My three-year-old masters mass-shooter drills while US leaders fail to act

The headlines as I write this are dominated by the horror in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers have been killed at school. The week before, the news was of carnage in a supermarket in Buffalo, where 10 people were killed. By the time you read this, there will likely have been still more mass shootings in the United States, and at least one will take place in a school. The US averaged almost two mass shootings a day in 2021, and this year already there have been 27 shootings in school settings resulting in injuries or deaths.

For a long time I resisted writing about gun violence in America because I didn’t think grieving people needed more hectoring from Australians about how easy it is to fix the problem. I still don’t want to do that – John Oliver pretty much said it all, anyway, in an episode of his TV show on Australia’s gun control laws.

Recently, though, the consequences of this madness arrived in my home, in a small way: my son had his first mass shooter drill. He is three and in nursery school. The principal sent an email explaining what the drill would entail: “We do not explicitly tell the children that we are practising for an active shooter during these drills,” she wrote. “Rather, we try to make this a hiding game of being quiet in our classrooms with the lights off.”

During the drill, the principal explained, the teachers would draw the blinds, cover the windows of their classroom doors, and lock the doors from the inside. Kids would be told to sit quietly away from the doors while administrators would walk around, making sure all doors were locked. The whole thing would take about two minutes.

The report from the teacher that day was that the kids had actually enjoyed their “modified version of hide-and-seek”. When I vaguely asked my son about it that evening, it seemed to have made no impression at all – I guess grown-ups are constantly telling kids to do things which make no sense to them – but my heart was still heavy.

The report from the teacher was that the kids had enjoyed their “modified version of hide-and-seek”.

Chris Murphy, a US federal senator who saw his state of Connecticut suffer the monstrous violence of the Sandy Hook massacre of first-graders back in 2012, channelled the impotent rage so many Americans feel after Uvalde when he asked his fellow senators, “What are we all doing?”

Pacing on the royal-blue carpet of the Congress, he continued: “Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate, why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority, if your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing?”

It reminded me of how John Howard talked through his thinking on enacting gun control laws after Port Arthur. In his biography, he writes matter-of-factly of the landslide election victory he achieved earlier that year, “Now, what is the point of having a majority if you don’t do something with it?”

A few days before Uvalde, the day after Buffalo, my son’s class was introduced to the idea of “courage”. We talked about it that evening. “Courage doesn’t mean you’re never scared,” his father clarified. “Courage means doing something even though you’re scared.”

American children are being asked to summon unbelievable courage every day. My greatest wish is that their representatives show that same mettle.

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