Nineteen children and two adults killed. The massacre perpetrated by Salvador Ramos in an educational center in Uvalde (Texas) has entered the most tragic and black history of the United States. Could the massacre have been prevented somehow? Did the victims have any chance to save their lives? What went wrong with security at Robb Elementary School?
Uvalde’s is the 27th attack with fatalities in an American school so far this year -the 118th since 2018-, according to data collected by ‘Education Week’, an organization that tracks shootings. A harsh reality that has worsened in recent years and has forced students and teachers to establish rehearsals among their school routines to know how to react if there is an attack with firearms inside their center.
Starting in 1999, after the Columbine High School massacre, which killed 15 people, these rehearsals became integrated into American school life in the same way as first aid or firefighting courses.
The types of tests and the methodologies that are carried out vary between schools, although most states have laws that establish measures to protect students from attackers. And in a society as polarized as that of the United States around the use of firearms, this is where the opposing positions arise between those who are in favor and those who are against students being instructed in schools to deal with these types of attacks.
After the massacre in Sandy Hook in 2012, when a shooter took the lives of 26 people, the formula known as “run, hide, fight” – “run, hide, fight” – was activated, which was born from the study of different shootings in schools and was reflected in the 2013 guide of the Department of Homeland Security. In a video from this agency, people are urged to look for “sharp or heavy objects” that can be used to “disable the attacker” in case they cannot hide or run.
For proponents of such “realistic” rehearsals, simulating stressful situations better prepares students and staff to deal with a shooter and helps them avoid the “deer in headlights” reaction than when startled by noises or car lights end up running towards the road instead of away from it.
Faced with those who consider that this type of training is necessary, the US Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association already joined in 2020 with the rights defense group Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund to demand the end of exercises that simulate violence with firearms. They argue that the drills “terrify” children, so they argue that “traumatizing students while we work to keep them safe from gun violence is not the answer.” The president of the National Education Association, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, defended in a statement collected by AP that “if schools are going to do drills, they have to take measures to ensure that they produce more benefits than harm”
Abby Clements, who was a second-grade teacher at Sandy Hook School, told the AP after the event that, in her opinion, a drill would not have saved lives there because the students “knew what to do.” “We taught them what to do in a emergency. We knew the evacuation routes and where there was a safe spot in the classroom where no one could see us from the outside. There is no way to be prepared, he asserted, for the infinite ways a shooting with weapons of war can unfold.”
Sandy Hook was not the only case where drills failed to prevent a massacre. Months before the Parkland (Florida) institute had another massacre with 17 dead, its students had participated in a rehearsal. It didn’t help them. The perpetrator of the massacre, Nicolas Cruz, did not bother trying to get into the classes. He just shot at the people who had stayed in the corridors.
