Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "This Private School Trains Student “Warriors” To Swarm An Active Shooter (VICE on HBO)" video.

  1. I don't blame schools, teachers, principals and students for going this direction, and I guess it all ends up in a contract between parents and schools anyways. And I tend to agree with some of the stuff the principal said... but there's an inherent and insidious problem with the entire philosophy and ideas behind school mandated shooting preparedness training among other things, and it has a relation as to why shootings happen in the first place - it's how it becomes ingrained in culture. People will argue on this, as they should, and I myself wouldn't take sides because I'm not living that reality personally. But here's the thing: if a kid is taught from an early age to think of shootings as something so common that it's necessary to have training, it just enters the agenda. It becomes part of daily thinking, and it gets ingrained as more of a cultural thing. One could draw parallels to the earthquake training of earthquake prone countries, or the nuclear strike preparedness during cold war, but here we're talking about mainly domestic terrorism. The message behind all this is hard to control, and it can backfire *no pun intended*. It's something that most people who lived through the cold war will probably know about, there can and will be unintended consequences - it changes the way people think their own culture and live their lives. And I won't argue with people who are in the position of thinking that having training for the worst case scenario can be a good thing, and that it could give peace of mind for some kids who are already oppressed by current happenings. It can be true in several cases. But in a very basic sense, you are creating a culture that goes around the normalization of gun violence, and in a way, the glorification of guns in a general sense. Let's say a kid from the school grows up, for whatever reasons, to not be an upstanding citizen in the community. I think some people will see the message that he/she got while attending this school. With a gun, you can mobilize a whole ton of people, create a huge commotion, generate such a happening that forced kids to adapt the entire curriculum to go around it. He or she might use the training as a way to plan his/her own attack, and then the school will have to change it to take that into account, and then it becomes a vicious cycle. There's also the entire thing about introducing guns to kids at young ages... yes, they can be taught and see them as defensive weapons, and with the severety and seriousness that the topic needs to be approached, but people can never discard the fact that guns are basically tools for taking other peoples' lives. There is no other purpose. And then, depending how kids take it, there is potential for abuse, for misuse, and for a morbid sense of fascination that can turn out very very wrong, as we all know by now. And I don't have the answer, nor I can say that what the school is doing is wrong - different times requires different strategies for different situations. But it isn't great a situation where kids needs to prepare for stuff like that, or that parents, teachers and principals need to think about strategies to prevent loss of lives because of random shooters. There's a deeper problem in US culture in general, and I'm not sure if this helps.
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