Some parents are conducting drills at home to teach their children what to do during a mass shooting

By Faith Karimi, CNN

(CNN) — Gunfire crackles and screams echo through Eeka McLeod’s home in Phoenix, Arizona.

McLeod is issuing rapid instructions to her 7-year-old daughter Ella, who is sprawled on her back on a bedroom floor.

“Stop breathing so heavy. Don’t move … little breaths, less, less,” she tells the girl. “Relax your face … no smiles, no nothing. Relax every muscle in your body.”

The dramatic scene isn’t a real shooting. The gunshots and anguished cries come from a video playing on McLeod’s phone. Mother and daughter are rehearsing for the unthinkable: what to do if a gunman enters Ella’s school.

McLeod captured their shooting drill on video and posted it on social media last September, including TikTok, where it has been viewed more than 34 million times. She’s one of a number of moms around the country who are taking extra steps to protect their children in an age of mass shootings.

CNN spoke to several of these parents, who say they have been holding such drills for months. But their grim rehearsals have taken on a new urgency in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, where two children were killed and another 17 people were injured.

Many schools conduct active-shooter drills in which students are taught to hide in locked, darkened classrooms. But parents like McLeod say their home drills add an extra layer of protection.

McLeod’s video shows her teaching Ella how to feign death during a potential shooting by remaining motionless, often in an awkward pose, and holding her breath.

As part of the drill, she guides Ella through various scenarios, including how to smear herself with someone else’s blood to appear fatally wounded.

“We practice falling on her back, on her side, on her tummy,” McLeod says. “I run the drills the same way I would if I was coaching her team. My focus is not on emotions but on making sure I give her the skills she needs to survive.”

McLeod says she has received criticism from people who say she is traumatizing her daughter, and she recognizes such drills aren’t for everyone. But she believes they are necessary in a country where mass shootings are a recurring headline.

“My perspective is … why are teachers responsible for this? This is my child. That is my responsibility,” she says. “And if she’s old enough to go to school and die … because our schoolchildren are dying … she’s old enough to know the truth.”

McLeod describes Wednesday’s deadly shooting at Annunciation Catholic School as another stark reminder of America’s gun crisis.

“It’s our nation’s children who pay for the decisions of our nation’s adults,” she says.

She started home drills after a deadly school shooting in Georgia

McLeod started her home drills in September 2024 after a shooting rampage that left four people dead and nine injured at a high school in Winder, Georgia.

The shooter, a 14-year-old student, hid an AR-15-style rifle in his backpack and took it to school, where he fired into a classroom and down a hallway before he was arrested. Ella’s elementary school conducted an active-shooter drill days after that incident, McLeod says.

Roughly 98% of K-12 schools in the United States conduct lockdown drills, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government, although the methods vary in different states. Such drills cover a range of threats inside the school, including criminal activity and active shooters.

Ella recounted how students hid in darkened classrooms and squeezed behind desks and cabinets as part of the drill, McLeod says. But when McLeod asked her if she knew the reason for the lockdown drill, she shrugged her shoulders.

She told her mother the teacher had described it as a “mild practice thing” to avoid making the students anxious, McLeod says.

“I kind of sat there … and decided the best course of action for me as a parent was to be as honest as possible,” she says.

Choosing her words carefully, and avoiding loaded words such as “murder,” she tried to explain.

“I told her, ‘The reason you’re actually doing these (drills) is because people are coming into schools with guns and they are shooting children.’”

McLeod says her daughter laughed it off and assumed it was her mother’s dark sense of humor. That’s when it hit McLeod that Ella did not fully grasp the seriousness of the threat.

“It occurred to me just how asinine the concept of school shootings is. How ridiculous and insane it sounds to (a young child) that people would come in and kill children in a school.”

Days later, she says, she had her first active-shooter drill at home with Ella and has conducted them regularly since.

In the TikTok video, Ella lies with her arms at her sides and stifles a giggle.

“Dead people don’t smile,” her mother says.

McLeod says she hasn’t yet talked to her daughter about Wednesday’s shooting in Minneapolis. She’s aware that the play-dead drills wouldn’t likely help Ella in such a case, because the Minneapolis shooter did not enter classrooms but fired into windows from outside the building.

So she’s planning a new kind of lesson: She’ll take Ella and her 10-year-old sister to a shooting range so they’ll be quicker to recognize and react to gunfire – even if they can’t see the shooter.

One mom considered buying a bulletproof backpack for her daughter

CNN spoke to three parents who conduct active-shooter exercises with their children at home. Two of them did not want to be identified for fear of backlash.

One mother in St. Louis says the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 26 people died, was a turning point for her – even though she was not a parent at the time.

As soon as her daughter was old enough to understand, she says she started teaching her to run and hide if someone started shooting.

After the May 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, she says their drills became more frequent. Her daughter was in elementary school at the time, so the Uvalde shooting hit close to home.

