It Could Happen To You

I was lying in bed when the headline appeared on my phone. A short article, barely a paragraph. The familiar geography of town flattened into a single chunk of text.

At first I thought it was only the college and the primary school adjacent in lockdown. I assumed an active shooter because in this country armed police do not arrive for anything mundane. Rifles mean a weapon present. Rifles mean the possibility of injury. I kept reading, searching for details the article did not offer. My son was waiting for lunch delivery, already outside on the deck with a book in his hands when the alarm went.

By two o’clock I had driven to the car park. Other parents were already there, pulled into a loose cluster, engines off. The stillness was strange. A school car park usually carries its own noise, a low grade churn of motion and voices. That afternoon the quiet felt engineered, as if someone had pressed a mute button over the entire block.

Around two forty five a sound cut through the stillness. Two successive cracks. Sharp. Precise. Some of us looked at each other without speaking. Whether they were gunshots or something else, no one could say, but the acoustics of the moment made them certainly seem so.

At three ten, staff finally opened the primary gate. Parents were told to enter the grounds, walk directly to the classrooms, and wait at the doors. Children were released one at a time. The process felt like a controlled pressure release, slow and methodical, as if the school was venting a sealed chamber.

My son came out holding his Minecraft book with both hands. His face was calm, almost analytical, the way he gets when he is still processing something.

Later, at home, he told me how it unfolded for him. He had been on the deck reading when the alarm sounded. He thought it signaled lunchtime. His teacher grabbed him gently but with urgency and told him to come inside. The doors were locked. The children sat in a designated area without speaking. He said it felt long. An hour, maybe more. Only after that were they allowed to read or colour quietly.

He told me the teachers said it was a pack of wild dogs. He said that was more terrifying than the idea of a lone person with a weapon. From his perspective a dog pack was unpredictable, fast, and capable of climbing fences. From mine, dogs would have been simpler. Contained. Less catastrophic in scale.

I keep thinking about that difference. The adult mind trying to build a plausible scenario even when information is scarce. The child mind constructing its own hierarchy of fear. Both systems trying to stabilise something unstable.

It is the kind of event you imagine belongs to other places, other countries, the ones we watch from a distance with a mixture of disbelief and fatigue. The ones where schools rehearse for danger as routinely as they rehearse for fire drills. You tell yourself that our small towns are insulated, that the mechanics of harm do not travel this far.

Until they do.

No child should ever be asked to mentally parse such a thing.

The day ended. At four pm the article updated that someone had been arrested. Authorities have not yet confirmed whether a weapon was present. The danger passed and life resumed its ordinary pattern, at least on the surface.

Even so, there is a different awareness now. The understanding that it can happen here. That geography does not grant immunity. That safety, which once felt inherent, now feels like a structure that needs constant reinforcement.

You never think it will touch your own street, your own school, your own child, until the moment arrives and the world narrows to a single thought. Keep them safe.