America's Overprotection Epidemic Will Have Consequences
Overprotection can be under-protection.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, many Americans stopped flying. Fear of Al Qaeda attacks pushed many to drive instead. Few argued against this exodus from air travel — the terrorists used airplanes, not cars, to launch the attacks in New York City and the nation’s capital.
Their fears were understandable. But their reaction may have cost more lives than it saved. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2004:
Immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Americans afraid to fly took to the nation's highways, a decision that many experts on risks said could be a fatal error: Driving 1,000 miles poses a greater risk of deadly accidents than flying the same distance. Statistics show the risk experts were right.
In the first analysis of U.S. Department of Transportation data for the last three months of 2001, a study finds there was a significant increase in the number of fatal crashes in this period compared with the same period in the year before the attacks. Because of the extra traffic, 353 more people died in traffic accidents, calculates Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, an expert on how people respond to low-probability but high-consequence events called "dread risks."
Telling Americans that they were better off continuing to fly after 9/11 than hopping into cars for long distances was a nearly impossible task. Availability bias tells us that human beings tend to misjudge the probability of events that immediately come to mind.
The horrifying 9/11 attacks served the purpose of making the threat of terrorism ubiquitous in the American imagination. Osama Bin Laden essentially achieved his goal of drawing America into prolonged conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the prospect of extremely rare terror attacks overtook the threat of much more common car accidents and fatalities for many Americans.
Yet if we had been able to think through the tradeoffs of all the behavioral and policy choices we made after 9/11, we may have saved a lot of lives (both here in the United States and abroad). But it would requires recognizing that measures we believe to be protecting us from X may be failing to protect us from Y.
The 1999 Columbine High School massacre was one of several events that helped transform how Americans think about the risks their children face at schools. Eric Harris and Dylan Kleebold’s act of mass murder set off a furious debate in American politics about what we need to do in order to keep our students safe (much of that debate is chronicled in Michael Moore’s 2002 film Bowling For Columbine).
Subsequent high-profile school shootings, including the attacks on Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, pushed lawmakers to adopt a new framework for preventing school shootings.
Around the country, states began to pass laws requiring students to take part in active shooter drills, where they are tasked with preparing themselves for the possibility that someone tries to kill them.
In 2015, at least six states had these drills. Following the massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, state legislatures pushed for even more measures, and as of this writing at least 40 states require their students to actively prepare for the prospect of a school shooter.
In the rush to pass these laws and implement active shooter training, few lawmakers asked themselves exactly how common school shootings are. In 2018, I happened upon the answer, which was found in research by Northeastern University scholars who looked at the trajectory of mass shootings and school shootings in the three decades between 1992 and 2015.
I summarized their research as so in a reported piece:
They found that schools are actually increasingly free of mass shootings, which they define as a shooting in which four or more individuals are killed by firearms. “There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” Fox said in a statement about the research, noting that there were four times as many children shot and killed in schools in the early 1990s as today.
More children are killed every year drowning in pools or in bicycle accidents than in school shootings, Fox added. Over the past 25 years, around 10 students per year were killed in gunfire at school. To put that into perspective, in the fall of 2017, around 56 million students attended public and private public elementary and secondary schools.
While school shootings are no doubt terrifying events, they are actually quite rare. Asking students everywhere to actively prepare for the remote chance they ever encounter one seemed to me like overkill.
Many of the well-meaning people I presented that article to did not agree. Every life’s sacred, so why shouldn’t schools do everything they can to protect every child? Well, one reason would be that overprotection against school shootings can translate into under-protection against under threats to child welfare.
Everytown for Gun Safety, one of the major gun control groups, admitted as much in a little-noticed report from 2020. After reviewing the evidence on their impact, Everytown and the nation’s two major teachers’ unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association — concluded that they would “not recommend these drills for students.”
The groups quoted psychologists and specialists who work with children who worried that the drills were having a devastating impact on mental health. “What these drills can really do is potentially trigger either past trauma or trigger such a significant physiological reaction that it actually ends up scaring the individuals instead of better preparing them to respond in these kinds of situations,” Melissa Reeves, a past president of the National Association of School Psychologists, told Everytown.
While children and teenagers are increasingly physically safe in the United States, thanks to the general decline in crime that occurred during the 1990’s, anxiety and depression have been soaring. It’s entirely possible that the understandable adult reaction to rare but terrifying school shootings is largely serving the purpose of making our students’ lives worse through increased stress and anxiety about something that almost certainly will never happen to them.
Sadly, it appears that the Parkland shooter may have even utilized the knowledge he gained from the active shooter drills to plan his attack. Because these sorts of shootings typically involve shooters who attend the school themselves, the drills can serve as a training ground for would-be mass murderers.
This brings us to the latest debate about protecting our children. Let’s be clear: the COVID-19 pandemic has been a huge threat to American lives. We’ve lost almost 700,000 people.
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