Introduction
Introduction Statistics Contact Development Disclaimer Help
.-') _ .-') _
( OO ) ) ( OO ) )
.-----. ,--./ ,--,' ,--./ ,--,'
' .--./ | \ | |\ | \ | |\
| |('-. | \| | )| \| | )
/_) |OO )| . |/ | . |/
|| |`-'| | |\ | | |\ |
(_' '--'\ | | \ | | | \ |
`-----' `--' `--' `--' `--'
lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Some parents are conducting drills at home to teach their children what
to do during a mass shooting
By Faith Karimi, CNN
Updated:
6:30 AM EDT, Fri August 29, 2025
Source: CNN
Gunfire crackles and screams echo through Eeka McLeod’s home in
Phoenix, Arizona.
McLeod is issuing rapid instructions to her 7-year-old daughter Ella,
who is sprawled on her back on a bedroom floor.
“Stop breathing so heavy. Don’t move … little breaths, less,
less,” she tells the girl. “Relax your face … no smiles, no
nothing. Relax every muscle in your body.”
The dramatic scene isn’t a real shooting. The gunshots and anguished
cries come from a video playing on McLeod’s phone. Mother and
daughter are rehearsing for the unthinkable: what to do if a gunman
enters Ella’s school.
McLeod captured their shooting drill on video and on social media last
September, including TikTok, where it has been viewed more than 34
million times. She’s one of a number of moms around the country who
are taking extra steps to protect their children in an age of mass
shootings.
CNN spoke to several of these parents, who say they have been holding
such drills for months. But their grim rehearsals have taken on a new
urgency in the wake of at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, where two
children were killed and another 17 people were injured.
Many schools conduct active-shooter drills in which students are taught
to hide in locked, darkened classrooms. But parents like McLeod say
their home drills add an extra layer of protection.
McLeod’s video shows her teaching Ella how to feign death during a
potential shooting by remaining motionless, often in an awkward pose,
and holding her breath.
As part of the drill, she guides Ella through various scenarios,
including how to smear herself with someone else’s blood to appear
fatally wounded.
“We practice falling on her back, on her side, on her tummy,”
McLeod says. “I run the drills the same way I would if I was coaching
her team. My focus is not on emotions but on making sure I give her the
skills she needs to survive.”
McLeod says she has received criticism from people who say she is
traumatizing her daughter, and she recognizes such drills aren’t for
everyone. But she believes they are necessary in a country where mass
shootings are a recurring headline.
“My perspective is … why are teachers responsible for this? This is
my child. That is my responsibility,” she says. “And if she’s old
enough to go to school and die … because our schoolchildren are dying
… she’s old enough to know the truth.”
McLeod describes Wednesday’s deadly shooting at Annunciation Catholic
School as another stark reminder of America’s gun crisis.
“It’s our nation’s children who pay for the decisions of our
nation’s adults,” she says.
She started home drills after a deadly school shooting in Georgia
McLeod started her home drills in September 2024 after that left four
people dead and nine injured at a high school in Winder, Georgia.
The shooter, a 14-year-old student, hid an AR-15-style rifle in his
backpack and took it to school, where he fired into a classroom and
down a hallway before he was arrested. Ella’s elementary school
conducted an active-shooter drill days after that incident, McLeod
says.
Roughly 98% of K-12 schools in the United States conduct lockdown
drills, the Rockefeller Institute of Government, although the methods
vary in different states. Such drills cover a range of threats inside
the school, including criminal activity and active shooters.
Ella recounted how students hid in darkened classrooms and squeezed
behind desks and cabinets as part of the drill, McLeod says. But when
McLeod asked her if she knew the reason for the lockdown drill, she
shrugged her shoulders.
She told her mother the teacher had described it as a “mild practice
thing” to avoid making the students anxious, McLeod says.
“I kind of sat there … and decided the best course of action for me
as a parent was to be as honest as possible,” she says.
Choosing her words carefully, and avoiding loaded words such as
“murder,” she tried to explain.
“I told her, ‘The reason you’re actually doing these (drills) is
because people are coming into schools with guns and they are shooting
children.’”
McLeod says her daughter laughed it off and assumed it was her
mother’s dark sense of humor. That’s when it hit McLeod that Ella
did not fully grasp the seriousness of the threat.
“It occurred to me just how asinine the concept of school shootings
is. How ridiculous and insane it sounds to (a young child) that people
would come in and kill children in a school.”
Days later, she says, she had her first active-shooter drill at home
with Ella and has conducted them regularly since.
In the TikTok video, Ella lies with her arms at her sides and stifles a
giggle.
“Dead people don’t smile,” her mother says.
McLeod says she hasn’t yet talked to her daughter about Wednesday’s
shooting in Minneapolis. She’s aware that the play-dead drills
wouldn’t likely help Ella in such a case, because the Minneapolis
shooter did not enter classrooms but fired into windows from outside
the building.
So she’s planning a new kind of lesson: She’ll take Ella and her
10-year-old sister to a shooting range so they’ll be quicker to
recognize and react to gunfire – even if they can’t see the
shooter.
One mom considered buying a bulletproof backpack for her daughter
CNN spoke to three parents who conduct active-shooter exercises with
their children at home. Two of them did not want to be identified for
fear of backlash.
One mother in St. Louis says the 2012 school shooting at , where 26
people died, was a turning point for her – even though she was not a
parent at the time.
