Active shooter situations are traumatic to children – even when they are just drills | Sabrina Vourvoulias

The stress and potential harm of these simulations in schools should not be underestimated, especially when they are repeated

After Sandy Hook, students across America have seen schools introduce active shooter simulations involving gunfire, masked men running down school halls and "victims". These drills are realistic, and in some cases, downright terrifying. Arguments that support them hinge on the belief that the verisimilitude predicts actual behavior and increases the chance of survivability in a real event. That may well be true, but it ignores the fact that active shooter drills themselves can leave scars.

When I was a child growing up in Guatemala City, the school I attended spent a fair amount of time drilling us on how to survive active shooter situations. They had to - Guatemala was knee-deep in a decades-long armed internal conflict, and we were often close to (or caught in) the crossfire between the military, paramilitary, police forces and presumed guerrillas.