“Mom. We’ve been doing drills for this our whole lives,” my 15-year-old said when I tested his mood after the classroom massacre in Texas this week.

       “We know this stuff happens,” he said, barely containing an eyeroll before slinging a backpack over his shoulder and heading toward the metal detector at his school entrance in Georgetown, one of the wealthiest enclaves in America.

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       There it is. We have stained a generation of American children — and their teachers alongside them — with a grim acceptance and war-weariness that is sickening.

       Shame on us.

       Yes, it’s the mass shootings that make headlines, that made a president gasp with grief and frustration before TV cameras after 19 students and two beloved teachers were killed by an 18-year-old in Uvalde.

       But these slaughters — inconceivable in any part of the world, even the places at war — are a fraction of the ways in which we’ve saturated our nation in blood.

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       All over social media, we have parents and pundits coaching each other on how to explain this to our kids. Meanwhile, the kids aren’t surprised at another shooting — we are. We didn’t grow up with this, yet we allowed this rat-a-tat, consistent interaction with gun violence to be part of our children’s lives.

       Banning books to save kids? Please, bullets are far more dangerous.

       Here’s a short list of gun-related mailings, threats and deaths in our region in May:

       Two men were shot at a children’s flag football game in Manassas, Va. A 16-year-old was arrested after allegedly walking into a Manassas mall wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun. A 15-year-old boy fatally shot two men in an apartment in Woodbridge, Va. A 9-year-old girl was gunned down while she played outside with friends. There’s a gutting video of the incident, where she screams “I can’t feel my legs!” over and over again as her friends duck for cover. A young man working the drive-through at a McDonald’s in Crofton, Md., was shot dead at the window. A 15-year-old was gunned down in his Southeast Washington neighborhood. A 46-year-old man was arrested after calling an elementary school in Southern Maryland and threatening “mass violence.”

       “We have to harden these targets,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said, on the day when his state was the site of one of modern America’s worst school massacres.

       It’s a schoolhouse, not a target. And the hardening is already happening, Dan.

       Our kids and teachers are hardening to the gunfire and bloodshed that is a part of their lives. They’re preparing for it, every day.

       It can be outside an upscale private school in an expensive part of the nation’s capital, (the Edmund Burke School shooting in April) or at a public school in Iowa where most of the kids are “economically disadvantaged” (the East High School shooting in Des Moines in March). They will know gunfire.

       I'm feeling like a kid in America now that my peers were gunned down at work

       The kids and teachers at Robb Elementary School rehearsed the attack two months before the assault with drills that took less than one generation of students to become as standard as the morning bell.

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       All of our nation’s kids and teachers do this. Ask them; ask a teacher what it’s like to pretend that they are being stalked and slaughtered in the place they go to learn.

       “What they don’t tell you is teachers are told in training that they have to lock out any of their students who are out of the classroom,” said Erin Hahn, an author and Michigan teacher. “Even if they beg and bang on the door. Because there could be a shooter using them to access your classroom … That policy always haunted me.”

       More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine

       Arming teachers is in the conversation again.

       “You’re going to have to do more at the school,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said, after the shooting. “You’re going to have to have more people trained to react.”

       It’s a ridiculous idea proposed by the people (the Republicans) who don’t want to talk about the real problems — that America is awash in guns.

       “I would never carry a gun into a room with children or youth,” a teacher told me on Thursday, as she took a deep breath and headed into a school that is expecting more of teachers every day. “I also can’t imagine being the parent of a child in a classroom where teachers have a gun.”

       So the same people who don’t trust teachers to choose which books to assign their kids or to talk with them about gender identity also want them to be trained in crisis marksmanship?

       Teachers are outraged at the idea of arming themselves in classrooms.

       The solution isn’t about securing schools or arming teachers. Or buying Kevlar-lined bookbags or sweatshirts for kindergartners, just in case.

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       The solution is us, understanding that the front line should not be at an elementary school, a football game, a grocery store, a church, a restaurant or anywhere else that people go to live. And teachers, after two years of being asked to put themselves at risk during a pandemic, in a traditionally low-paying and difficult position, have sacrificed enough.

       We elect people to Congress, and pay them, to represent us all; to ensure we get a chance at life and liberty. They have failed. And it has cost us — too much.