As soon as her daughter was old enough to understand, she says she
started teaching her to run and hide if someone started shooting.
After the May 2022 shooting at , she says their drills became more
frequent. Her daughter was in elementary school at the time, so the
Uvalde shooting hit close to home.
“We started teaching her how to play dead,” she says. She also
taught her daughter that her focus should be on saving herself – not
anyone else – if a shooter shows up at her school.
Her daughter is now 9, and they continue to conduct the drills at home.
But it never gets easier, she says.
“She’s very sensitive and I am not able to keep myself together
while we have these talks — we usually cry together and talk about
why it’s so important,” she says. “It’s not possible to not
cause fear and anxiety. This, unfortunately, is the reality of life for
schoolkids in the US now.”
Amanda, who lives in Puyallup, Washington, says she’s teaching
similar lessons to her 8-year-old daughter. The lessons sometimes
require difficult conversations.
When her daughter said she planned to save her best friend if a shooter
came to their school, her mom was blunt in her response.
“I had to, in no uncertain terms, tell her that if she tried to
protect her friend, she would also likely die,” she says.
Amanda says she started teaching her daughter while she was in
kindergarten how to stay quiet and motionless during a shooting. She
briefly contemplated buying her a bulletproof backpack but ultimately
opted for a multicolored book bag.
Her child sees a therapist to address her anxieties, she says.
“Unfortunately, it isn’t an irrational fear,” she says. “All I
can do is lean on the tools we practice in therapy and our daily
routines to help her manage it.”
Wednesday’s Minneapolis shooting hit Amanda especially hard because
one of the children killed is the same age as her daughter, she says.
Her daughter is at summer camp and likely doesn’t know about the
shooting yet, she says. She tries to limit how much news exposure she
gets.
Her daughter starts school next week, and they usually have a safety
talk the night before. But she says she’s not planning to mention the
Minneapolis shooting.
“I think more than anything, this (shooting) will reinforce my
messaging about being aware of your surroundings and people,” she
says. “I’ve been trying to help her strengthen that situational
awareness for everyday things like grocery shopping … getting her to
apply that in school might be a challenge, but beneficial.”
Critics say active-shooter drills can traumatize children
As of this week there have been 44 school shootings so far this year in
the US — half of them on K-12 school grounds. Eighteen people have
been killed, and dozens injured, according to by CNN.
The unpredictability and trauma of school shootings poses a huge
challenge for parents and teachers, says Lisa Morgan, president of the
Georgia Association of Educators.
“Parents are being forced to make some very hard decisions about what
they share with their children,” she says. “We have accepted that
there will be violence in our schools. And so our efforts are toward
anything we feel like we personally can do to ensure we survive.”
School shootings account for less than 1% of the more than 44,000
annual gun deaths nationwide, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a
nonprofit that advocates for gun control.
But they have an outsized impact on communities, forcing schools to
take action.
While the vast majority of schools now hold them, there are no uniform
regulations for lockdown and active shooter drills.
“It gets very confusing because it varies by state law and then it
goes down to the individual school districts and then even individual
school preferences,” says Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician and
senior advisor at Everytown for Gun Safety.
Some schools have used pellet guns and fake blood to mimic the scene of
a shooting, she said.
Everytown and other gun-safety groups there’s insufficient research
that active-shooter drills are effective in protecting students and
staff during actual shootings.
In 2022, Everytown for Gun Safety partnered with the American
Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association to
produce . It linked the drills to increased depression, stress and
anxiety in children.
Andrews said she empathizes with McLeod and other parents who fear for
their children’s safety.
“My heart breaks for parents who are trying to grapple with this
public health crisis that is gun violence … and trying to feel some
sense of agency over what they can do to protect their children,” she
said.
But she’s not convinced that active-shooter drills, especially those
involving children, make students safer. Children could face long-term
effects from losing their sense of physical and psychological safety in
a classroom, Andrews says.
“As a pediatrician, I’m also always going to be thinking about
compounding trauma for children with drills that … cause anxiety and
stress,” she says.
She suggests instead that parents protect their kids by securing
firearms at home. The majority of school shooters under age 18 get
their guns from the home of a parent, friend or relative, she says.
And if children must take part in drills and emergency planning,
parents and teachers should consider their age, developmental stage and
how they handle crises, Andrews says.
“Assure them that it’s our job to protect them and keep them
safe,” she says. “Validate their feelings of fear and anxiety.”
She tries to strike a balance between fear and readiness
McLeod is unfazed by criticism that her home drills are too graphic for
her child, calling them an essential survival tool in today’s world.
“Just like we were taught ‘stranger danger’ as kids… but with a
gun,” she said.
She has since made her TikTok account private due to ongoing
harassment, she said.
“Not everybody agrees with what I’m doing … but I will do
anything it takes to give my child any leg up in life that they need to
stay alive,” she says.
Ella’s pet chicken, Barbie, died last fall, which has made the
concept of loss a little easier for her to grasp, McLeod says.
McLeod says she’s struggled with finding the right balance between
teaching her child how to survive a shooting and making sure she’s
not traumatized. All the parents CNN spoke with share similar concerns.
If she does nothing, McLeod fears her daughter will freeze if violence
strikes. But if she does too much, she fears harming the child she’s
trying to protect.
But even with this uncertainty, she says she’s positive that she’s
doing the right thing.
“I would rather have my kids scared and alive than naive and dead,”
she says.
<- back to index
You are viewing proxied material from codevoid.de. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.