The other night, my kid had a nightmare about guns. I bet he wasn’t the only one, in the wake of all the publicity about the Apalachee High School shooting.

The New York Times reported afterward that the Georgia school contracted with a private security firm to respond to just such an event, and a week earlier school personnel had received personal “panic buttons” to contact the police. But I have to ask, would four people be alive now if the school had spent money on counselors and mental health instead?

We learned from Colt Gray’s aunt that the 14-year old had been “begging” for mental health treatment. The FBI questioned him when he was 13. School shootings do not come as a surprise. One kid who shot up a school had carried the nickname “school shooter” for years. At Parkland High School in Florida, part of the shock of the 2018 shooting there was that kids had said for years that they were mortally afraid of Nikolas Cruz.

This is the great fallacy of “active shooter drills” — school shooters come from the community. These drills just tell potential shooters what the response would be, while terrorizing the rest of the kids. At the same time, school shootings remain extraordinarily rare; the chance of being killed in one is about one in 614 million, according to a Washington Post report.

What if, instead of giving kids nightmares about an event that is less likely than getting killed by lightning or a shark attack, we supported counseling and treatment for kids who are struggling? Instead of locking school doors, maybe we need to care for those inside.

Laura Briggs

Northampton