What's good, y'all? This is Jean.

We've talked about this on the podcast before.

Schools are the site of so much anxiety, like moral panics,

over textbooks and curriculum, you know, battles over teacher pay, etc, etc.

Because there were people send their children, where their kids spend most of the waking hours of their young lives.

And so we're about to turn to the latest episode of school colors,

and we wanted to just nod to the fact that if you're listening to a podcast about schools in this moment,

or just thinking about schools, then you're also probably thinking about what happened in Yvonne Day, Texas.

Yvonne Day is a ranching town, mostly Latino, just 80 miles away from the US-Mexico border,

and it is now the latest scene of this uniquely American occurrence.

This week, a gunman walked into Rob Elementary School and killed 19 children and two teachers.

There are still so much we don't know at the time we're recording this,

but in a town of just 16,000 people, it's a nightmare that will touch basically everybody.

We don't know what the shooter's motive is, if it was ideological, like the gunman and buffalo,

or if he was just, I'm going to quote, a petty, angry man with an axe to grind.

The motives matter, they do, but they also kind of don't, because again, in a country where there are more guns than people,

a country that takes a laissez-faire approach to protecting most rights, but a maximalist,

near absolute approach to the right to have guns, any sufficiently motivated person, with any reason, can author a calamity.

This, at one point, is the kind of thing that politicians or TV pundits used to call unimaginable.

The problem is that people in the United States, especially young people, are really used to imagining it,

or force to conceptualize it and prepare for it.

I mean, Americans under the age of 30 have grown up in a world where school shootings are a frequent occurrence,

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