"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."