I, like you, was trained to act not hide. Unfortunately a school is a no weapon zone. I cannot carry in a school. That does not mean I would not carry on school grounds, but the law says no weapons on school grounds. Ideally an armed presence for the protection of the children and others would be the answer. If only we could convince the school districts of this. I don’t know how I would react in this situation. The school had an active shooter protocol and it was followed. I believe the police arrived on site as soon as they could. However, I also believe that an armed presence on site could have prevented the fatalities. We will never know. Until people accept that we are living in a violent society and it is the violent people that are the problem and not the weapons we will continue to have to deal with this problem. Guns, in the hands of people trained to carry and use them and trained in the laws regarding their us are one answer. We will not ever know if it would have been the answer in the Nashville attack, but it could not have hurt to have an armed presence at that school.
The shooter literally shot her way into the school through a locked safety glass (I am assuming) door. Gunshots without a suppressor are loud. There HAD to be some type of warning. At the first gunshot, students and staff should have been evacuating through alternate exits.
No they did not know it was a single shooter, but even if there were multiple shooters stationed around the school, moving targets outdoors are A LOT harder to hit (especially when you’re not prepared) than a bunch of motionless ones at extreme close range. If you disagree, I invite you to try your hand at the Fort Benning moving target range.
Hiding in a room with only one entry/exit is simply waiting to die at the hands of a determined shooter.
The one exception to this might be if you had armed and trained responders on site immediately engaging the attacker. Then keeping the students in place might make the defenders job of finding and engaging the attackers easier.
Otherwise I agree that die in place is a very questionable strategy. Ideally there would be coordination with the people engaging the attacker and others getting nearby students out of their classrooms and away from the shooting. But that would require a lot of training and coordination on the staffs part. As well as a lot of very quick decisions based on limited information.
But as I’ve said elsewhere, these situations are incredibly rare with kids having much higher chances of being killed or injured in accidents on their way to and from school. So I don’t think excessive measures are necessary. Just letting these cowards know that there are armed and trained staff on site (especially if they don’t know which staff are armed) would go a long way towards making these incredibly rare events even rarer.
We also need to get the news media to stop glorifying these shooters and the weapons they choose to use. As well as getting the news to start reporting all the stories where armed citizens take these shooters down before they get a chance to start their body counts.
I read one article that said she shot the lock out of a door. That’s entirely possible, but it also smacks of some Hollywood bullsheet. The early reports tends to be unreliable, anyway.
I’ve done a small bit with a group focused on school security. In the 21st century, glass doors on schools should be a rarity. If Covenant had glass doors, that might have made it an inviting target for a suicidal predator.
The video showed the child killer shooting out and shattering the glass with a couple of shots and easily stepping through them. So not only were the doors glass but they weren’t even well enough laminated to hold together after just a couple of impacts.
the glass in doors are designed to ‘‘crumble’’ so no glass shards can injure
a person.
seen a teenager run right threw a glass side window
the glass shattered into little pieces [looks like rock salt]
she thought it was an open door.
Seen glass designed to do that. But I’ve also seen special laminated glass that can get shot or hit multiple times and aside from the bullet holes it stays safely together.
3M makes a laminate you can add to doors and windows that does the same thing. If this attacker had to spend more than the 5 or so seconds it took to get through the doors it might have saved a life or two.
I am seriously looking at this option.
According to a press release:
“The motive for Hale’s actions has not been established and remains under investigation by the Homicide Unit in consultation with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. It is known that Hale considered the actions of other mass murderers,” the press release said. “The investigation shows that Hale fired a total of 152 rounds (126 5.56 rifle rounds and 26 nine millimeter rounds) from the time she shot her way into the school until she was killed by police. Two officers fired on Hale.”
Emphasis mine.
Note the nod to copycats. The press loves mass murderers, and this particular killer studied the actions of her predecessors. Our society needs to stop worshipping monsters, because we’re breeding more monsters.
Also… 152 rounds fired? I’m shocked that only 6 people were killed. What was she doing with all those rounds? Shooting her name into the wall?
I think we’ve been fortunate so far that most of these mass murderers seem to have gotten the majority of their training and tactics from video games and movies where the ammo is virtually unlimited and accuracy isn’t a requirement. Also probably helps that video game controller skills don’t directly translate to firearm skills.
Agree on the need for media to stop aggrandizing these losers.
I had a 4th grader explain to me that their school has an open floor plan, so there’s no place to hide when they do lock-down drills.
How crazy is that? We never had to worry about such things when I was in elementary school. Hide-and-seek was for recess, not for staying alive.
From the mouth of babes!!!
I’m unfortunately starting to view the games of hide and seek with my son as real life survival training.
I’m sure that’s what it was based on. Our ancestors never knew when some troglodyte was going to invade their cave.
BTW, this is also not ok.
LGBTQ group targeted in alleged ‘slaughter’ threat in response to Nashville shooting (msn.com)
We are trying to figure out when to start teaching our 3yo. very smart and outgoing Granddaughter that there are bad people out there without scaring her. 
That’s definitely the challenge. I think it’s very important for kids to feel protected and empowered as apposed to threatened. It’s a lot easier now that my son is 8. Several years ago I started the what would you do if game. We started with some pretty ridiculous scenarios like what if a dinosaur tried breaking into the house. He thinks dinosaurs are cool and knew they are extinct so it wasn’t a scary thought process for him but some of the solutions we came up with would work well and I think would pop into his head if he was presented with a real threat.
He has been taking martial arts for a year now. They do a good job of making the training fun while going over the differences between dealing with school yard bullies vs really bad people without making the bad people sound too scary.
That is a good idea. Thank you. 
Interesting observations. If you look back at many of these shootings, Sandy Hook, window or door gets shot out, threat enters. Uvalde, door gets shot out, shooter enters. Tennessee, door gets shot out, shooter enters. No armed guard on the other side. How stupid can people be not to see a possible solution?
I’ve often felt that the physical/medical aspects of radical trans surgery has a definite effect on the psyche of a normal person. Consider that if a normal medical procedure on one’s genitalia can come with considerable post-op complications, can you imagine what the medical complications could be with procedures that are not normal? If you’re always thinking about pain in that area you’re probably a short step away from going nuts - no pun intended.