We were at a playground with the kids today. Beautiful day, tons of families out enjoying the sun.

And there was a kid — one single kid — running around with a toy gun. Pointing it at the other kids. “BANG BANG BANG!”

Pointing it at my six-year-old son. “BANG YOU’RE DEAD.”

At my three-year-old daughter. “BANG BANG HAHA KILLED YOU.”

At me. “BANG BANG DIE!”

And I’m looking around like, this is fine, I guess? Kid’s parents are (obviously) nowhere in sight. Nobody’s stopping him or telling him to, you know, maybe not make so much with the aggression and the pretending to shoot people at random.

I mean, how does any parent allow their kid to run around in a public place with anything that even slightly resembles a weapon in this day and age? In the last five days of class, the county I teach in (the COUNTY, to say nothing of the STATE) has had three students arrested for threats of gun violence. THREE! In a week!

Sure, they’re just playing.

Sure, boys will be boys.

But our kids keep dying, and everybody’s scared to death. My students this week asked me (and they were only half joking) if I would take a bullet for them. When the fire alarms went off on Monday, thirty pairs of eyes flashed to me in terror: is it real? or is it a ploy to get us outside?

And here comes this eight-year-old, on a playground swarming with kids, running from person to person going BANG BANG YOU’RE DEAD, over and over and over again.

I don’t understand how any parent who’s paying the slightest bit of attention to the world around them can let that happen. How they can let their kid out the front door to play in the yard with anything remotely like a gun. Let alone putting their kid in the car and allowing them to take the toy gun into a crowd.

I get it, I do. Our country is totally ass-over-elbows when it comes to guns. We love them and we’re terrified of them; they are the source of and the solution to all our problems; hell, some people are getting married with them now.

This is fine, I guess.

This post is part of Stream-of-Consciousness Saturday.