NBC4 reports that Alice Deal Jr. High School in Tenleytown was the first school to hold a mock shooting rampage drill yesterday. The drill, which simulated a shooter coming to the school with a gun intending to kill as many people as possible, will be repeated at other D.C. schools in the coming weeks.

… In the scene, the mock shooter is a disgruntled parent upset about his child’s grades. To retaliate, he rushes the school building with an M-16 semiautomatic gun. The rampage begins with a security guard being the first to go down. Then the gunman fires at students.

“We heard the gunshots and my class is on the first floor,” student Elizabeth Stone said. “The gunshots were really close by. The teacher went over and closed the door. We had to move our desks and everything.”

The mock shooter — a D.C. police officer in costume — held a third-floor classroom hostage in the simulated emergency. Then the shooting intensified.

Sounds pretty damn scary. In fact, the story also quotes a parent who has mixed feelings about the drills. On the one hand, everyone seems to agree that schools need to be prepared to deal with deadly situations like these. On the other, simulating the actual sound of gunfire in schools is almost certain to frighten many students, drill or not. What do you think about drills like these in our schools?

Screen capture from NBC4