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another school shooting out here in SoCal, my mind marvels at just how little time has passed between my graduation and the frequency of school shootings and active shooter drills in schools. Just gonna kinda tweet a thread of consciousness for a sec.
I graduated from high school 15 years ago. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot of time between then and when kids started having to have training for an active shooter situation.
One thing we DID have was bomb threats. And we had a LOT of bomb threats.
One thing we DID have was bomb threats. And we had a LOT of bomb threats.
Smithson Valley High had a pretty huge problem with bomb threats in the early '00s. I think I can recall one year where we had about six of them. We started having bomb threat drills since it was becoming such a regular occurrence.
But the whole thing was a joke. The drills, the actual threats, all of it. The whole thing was comedy and was utterly pointless. Not a single bomb threat was ever real. Every time we got one (either from a note found in the bathroom or somebody calling it in at the office)...
...we would all just roll our eyes and march outside with our classmates. Some loved it 'cause it means class was knocked out for a day. Other smarter kids realized it sucked because our school had to schedule us make-up days due to bomb threats.
And drills for bomb threats weren't really conducted any differently than fire drills. You stuck with your class as your teacher led you outside, specifically to the football field, where we sat on the bleachers for a few hours.
Which, in and of itself, was dumb. After a couple bomb threats had come and gone, we all knew that, if there WAS gonna be a real bomb, obviously the person was gonna put it in the bleachers at the football field 'cause they kept taking us there.
I saw a whole lot of SWAT/bomb squads in those handful of years. Obviously they were professional and taking it seriously because they had to, but all it ever served to do was have all the students gawking at the squads and their K-9 units.
Only a handful of years later, nobody would be concerned about bomb threats anymore (if they were ever REALLY scared of bomb threats). Only a handful of years later, school shootings would be the norm, and somehow I was just a little early for them.
And it's just SO WEIRD how I'm not THAT much older in the grand scheme of things, and everything is so DRASTICALLY DIFFERENT now.
You think you can still remember what it's like to be a kid in school 'cause it wasn't THAT long ago, but you don't know what it's like to have to live through ACTUAL school shootings where someone's going to try to kill you, where you gotta be ready to just hope you live.
As always, I don't have the solution to this. But doing NOTHING is not the solution. Kids shouldn't have to live thinking this is normal. Nothing about this is normal.
I think that's all I got for now.
I think that's all I got for now.
