Oklahoma mom goes viral on TikTok for conducting school shooting drills with 5-year-old son: "I wish that it wasn't necessary"
An Oklahoma mom went viral on TikTok after posting a video which showed her going over active shooter drills with her 5-year-old son as he prepares to go to school.
The TikTok video — which has over one million likes — shows Cassie Walton, a 22-year-old mother of two in McAlester, Oklahoma, playing out a school shooting drill with her son Weston. In the video, she asks him what he would do if he heard the principal announce a shooting over the intercom.
The video shows her son crouching in a corner of his bedroom, demonstrating how he would hide in his classroom and use his bulletproof Spider-Man backpack as a shield to protect himself, to which Walton says, "good job."
She also tells her son that if a shooter is in the classroom, and the police officers are outside the door asking if anyone is inside, he should not respond, and instead needs to "stay absolutely silent." She tells her son if he is able to escape, he needs to run as far away from the school as possible.
Walton told CBS News Tuesday that it was important for her to give her son that lesson "just in case." She said she was afraid that the drills could potentially scare him from going to school, but that 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 5, he was just like, 'I'll just karate chop him if I need to.' And I was like, 'No, not quite, it's a little more serious than that.' Then, after that, he was able to take it a little more serious."
Walton told CBS News she was surprised at how much attention her video received. She said she was inspired to purchase the $140 bulletproof backpack insert after watching another mother post about it online.
"Honestly, when it comes to protecting your children, no amount of money is too much," Walton said. "I wish that it wasn't necessary, and I wish we could come up with a better solution."