California banned hyper-realistic active shooter drills in schools after evidence mounted that simulated violence, complete with fake blood and role-played killings, was leaving children with lasting psychological damage rather than genuine preparedness. The legislative response arrived alongside a growing body of research suggesting that when young people rehearse threat scenarios framed as real, the training does not just teach defense; it can wire aggressive behavioral scripts that persist well beyond the exercise. From school gymnasiums to wilderness therapy camps in North Carolina, the pattern is the same: programs sold as safe survival training are producing outcomes no one advertised.
California Draws a Line on Simulated Violence
California’s AB-2968 prohibits “high-intensity” armed-assailant drills in schools, specifically banning exercises that simulate real incidents using fake blood, role-play of assailants and victims, and swarming or attacking scenarios. The law also bars real weapons, gunfire blanks, and explosions during any school drill. The bill responded to documented cases in which students, unable to distinguish a drill from an actual attack, experienced acute fear responses that lingered for weeks or months. Parents and educators described children refusing to return to campus, experiencing nightmares, and showing signs of hypervigilance that looked less like preparedness and more like trauma.
A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that unannounced, deceptive, and hyper-realistic drill features generate fear and distress without clear preparedness benefits. Standard drills typically involve turning off lights, keeping silent, and locking doors. The high-intensity versions go far beyond that baseline, and the NASEM synthesis concluded the added realism does not translate into better safety outcomes. “It can create feelings of helplessness,” psychologist Jillian Peterson of Hamline University has said of the more extreme exercises. California’s prohibition is the sharpest state-level acknowledgment that the cost-benefit math on these drills does not add up, and it signals a broader rethinking of what “training” should look like when the trainees are children.
How Rehearsed Threat Rewires Young Minds
The concern is not simply that realistic drills scare children. Research on media violence has shown for decades that perceived reality amplifies behavioral effects. A study indexed by the Office of Justice Programs found that when preadolescents believed televised violence could happen in real life, it increased aggressive behavior more than the same scenes framed as obviously fictional. Separate experimental work published in the journal Aggressive Behavior demonstrated that realism in violent video games, defined as the probability of seeing an event in real life, amplifies aggressive feelings and physiological arousal beyond what fictional violence produces. Aggressive thoughts increased across all violent conditions, but the realistic framing pushed emotional and physical activation higher, suggesting that the brain encodes these experiences more like lived events than stories.
Iowa State University researcher Douglas Gentile put the mechanism plainly: “It’s the same with violent games. You practice being vigilant for enemies, practice thinking that it’s acceptable to respond aggressively to enemies, and then you carry that with you and it increases their aggressiveness in real life.” When schools run drills that feel indistinguishable from an actual shooting, students are not just learning where the exits are. They are rehearsing aggressive scripts and beliefs, a process that research on violence exposure and callous-unemotional traits links directly to increased aggression over time. An analysis by Everytown for Gun Safety and Georgia Tech examined nearly 28 million social media posts and found that depression, stress, and anxiety language increased for months after active shooter drills, using 90-day pre-and-post comparisons. The distress was not momentary; it reshaped how communities talked about their own safety for an extended period, indicating that the “lesson” students internalized was fear, not competence.
Wilderness Programs and the Limits of Staged Risk
The same tension between controlled danger and real harm plays out in wilderness therapy, where survival training is the product itself. On February 3, 2024, a child died at Trails Carolina, a nature-based therapy program in North Carolina. The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the death and disclosed that investigations were being conducted by Transylvania County DSS, the Transylvania County Sheriff’s Office, and NCDHHS itself. The state removed all children from the facility and suspended new admissions during the probe. Directives issued to Trails Carolina included stopping the use of bivy bags, ensuring awake overnight supervision, and providing full investigator access, underscoring regulators’ concern that basic safeguards had not kept pace with the program’s rugged image.
Federal litigation has since exposed deeper allegations. In Siegel v. Trails Carolina, LLC, filed in the Western District of North Carolina, claims include forced transport of a minor, extended custody, and sexual assault of one minor by another while in the program. A separate case, Doe v. Trails Academy, filed in October 2024, names a web of corporate entities including Trails Academy, Trails Carolina, Trails Momentum, Wilderness Training and Consulting, Family Help and Wellness, WTC Holdco, and WTCSL. The breadth of defendants suggests an organizational structure that dispersed accountability across multiple entities. Extended wilderness isolation itself carries documented mental health risks: prolonged periods without social contact can produce cognitive fatigue, irritability, and a sense of overwhelm, according to published research on wilderness survival training psychology. Against that backdrop, the promise that these programs provide “safe” exposure to hardship looks increasingly fragile.
Nature’s Model vs. the Human Version
Biologists have long noted that many animal species expose their young to danger in carefully titrated ways, using play-fighting, mock chases, and supervised foraging to build competence without courting catastrophe. A synthesis of animal behavior research described on Phys.org explains how parents in species ranging from meerkats to birds gradually increase the difficulty and risk of tasks only after juveniles have developed sufficient skill. The key is that adults remain nearby, modulating the challenge in real time and intervening when necessary, so that “practice” never becomes indistinguishable from a true life-or-death struggle. Young animals learn to read threats while still anchored in a sense of safety, and the lessons accumulate slowly rather than being delivered in a single overwhelming shock.
Human-designed simulations often invert that logic. In both hyper-realistic shooter drills and wilderness boot camps, adults orchestrate scenarios that feel as real as possible, then step back, believing that immersion alone will harden participants. A recent review of survival training, also discussed on Phys.org, warned that staged danger can push young people past adaptive stress into harmful overload when safeguards are weak or absent. The challenge, the authors noted, arises when adaptation is treated as limitless and psychological costs are discounted. California’s ban, North Carolina’s emergency suspension of Trails Carolina, and the social-media footprint of distress after active shooter drills all point in the same direction: when training crosses the line from symbolic rehearsal to perceived reality, the brain stops treating it as practice. For children and adolescents, whose stress systems and moral frameworks are still under construction, that line may be far closer than many policymakers and program operators have been willing to admit.
Recalibrating safety training will not mean abandoning drills or outdoor programs altogether. It will mean redesigning them around predictable schedules, transparent communication, age-appropriate content, and robust adult presence (more like a parent teaching a child to swim in the shallow end than throwing them into deep water “for their own good”). Evidence from psychology and animal behavior converges on a simple principle: the safest way to prepare young people for real danger is to keep practice clearly separate from the real thing. Where schools and therapeutic programs ignore that distinction, they risk turning the promise of resilience into a pipeline for trauma.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
