Meet Me In The Quad

Thanks to increasingly sophisticated drills, more American schools are prepared for a rage massacre attack than at any time in U.S. history.

In late April, student actors joined with police officials in Riverside, OH, to stage a mock school massacre. The "killers" used paint guns to take over Mad River Middle School; according to a WHO1 TV news report, they "took numerous individuals to make the school shooting look real."

In fact, almost no school rage attacks involve hostage taking, as Caldwell County, Kentucky's sheriffs observed. They're implementing a hot new plan called QUAD (Quick Action Development), a concept pioneered in Columbus, OH after the Columbine attack. "The philosophy is simple: stopping a shooter as quickly as possible to minimize other loss of life." You might read that and think, "Well, duh!" unless you're familiar with the surrender-monkey tactics employed at Columbine, where police and SWAT goons waited for hours after Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had offed themselves-allowing some of their victims to bleed to death-before moving in and giving an "all clear."

When I was in high school, "quad" referred to a school's central square, where the crushing social hierarchies were regularly reinforced. It's almost comforting to know that today QUAD refers to a plan whereby cops murder students who murder other students, perhaps because it means that what seemed unbearable at the time-white middle-class school life-a pain which we then dismissed as mere "whining"-really was objectively unbearable, judging by the insurgency it eventually spawned. What today's school massacres prove is that we were just too early, or too cowardly, to do something about that pain and injustice.

In Craig, CO, a drill involved some 50 student actors, scores of cops and city employees. The details are insanely funny: A real parent plays a "screaming parent," who, rushing to the school, gets "tackled by police," according to the Craig Daily Press. Law enforcement employed QUAD tactics, "unloading rounds from every weapon before entering the school."

If the strategy evokes Fallujah, many of these school-shooting drills were combined with drills to combat terrorist attacks. This acknowledges not only that some middle-class American kids are capable of terrorism, but also suggests their use of violence, like al Qaeda's, is a desperate reaction against everything hateful and oppressive in America. Indeed, Klebold and Harris planned to crash a hijacked jetliner into Manhattan if they survived Columbine; in Tampa, 15-year-old Charles Bishop commandeered a Cessna into a downtown skyscraper in early 2002.

As always, America's way of dealing with this is a hysterical aversion to understanding the causes, combined with ever-cooler plans like QUAD to crush it with force.