Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Slate Presents: Lockdown
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2019
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you have any school-aged children in your life, you know that lockdown and active shooter drills have become a routine part of their school experience. These drills now take place in 95 percent of American schools.
What you’re about to hear is a collaboration between Slate and The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in the United States. It’s an audio project featuring firsthand accounts from kids of all ages about what it’s like to go through these drills. We hear a lot about school shootings, but we’re only starting to have a larger conversation about how they affect even those kids who may never go through one.
You can hear more from the students at slate.com/lockdown.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Dahlia Lithwick, and I am here to tell you about a special project that we've been working on here at Slate, and we want to share it with our amicus listeners too. |
| 0:10.8 | By now, we're all aware, I think, that students across the United States learn to do lockdown drills. |
| 0:16.5 | That's just a part of going to school today. |
| 0:19.0 | What we may be less aware of or, frankly, haven't really wanted to think about much is how these drills are affecting the millions of kids who do them and then do them and do them from kindergarten through 12th grade. |
| 0:31.6 | Well, you're about to find out this special audio story from Slate and the Trace is titled Lockdown, Living Through the Era of School shootings, one drill at a time. I am in kindergarten. First grade. Second grade. Sixth grade. Eighth grade. Ninth grade. I'm in the 10th grade. I'm in 12th grade. And I live in San Diego, California. I'm a touch in New Jersey. In Louisville, Kentucky. Baltimore City. |
| 0:56.5 | L.A. County. South Orange, New Jersey. I live in Seattle, Washington. |
| 1:06.3 | I'm Elizabeth Van Brocklin. I've been covering Gun violence as a reporter for The Trace for four years. |
| 1:12.9 | And for the past couple of months, in partnership with Slate, my colleague Alon Stevens |
| 1:17.0 | and I have interviewed two dozen students of all ages in towns and cities across the country. |
| 1:23.5 | We wanted to know what they see, what they hear, and what they feel during what has become |
| 1:28.9 | a routine experience in America. |
| 1:31.6 | The school shooter drill. |
| 1:34.8 | As I listened to these kids in their living rooms and bedrooms, two things struck me. |
| 1:40.1 | First, this is a generation that has grown up doing lockdown drills. |
| 1:47.0 | Second, most of these kids know exactly what the drills are for, whether we adults realize |
| 1:53.0 | it or not. |
| 1:55.0 | Before I had these conversations, I didn't really understand how the constant threat of shootings has changed the experience of going to school. |
| 2:04.2 | You're about to hear from some of the kids we spoke to, from kindergartners through high school seniors. |
| 2:10.9 | You'll hear about the many different ways these drills affect nearly every student in the country. |
| 2:23.6 | Thank you. These drills affect nearly every student in the country. I call it usually the flip picture. |
| 2:27.2 | What can you see in this? |
| 2:29.0 | A tree frog. |
... |
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