The Lockdown Generation

Your five-year-old is practicing hiding from a gunman in a dark closet. And a study found it is giving them a 42% increase in anxiety.

That is not a political statement. That is a research finding published in Nature. Ninety-five percent of American schools now run active shooter drills. The vast majority of them do not warn students in advance. They do not provide mental health support afterward. They simulate the sounds of gunfire. They lock children in dark rooms. They tell kindergartners to be silent or they might die.

And then they send them back to math class.

What the Research Actually Shows

A 2021 study published in Nature's Humanities and Social Sciences Communications analyzed the psychological impact of active shooter drills on students. The findings were not ambiguous. Children who experienced these drills showed a 42% increase in anxiety and a 39% increase in depression. These were not children with pre-existing conditions. These were normal children responding normally to an abnormal situation.

A 2025 study in the Journal of School Health confirmed and extended these findings. The psychological effects are not limited to the day of the drill. They persist. Children develop hypervigilance. They have trouble concentrating. They begin to associate school with danger. Some develop symptoms that meet the clinical criteria for post-traumatic stress.

We are giving children PTSD in the name of keeping them safe. And nobody is asking whether this trade-off makes any sense.

What These Drills Actually Look Like

If you have not been in a school during an active shooter drill, you may not understand what your child is experiencing. This is not a fire drill. Nobody walks calmly to the parking lot.

An announcement comes over the intercom. Sometimes a code word. Sometimes an alarm. The teacher locks the door. The lights go off. Twenty-five children are told to get on the floor, against the wall, away from the windows. They are told to be absolutely silent. They are told that if they make a sound, the person with the gun might hear them.

Some schools play recordings of gunfire over the loudspeaker to make it realistic. Some have staff members bang on doors and rattle handles to simulate a shooter trying to enter. Some use simulation rounds. Some mark children with paint to indicate who was "killed" during the drill.

These are children. Some of them are five years old. And we are teaching them that the building where they spend most of their waking hours is a place where someone might come to kill them.

The Safety Theater Problem

The argument for active shooter drills is that they save lives. But the evidence for that claim is thin at best. There is no controlled study showing that active shooter drills reduce casualties in actual school shootings. What there are studies showing is that these drills cause measurable psychological harm to the children who participate in them.

We are subjecting millions of children to a documented source of anxiety and depression based on the unproven assumption that it might help in a statistically rare event. The probability of any individual child being involved in a school shooting is extraordinarily low. The probability that a child will experience psychological harm from an active shooter drill is, according to the research, very high.

That math does not work. But we keep doing it because it makes adults feel like they are doing something. It is safety theater. It looks like protection. It feels like preparedness. But the only measurable outcome is harm to children.

The Mental Health Crisis Nobody Connects

Antidepressant prescriptions for teenagers have surged 66.3% from 2016 to 2022. For teenage girls, the increase after March 2020 was 129.6%. The Annie E. Casey Foundation reported a 61% increase in school staff concerns about student depression and anxiety from the 2023-24 to the 2024-25 school year. The WHO found that teenagers are the loneliest age group on Earth.

And we wonder why.

Children spend six to eight hours a day in a building where they practice for mass murder. They absorb the message that their school is not safe. They internalize the idea that violence could happen at any moment. They carry that anxiety home. They carry it to bed. They carry it back to school the next morning.

Nobody is connecting the dots. The same institutions tracking the adolescent mental health crisis are the ones conducting the drills that contribute to it. They measure the depression. They measure the anxiety. They never ask whether the thing they are doing to children every semester might be part of the problem.

What Schools Will Not Tell You

Most schools do not inform parents before conducting active shooter drills. Most do not offer opt-out provisions. Most do not provide counseling or debrief sessions afterward. Your child may come home from school today having spent 30 minutes hiding under a desk in a dark room, listening to simulated gunfire, and you will not know about it unless they tell you.

And many children do not tell you. They have been told not to. They have been told this is normal. They have been told this is what you do to stay safe. So they absorb it. They normalize it. And the anxiety builds quietly, manifesting as stomachaches before school, difficulty sleeping, reluctance to go to class, outbursts that seem to come from nowhere.

You take them to the pediatrician. Maybe they get a diagnosis. Maybe they get medication. And nobody ever asks whether the environment itself might be the problem.

Homeschool Children Do Not Practice for War

Homeschooled children do not experience active shooter drills. They do not hide under desks. They do not learn to barricade doors. They do not associate their learning environment with the possibility of violence. They learn in a place that feels safe because it is safe.

That matters more than any curriculum choice or teaching method. A child who feels safe can learn. A child who is afraid cannot. And the research on active shooter drills tells us clearly that millions of children in this country are carrying fear into their classroom every single day.

This Is Not About Gun Politics

This is not an argument for or against any gun policy. This is about what we are doing to children right now, today, in the name of safety. Whatever you believe about guns, the question remains: Is it acceptable to cause documented psychological harm to millions of children based on an unproven assumption that it might help in a scenario that most of them will never face?

Every parent has to answer that question for themselves. But they should at least know the question exists. They should know the data. They should know that the 42% anxiety increase is real. They should know that their five-year-old's stomachaches might not be random. They should know that there is another option.

Your child does not have to grow up practicing for a worst-case scenario every semester. They can grow up learning in a place where safety is the default, not a drill. They can grow up without the weight of that fear. And you can be the one who makes that choice.