‘Lockdown’ vs. ‘silent safety drill’: The school security language debate With these precautions has come a new vocabulary. “Active shooter,” for instance, in its modern sense of a gunman on a killing spree, began as police terminology after Columbine, according to Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, but schools picked it up around the mid-2000s. “Lockdown,” he said, made the jump from prison lingo into […]