Essential

In a lot of ways, I don't let myself think too much about the psychological effect of school shootings on kids in school because it makes me too angry: Kindergartners and first-graders being subjected to active-shooter drills so grownups can have deadly toys. Anyone who reads my blog has an idea what I think about that.

This new PSA by Sandy Hook Promise really got me, though. As their disclaimer says, it contains content related to school shootings that may be too difficult for some people to watch. But that's the country we live in:


I'm old enough to remember some of the duck-and-cover drills of the 1960s, though I was too young to really understand what they meant by the time we stopped doing them. And compared to the drills that are done now, they were nothing in terms of on-the-ground, in-your-face terror, since the people who designed them knew they were just security theater. As a teenager and particularly later as a young adult in the 1980s, I did have clear visualizations of what it would be like to know the missiles were in the air, or what the aftermath of a nuclear attack would be like.

But this.