Hey, teachers going back to work and parents of kids going to class for another school year, the FBI's got a video for you! It’s a six-minute PSA called “Run. Hide. Fight. – Safe in Schools.”
A friend who teaches at the Northern Virginia school where it was filmed recently sent the clip to me. For those who didn’t and won’t, I watched. The feds' attempt to sterilize school shootings would be comical if the real-world body count weren’t so high. There are no guns or deaths in the whole movie. No ambulances in the parking lot. Not even a single scream.
Good god, what a phony, deflating piece of crap.
The film opens before the first bell of the day with the principal, a P.E. teacher, a science teacher and a librarian strolling down a hallway making small talk about exercise, school fairs and field trips. The bell rings, and everything’s peachy until about the one-minute mark, when gunshots start pop-pop-popping over a soundtrack of ominous keyboard music. Nobody screams.
Nobody ever screams. Kids in the gym calmly obey the P.E. teacher as she calmly counsels them to run outside. She then turns to the camera and wants viewers to know that when their school gets shot up, they should, “Keep your empty hands up and follow all instructions by the police.”
Cut to the science class where kids calmly obey their teacher when he calmly tells them to hide. He then turns to the camera to tell viewers that when their school gets shot up, they should not “get under desks and freeze” because “that makes an easy target for the attacker.” An apparent maintenance man with a nametag (“PAT”) on his shirt appears in the science teacher’s classroom with bloodstains from an unseen arm wound and is calmly told, “You’ll be fine.”
The librarian is then shown in the library calmly telling two underlings that the unseen gunman is blocking their only exit, and there’s nowhere to hide between the bookshelves so they’re going to fight. “If you control the weapon, you control the shooter,” the librarian tells the audience, while calmly giving out battle plans to her two coworkers: “I'll go for the gun. Kate, you go for the arms. Alex, you go for the head.”
Bookish-looking Alex calmly nods her head in the affirmative and grabs a decorative rock off a shelf. I guess that stone gives her a slightly better chance when the shadow of the apparent gunman appears and they head off to engage him. But in the real world none of these folks are getting out of this sort of encounter without bullet holes.
This isn’t the real world, of course. This is a government movie. The screen goes dark before we see cops running into the library and the librarians telling them, “We got him!”
Soon enough, all the main characters reunite outside in the parking lot, and everybody’s happy. The film ends with a tutorial on how to follow the run, hide, fight plan. In the end, only Pat the maintenance man spilled any blood. But, again, he’s going to be OK.
Far as I can tell, the Department of Justice never put out a press statement or otherwise announced the release of the school shooting video. I can't blame them. Whoever greenlit this worthlessness probably had to run and hide from their superiors once it was finished. An FBI spokesperson declined to answer any of Defector’s questions, including queries regarding who produced the movie or how much money was spent making it.
According to the data site Statista.com, there were 82 school shootings in the U.S. last year. All of us who send our children to school in this country are playing the odds.
Happy school year, everybody. You’ll be fine.
