A mother from Oklahoma went popular on TikTok after sharing a video of her and her 5-year-old son doing active shooter exercises before school.
Cassie Walton, a 22-year-old mother of two from McAlester, Oklahoma, plays out a school shooting practise with her son Weston in a TikTok video with over one million views. She asks him in the video what he would do if the principal announced a school shooting over the intercom.
The video shows her son crouched in a corner of his bedroom, showing how he would hide in his classroom and use his bulletproof Spider-Man bag as a shield to defend himself from gunshots; Walton responds, “good job.”
In addition, she instructs her son to “stay absolutely silent” if a shooter is present in the classroom and police officers are inquiring whether anybody is there. She instructs her son, should he be able to escape, to get as far away from the school as possible.
Walton told CBS News on Tuesday that she felt it was essential to teach her son this lesson “just in case.” She said that she feared the exercises could discourage him from attending school, but he ended up taking them seriously.
“Whenever I was filming the video, I was pushing back all of the tears, trying to get all of that out, and he’s very smart, and he took in all of the information very well, and he wasn’t scared of the drill, he knew it was a serious situation,” Walton said. “But, you know, as a 5-year-old, he was concerned about the bad guys, and him being five, he was just like, ‘I’ll just karate chop him if I need to.’ And I was like, ‘No, not quite, its a little more serious than that.’ Then, after that, he was able to take it a little more serious.”
Walton expressed amazement at the amount of attention her video garnered to CBS News. She said that seeing another mother’s online post about the $140 bulletproof backpack insert motivated her to buy one herself.
When it comes to defending your children, no amount of money is excessive, according to Walton. I wish it were unnecessary and that we could find a better solution.