At 1 a.m., in the lobby of her hotel, my colleague Jillian told me about the time her school changed its active shooter policy. We were sharing a slice of cheese pizza so big it prompted me to tell her that, in my native England, “This would be an entire pizza.” We hadn’t had dinner, for reasons that will become clear.
Jillian told me that when she was really little, she and her classmates were told to remain in their classroom if they heard gunshots but turn out the lights and stay quiet. They were supposed to pretend they weren’t there. Then at some point, someone realized that was a bad idea, and the advice changed: Kids were told to be more “aggressive,” she said, to look around for weapons—a baseball bat in the closet or maybe even a stapler, which could be thrown at the shooter’s head. They were supposed to run toward the door, and barricade it.
None of us had run toward the door a few hours earlier, when we heard what turned out to be gunshots from our table at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. My boss Olly, like President Trump, thought it might be the sound of an unlucky waiter dropping a serving tray; being of an anxious disposition, I thought to myself, That sounds like a gun. Having spent a lifetime rejecting said anxiety, my next thought was, Don’t be ridiculous. It was probably just someone knocking on the double doors 10 meters away!
