“Parents are feeling compelled to send… their first grade children to school with bulletproof backpack plates.”

My girlfriend teaches first grade. And I think on Wednesday she told me about a co-worker, a fellow first grade teacher, who got an email from a parent of a first grade child. The parent was not upset, nothing really, it was a very matter-of-fact email. And she just wanted the first grade teacher to know that she’d sent her child to school with a backpack that had a bulletproof plate inserted in the backpack. And she wrote to the teacher to the tell her that she had spoken with the child, that it’s not something you’re supposed to talk about much and it’s no big deal. It’s just like the shield that Captain America uses, and you know, she just wanted the teacher to be aware that’s – that it existed. And I just can’t piece together and verbalize how many wrong turns we had to have taken as a society to end up in a place where parents are feeling compelled to send their kids to school with – their first grade children to school with bulletproof backpack plates and casually telling their teacher about it as though it’s normal, you know, to protect her child in case of the next mass shooting. I don’t know.