Talking Guns with a First Grader

When I was a kid, my parents had simple parenting fears. Dad was anxious for my brothers and me to find a career path that inspired us and afforded us the life we wanted. Mom, that we’d get cancer or die in a car crash. While those things concern me as a parent now, my greatest fear is that my two boys will get gunned down in a mass shooting. I face this fear every day that I drop my 6-year-old off at school. It’s not a crippling fear, but it’s chronic.

In June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis. That makes sense. According to Everytown For Gun Safety, America’s largest gun violence prevention organization, more than 21,000 children and teens are killed or wounded every year, and approximately 3 million are exposed to gun violence. Many of these incidents occur in the home. I don’t want to ignore that context, but in-the-home is something I can control. There are no guns in my home. My dad’s collection is of the antique variety, and there’s no ammo in his house. So, it’s the randomness of the mass shootings at concerts, grocery stores, and schools that haunts and taunts me. Statistically, the chances of my child’s school being shot up is low; I understand that. But do I need to remind you of the title of this column?

Schools take precautions to prevent shootings, but even those preventions can have an impact on a child’s wellbeing. Everytown reports that active shooter drills and lockdowns may be harmful to mental health. Meaning that even if my boys live through their schooling years, mass shootings can still do damage to them.

Chicago Public Schools’ Office of Safety and Security reported 650 lockdown drills during the 2023–2024 school year. Beyond the drills, there were more than 100 actual lockdowns among 646 schools. Some were due to threats on campus; others resulted from neighborhood activity.

I sat down with my son, who is in first grade at a Chicago Public School, to talk about guns and how his school’s lockdown drills impact him. Here’s how that conversation went, between myself (Dad) and him (Harry).

Dad: Harry, I think you’re a real brave kid. But what are things that freak you out?

Harry: I’m mostly scared of the dark and when I see white eyes and branches around so it kinda looks like a face. Like in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, in Puss’ imagination, with the wolf, when he has his last life.

Dad: You get freaked out by the dark and what your imagination makes you see.

What else freaks you out?

Harry: Mostly guns, too. Well, not really. My worst nightmare is my family getting murdered.

Dad: Yeah, that’s a pretty terrible thing. A nightmare for all of us.

Dad: Sometimes, if you fall and cut yourself, you get freaked out by the blood. Does blood freak you out?

Harry: Only if it’s, like, a lot and it’s actually leaking. If you get shot, you know how the blood leaks.

Dad: We play with toy guns, but we have rules about how we play. What are our big rules when we play with the NERF guns or squirt guns?

Harry: Do not shoot people if they don’t have a weapon or don’t have goggles on.

Dad: Right. Because even though the NERF blasters are toys, they can still hurt people.

Harry: Remember the first NERF battle we ever had? You shot me in the eye one time in my goggles. So if I wasn’t wearing my goggles, you would have shot me in the eye. And that was like the first shot where you hit me.

Dad: And that was an accident. Even toy guns are kind of dangerous. What do you know about real guns?

Harry: I know that real guns make people actually bleed.

Dad: What are guns used for?

Harry: To kill people. But sometimes they’re not even really used to kill people, sometimes they’re used to shoot in the ground or use them for target practice, right? The most important thing about real guns is probably, no ammo.

Dad: Like, don’t have ammo?

Harry: Yeah, because guns are really dangerous and scary. So if you ever see a gun in real life, you need to run and call your mom or your dad and make sure that you’re safe.

Dad: So you know that real guns make people bleed and they’re used for killing people. And sometimes target practice.

Harry: And also use guns to shoot the ground to scare people. Like if someone said they were going to kill you and you had a gun too, you could shoot the ground and scare them away.

Dad: So, like, for self-defense, or protection.

Harry: Yeah, you can’t just shoot them back because you would go to jail too, right?

Dad: Possibly.

Harry: And also, you need to feel safe in school. That’s why there’s no guns allowed at school.

Dad: Do you know what an active shooter drill is or a lockdown is at school?

Harry: It’s when all of the security guards look for any bandits. And you lock your doors to make sure that the kids are safe. And if [the bandits] manage to unlock them, you hide in your room. I did the lockdowns before.

Dad: How many lockdowns have you had?

Harry: I don’t really know…probably a couple. Maybe two or three! I don’t know.

Dad: And what do you do in those?

Harry: They tell the teachers to get ready. Then the teachers tell us if we didn’t hear [the announcement]. And so they tell us we’re doing a lockdown drill today. So, we usually just stay in the lockdown until they say it’s okay to stop doing the lockdown.

Dad: Do you hide under your desk or just stay at your desk?

Harry: Sometimes you can go somewhere else, but you still stay in your classroom.

Dad: How do those lockdowns make you feel?

Harry: Sometimes it makes me feel a little scared. It’s really, mostly like, it doesn’t really make me feel scared, but usually feel crazy, weird — like I don’t know what’s happening.

Dad: Is it confusing because it disrupts your day or confusing because you don’t know what’s going on?

Harry: Mostly I really don’t know what’s going on.

Dad: You said that the security guards are looking for bandits, so you know that there might be bandits in the school. Do you know what those bandits might be doing?

Harry: It’s really mostly because they could have guns sometimes and be trying to kill the kids or kidnap the kids. I would rather be kidnapped by them, if they do catch us. Because I do not want to die. Everyone does die by old age, but everyone needs to be safe from guns and every other weapon, right?

Dad: I would agree with that. Do you feel safe at school?

Harry: Sort of.

Dad: How could you feel safer?

Harry: I don’t really know. The only way I feel if I’m getting hurt is if I fall, like at recess or in gym. But that’s okay. I don’t get scared by that because I know that’s not me dying.

Dad: Generally, in your life, do you feel safe and protected? Like when you’re with me or Mommy or your grandparents or friends?

Harry: Yep. How do you feel about staying safe at work?

Dad: I feel pretty good. I don’t feel that I’m going to get —

Harry: Kidnapped?

Dad: Kidnapped or shot. When I was a little kid though, the thing I worried about most was getting kidnapped.

Harry: What about dying?

Dad: I worried about that a little bit, too.

Harry: Why a little bit? That’s worse than getting kidnapped.

Dad: Yeah, but I think, when I was a kid, getting kidnapped was a big thing in the news they talked about. And it was a big thing they talked about a lot in school. We had a lot of programs and classes about how not to talk to strangers. That’s why I was worried about it. That’s why I’m asking you if maybe they talk about guns in schools and mass shootings to you guys a lot that might make you be afraid of it.

Harry: I’m not scared. I just don’t know what’s happening. And I get confused.

Harry doesn’t worry about the same things I do. Not yet, anyway. He’s too young. I hope it stays that way. And if it doesn’t, I hope he talks to me about it. We can find ways to worry less together.

And he shouldn’t have to worry about dying. The big worries are a parent’s burden to carry. We just have to leave enough room to carry hope, too. Hope that the gun violence epidemic eventually abates and childhood can be what it’s meant to be: a non-stop flow of new, joyful experiences with a few hardships sprinkled in to build character. And so that I can go back to worrying about kidnapping, which, according to my son, is a way better option than being murdered in his classroom.