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The training is fairly reasonable for someone who has a reasonable expectation of engaging in combat. You need to drill reactions under duress until you stop th
by b_t_s 8y ago
The training is fairly reasonable for someone who has a reasonable expectation of engaging in combat. You need to drill reactions under duress until you stop thinking and just do what you've drilled instinctively. The problem is that that this is not a reasonable expectation for school teachers. They shouldn't and don't really have a statistically significant chance of seeing combat. They're also a population that strongly self selects for physical and mental inability to be effective in combat. For the majority of school teachers, trying to turn them into halfassed semi-trained soldiers is hopeless and cruel.
- bootlooped 8y agoIf you read the article it sounds like they just put them up against a wall and shot them in the back. It doesn't sound like training, it sounds more like punishment or hazing.
- b_t_s 8y agoI did read the article, and I maintain that it is training. It can save lives. They're trying to make you more afraid of dying through inaction than dying through action, and get you familiar with the fear so you don't freeze. This sort of training can be traumatic but it can also be effective. For young high agressive males, it's high on effeciveness and arguably lower on trauma, and reasonably justified if they are going into combat. For your average middle age female school teacher who has probably never even been in a fist fight let alone a firefight and probably never will, it's largely ineffective, much more traumatic, and likely pointless. I'm sure there were even a few teachers in that session who got some benefit from it. What is training for one person can be hazing for another. Try stepping into a ring with a thai kickboxer for some medium sparing in preparation for a fight. For some people that's just another day at the gym, while for others it's assault, and the most violent traumatic thing they've ever experience. The training has to be calibrated to the students, and in this article it clearly wasn't. To me it sounds more like executive incompetence/misunderstanding than deliberate malice.
- bootlooped 8y agoI'm not against pain being incorporated into training, but for this specific scenario I don't get how you go from "I have been shot in the back once with an airsoft gun" to "I must rush the active shooter or I will die".
- b_t_s 8y agoAlso, these _were_ just recreational airsoft guns, very comparable paintball. Lots of people play airsoft and paintball for fun in their spare time. Yea, you're supposed to have goggles on, and point blank shots are frowned on 'cause they hurt more, but it's not all that bad. Sure you might end up with some bruising and broken skin particularly with close range shots to exposed skin, but I'll still play in shorts and tshirt on a hot day and if I get lit up on exposed skin, meh, at least I'm not sweating as much. For the guys running these trainings who are used to shooting each other with paintballs fired from real firearms, airsoft is consumer grade toys, one step above nerf guns. This situation is like having a cross training day between the competitive cagefighting gym and the over 50 cardio kickboxing class...there's just _so_ much potential for that to go poorly.