“We started teaching her how to play dead,” she says. She also taught her daughter that her focus should be on saving herself – not anyone else – if a shooter shows up at her school.

Her daughter is now 9, and they continue to conduct the drills at home. But it never gets easier, she says.

“She’s very sensitive and I am not able to keep myself together while we have these talks — we usually cry together and talk about why it’s so important,” she says. “It’s not possible to not cause fear and anxiety. This, unfortunately, is the reality of life for schoolkids in the US now.”

Amanda, who lives in Puyallup, Washington, says she’s teaching similar lessons to her 8-year-old daughter. The lessons sometimes require difficult conversations.

When her daughter said she planned to save her best friend if a shooter came to their school, her mom was blunt in her response.

“I had to, in no uncertain terms, tell her that if she tried to protect her friend, she would also likely die,” she says.

Amanda says she started teaching her daughter while she was in kindergarten how to stay quiet and motionless during a shooting. She briefly contemplated buying her a bulletproof backpack but ultimately opted for a multicolored book bag.

Her child sees a therapist to address her anxieties, she says.

“Unfortunately, it isn’t an irrational fear,” she says. “All I can do is lean on the tools we practice in therapy and our daily routines to help her manage it.”

Wednesday’s Minneapolis shooting hit Amanda especially hard because one of the children killed is the same age as her daughter, she says.

Her daughter is at summer camp and likely doesn’t know about the shooting yet, she says. She tries to limit how much news exposure she gets.

Her daughter starts school next week, and they usually have a safety talk the night before. But she says she’s not planning to mention the Minneapolis shooting.

“I think more than anything, this (shooting) will reinforce my messaging about being aware of your surroundings and people,” she says. “I’ve been trying to help her strengthen that situational awareness for everyday things like grocery shopping … getting her to apply that in school might be a challenge, but beneficial.”

Critics say active-shooter drills can traumatize children

As of this week there have been 44 school shootings so far this year in the US — half of them on K-12 school grounds. Eighteen people have been killed, and dozens injured, according to an analysis by CNN.

The unpredictability and trauma of school shootings poses a huge challenge for parents and teachers, says Lisa Morgan, president of the Georgia Association of Educators.

“Parents are being forced to make some very hard decisions about what they share with their children,” she says. “We have accepted that there will be violence in our schools. And so our efforts are toward anything we feel like we personally can do to ensure we survive.”

School shootings account for less than 1% of the more than 44,000 annual gun deaths nationwide, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control.

But they have an outsized impact on communities, forcing schools to take action.

While the vast majority of schools now hold them, there are no uniform regulations for lockdown and active shooter drills.

“It gets very confusing because it varies by state law and then it goes down to the individual school districts and then even individual school preferences,” says Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician and senior advisor at Everytown for Gun Safety.

Some schools have used pellet guns and fake blood to mimic the scene of a shooting, she said.

Everytown and other gun-safety groups warn there’s insufficient research that active-shooter drills are effective in protecting students and staff during actual shootings.

In 2022, Everytown for Gun Safety partnered with the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association to produce a report on the impact of active-shooter drills in schools. It linked the drills to increased depression, stress and anxiety in children.

Andrews said she empathizes with McLeod and other parents who fear for their children’s safety.

“My heart breaks for parents who are trying to grapple with this public health crisis that is gun violence … and trying to feel some sense of agency over what they can do to protect their children,” she said.

But she’s not convinced that active-shooter drills, especially those involving children, make students safer. Children could face long-term effects from losing their sense of physical and psychological safety in a classroom, Andrews says.

“As a pediatrician, I’m also always going to be thinking about compounding trauma for children with drills that … cause anxiety and stress,” she says.

She suggests instead that parents protect their kids by securing firearms at home. The majority of school shooters under age 18 get their guns from the home of a parent, friend or relative, she says.

And if children must take part in drills and emergency planning, parents and teachers should consider their age, developmental stage and how they handle crises, Andrews says.

“Assure them that it’s our job to protect them and keep them safe,” she says. “Validate their feelings of fear and anxiety.”

She tries to strike a balance between fear and readiness

McLeod is unfazed by criticism that her home drills are too graphic for her child, calling them an essential survival tool in today’s world. “Just like we were taught ‘stranger danger’ as kids… but with a gun,” she said.

She has since made her TikTok account private due to ongoing harassment, she said.

“Not everybody agrees with what I’m doing … but I will do anything it takes to give my child any leg up in life that they need to stay alive,” she says.

Ella’s pet chicken, Barbie, died last fall, which has made the concept of loss a little easier for her to grasp, McLeod says.

McLeod says she’s struggled with finding the right balance between teaching her child how to survive a shooting and making sure she’s not traumatized. All the parents CNN spoke with share similar concerns.

If she does nothing, McLeod fears her daughter will freeze if violence strikes. But if she does too much, she fears harming the child she’s trying to protect.

But even with this uncertainty, she says she’s positive that she’s doing the right thing.

“I would rather have my kids scared and alive than naive and dead,” she says.

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