I have some very old-fashioned ideas some things, and one of them is that I think greed has destroyed the fabric of society, and that we're failing our kids and indeed all our citizens. It's more than just taking away mental health services, but doing that is certainly exceptionally un-helpful. It's about not leaving kids out in education, about getting to know your neighbours and building up a community again, and it's obviously about healthcare.
Society always has an impulse to react to the last crisis out of passion and emotion, rather then to think analytically. In my eyes, if the lesson taken from these shootings is that we need to teach kids how to respond in shootings, then we've just fallen into that trap again.
B.
