Every morning, my seven-year-old son and I ride the subway to his school, a public elementary in Brooklyn. There are posters on the station walls, many of them advertising movies and TV shows and video games, and often my son has questions about these posters. “Is that a gun?” he asked me last week, about the advertisement for “The Last Stand,” which shows a grim-faced Arnold Schwarzenegger wielding a powerful piece of artillery. “What’s that?” he asked next, after pausing in front of the poster for “Texas Chainsaw,” which shows a figure with a muscled, bloodied arm holding a gore-smeared logging implement.

I find these questions hard to answer, and usually a lot of deflecting is involved. (Yes, that is a gun; and I have no idea what that is smeared on that man’s biceps. Let’s move down the platform and look at this poster for the Rockettes instead.) In just the past few months, I’ve fielded inquiries about the poster for “Seven Psychopaths” (yes, that is a gun), and about the ad for the latest season of “Dexter,” the hit TV show about a serial killer. (No, I don’t know why that man has blood on his face. Why don’t you sit on this bench and read a book?) Every couple of weeks, there appears on the subway wall a new Hollywood celebration of gun violence, as well as a new, perverse representation of mental illness as a proper subject of popular entertainment. I am at a loss about how to explain these phenomena to myself, let alone to a curious second-grader.

What do we tell the children? This is the question parents are asking themselves in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in which twenty six- and seven-year-olds were slaughtered by a young man who was himself barely out of childhood. Six of the adults who taught and watched over them were killed, too. Schools already drill children on what to do if an armed stranger enters the building—the “duck and cover” of this era—and advisories from psychologists suggest that parents should not shy from talking about gun violence with their kids. “Start the conversation. Talk about the shooting with your child. Not talking about it can make the event even more threatening in your child’s mind,” reads one from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network that I received in an e-mail this morning. “Reinforcing safety after this tragedy is important with very young children.”

Perhaps it shows the limits of my abilities as a mother, but I find it impossible to imagine a conversation with a very young child about the fact of other very young children being shot and killed that could conceivably reinforce a sense of safety. (Yes, there was a gun. No, I don’t know why it happened.) As the President said in his address last night, all parents are sorrowing on behalf of the bereaved families of Newtown. We feel grief, too, on behalf of our own, unharmed, children: for their premature exposure to harrowing violence, for the threat that we imagine unspooling in their minds, like a movie they are too young to be watching. We are lamenting their immersion in a culture that is saturated with gun violence: the glorification of guns in entertainment, and the vile grip of the gun lobby on the body politic.

What transpired in Newtown may be horrific enough to precipitate political action. Until then, there are no good answers to our children’s questions. Yes, that is a gun. There are eighty-eight of them in America for every hundred Americans. That word says “Texas.” Texas is a state where you can buy and own a gun without needing to get a license for it. That man is a serial killer. A serial killer is someone who murders a lot of people. Some serial killers use guns. A psychopath is a person who is severely mentally disturbed. Some of the people who commit mass killings are psychopaths who have access to guns. Yes, that is a gun. Yes, that is a gun.

Photograph by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.



Subscribe to The New Yorker