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Article History

Received: 20 October 2020

Accepted: 11 November 2021

First Online: 8 December 2021

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: This focus group study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the lead authors’ institution, Georgia Tech. As noted in the manuscript, the focus group interview study constituted human subjects research, for which IRB approval was obtained at the lead author’s institution, Georgia Tech, and participants were recruited following informed consent. Since historical, publicly accessible social media data from Twitter and Reddit were used for the computational aspects of this research and it involved no interaction with the authors of the social media postings, this part did not constitute human subjects research and therefore ethics approval was not required

: Eligible individuals 18 years or older signed a consent form if they agreed to participate, while those under the age of 18 but above 15 provided their assent with consent from their legal guardian. All participants were provided with a plain language statement of the study and approved personnel—three of the paper’s authors—conducted the interviews. As the drills could be emotionally triggering or distressing to some, especially those with first-hand experiences of a mass/school shooting, the consent form provided pointers to help, support, and counseling resources and participants were told that they could stop participating at any time.