Hey there, mom and dad are fighting listeners. We're off for Memorial Day, but we wanted to share this episode from our friends at Slate's how-to podcast. Melinda Winter Moyer, author of Is My Kid the Asshole and former Slate contributor, joins to help a parent who is understandably worried about gun violence and her kid's safety. There's actually some actionable advice in here, so I hope you

all find it as helpful as I did. Here's the show.

It was interesting when Rosie got back to me saying that you wanted to talk about it, because

the acknowledgement actually made me want to retract the question. Like, no, no, no, that's hysterical.

I mean, if we don't look at it directly,

we can still ignore it and send our kids to school every day.

Welcome to how to. I'm Amanda Ripley.

It's kind of funny how often this happens.

A listener will reach out to us with a really hard and important, vulnerable question. And then, the morning after, they'll have second thoughts. They'll wonder, am I crazy? Is that question crazy? Is this just too hard to even talk about? Well, that's actually our specialty here at how to.

Because what we found is, no matter how complicated and frustrating the problem, it doesn't get easier if we don't talk about it.

So my name is Allison, and I live in Madison, Wisconsin.

I have a ninth grader and a sixth grader.

And, oh, I'm all hot and sweaty.

I don't know that that's relevant.

Yeah.

Do you feel nervous just because we're doing it?

Oh, my gosh. So, so nervous. I don't usually, on a regular basis, speak to people. I work in a lab by myself. My kids are quiet. There was this pandemic that enhanced all of the quiet.

Sure, sure, sure, yeah. This is a really heavy subject, and I don't think we should discount that.

And I think it's kind of tempting to pretend this isn't happening.

This is true.

50 million kids went to school last week.

All but three of them came home. If we were talking about drug

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