One thing I didn’t expect when I wrote about kids and smartphones is the number of people who would tell me that their child needs a phone in case there’s a school shooting. It’s absolutely mind-blowing to me that we’re at the stage where people are accepting these tragedies as a matter of regular life and taking personal measures like buying bullet proof school backpacks.

I say this an somewhat of an outsider — although I have three school-aged kids, we live in Canada, where the only assault-rifle mass shooting in a school was in 1989. (In fact, the total number of people who have died by way of a firearm in a Canadian school, ever, is roughly equal to the people who have died by gun in U.S. schools in the first five months of 2019.) I truly hope the U.S. trend of more and more deadly school shootings changes soon.