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By Elizabeth Chuck
When he was confronted with an armed man in his Colorado school early in the week, teenager Kendrick Castillo complied with the commitment he had made long ago in the case of an active shooter on his campus: he decided to rush the shooter, taking a fatal blow that his classmates a chance to flee.
The movement has been widely hailed as an act of heroism. But some school safety experts and psychologists fear this indicates growing pressure from American school children to counter threats to their schools – an unfair wait that sometimes puts students at risk where it may not have existed. not yet.
They say that the need to retaliate comes mainly from an active reaction protocol adopted by many schools and workplaces, called "Run, hide, fight," which encourages those who are on the road to "life". an armed intruder to escape or hide by doing things such as using furniture to barricade doors and, as a last resort, to attack the assailant.
Not all security experts are in favor of this type of training. Ken Trump, President of National Safety and Security in Schools, provides safety training in kindergarten to grade 12 schools, but encourages educators to isolate or use others methods for "running, hiding, fighting", one of the protocols known as option-based training.
"A number of experienced school security experts have strongly warned against option-based training, and recent incidents are even more worrying that some people are preparing their children to become martyrs." , did he declare. University of North Carolina student at Charlotte, who also lost his life last week when he confronted a gunman to save other people.
Option-based training, which also includes ALICE, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate, or ALICE, "does not take into account age and development factors," Trump said.
"We ask children to make executive decisions, vital decisions: are we going to attack or not?" Do we run or should we lock ourselves up? he said. "We ask them to make executive decisions where science tells us that their brains are not fully developed."
B.J. Casey, a professor of psychology at Yale University who studied the brains of teens, said that when adrenaline swelled, this can cause a person to make thoughtless decisions.
But as brains are still evolving in their early twenties, adolescents are particularly likely to be "much more reactive or impulsive" when they are threatened, and they still develop the ability to think about "future consequences of their actions, "especially in emotional situations. situations, she said.
This could make them particularly likely to respond to a deeply traumatic incident such as a shootout without thinking about their actions, she said, although she added that, in Castillo's case, this seemed to be "a case of peer protection and also a fight or flight response".
Some experts nevertheless argue that students have been conditioned to want to fight excessively when they face a firearm at school.
Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International, a nonprofit school security consultancy, has sometimes stated that, when a firearm is brought to the campus of a school, the person who the door does not intend to carry out a shootout. Sometimes it's a student who just wants to "show" the weapon, he said, or at other times, maybe an armed individual wants to create a situation hostage, but has no plan to actually shoot with the weapon.
"Students and educators were shot and wounded while the person was not shooting, did not shoot," he said.
The protocol "run, hide, fight" is too simplistic, said Dorn. It encourages educators to be trained in various scenarios and the management of these, including locks and reverse evacuations, where students quickly rank inward when a shootout takes place in the playground or elsewhere.
Amy Klinger, founder and program director of Educator School's School Safety Network, pointed out that even though heroes who face gunmen often make headlines, the chances of getting shot at Are still so rare that it is difficult to know if to fight against the aggressor always the right move.
She added that she suspected that some cases of armed men attacks were purely instinctive and unplanned as a result of active training at the shooter set up at the time. ;school. She stated that it was important to focus on ways to escape or hide from gun violence if you are within shooting range of a shooter but not too much close to be able to attack the shooter.
"There is a difference between staying here and thinking" it's happening in front of me "and" I'm down the hall and I'm supposed to go down the hall and shoot down the gunman, "she said. do not have any choice but to die, so something has to happen, but say that in a room full of students, we will all charge, no. Maybe in this situation, you will have more chances to survive climbing through the window or in the other direction.
All the experts said that Castillo was heroic in his actions and Trump said he was encouraged by the fact that the attention of the media had been focused on "the heroes and not the shooters".
"But I'm starting to wonder if, in doing so, we are unintentionally sending the message to children that it is this way we should react," he said. "I am really worried that we are preparing our children to be martyrs."
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