There was no point in adding to the traffic and confusion. Enough people were already doing that. Besides, I had driven the street that my daughter’s high school is on every school day during the first three weeks of this school year and I knew how congested the entrance could be during the morning drop-off routine.

I also knew that there was no way the police would be letting anyone onto campus for a least a few hours as they completed their investigation into a report of gunshots being fired on campus at around 11:20 a.m. Tuesday. Going to the school wouldn’t do anything toward resolving the situation, so I decided to just stay home.

This wasn’t the first school shooting in the United States. And in terms of school shootings, what happened at Skyline High here in Oakland wasn’t anywhere near the level of what has happened at other schools through the years. Based on the information that has been released, police arrested two students, and detained two others, for their roles in allegedly firing off between 4 and 6 shots from a handgun in an out-of-the-way area of the school. No one was targeted. As soon as reports of shots being fired went out, the school went into lockdown, kids and teachers were secured in their classrooms and Oakland police and California Highway Patrol officers descended like the Bay Area’s marine layer upon the school and began searching for the perpetrators.

I was doing some busywork at home when word of the incident got out. Much of my morning included calls or emails to the likes of an accountant, a wood-floor restorer, my truck mechanic (again) and the people who installed the solar panels on our roof, some of which were now not producing anywhere near the power they were supposed to. It was looking like a day of just plowing through minor First World Problems.

But then a friend of mine texted me, asking if I had heard about “shots fired” at my daughter’s school. I said I hadn’t, and was told to check out the Citizen app. For those not in the know, Citizen is an app that is kind of like Nextdoor in that it allows people in a certain area to communicate with each other about what’s going on in their neighborhood. Unfortunately, it is also like Nextdoor in that people inundate the app with oftenover-the-top reports of crime or people looking like criminals walking down their street. And it was on the Citizen app where someone had posted “shots fired” either at or near my daughter’s school.

 

People often say things like time stopped, or time flashed by when something big happened to them. For me, when I read the words “shots fired” time just…continued like it normally did. I only knew one thing, and it wasn’t going to do anyone any good for me to panic. I turned on the local news at noon and saw the heavy police presence at the school’s entrance. Soon, the news anchors reported that suspects had been detained and cops were securing the school site. For all practical purposes, the incident was over.

I got a hold of my daughter—Like almost all high school kids, she has her own cellphone, and also like almost all high school kids, she keeps her phone handy in class even when she isn’t supposed to—and I texted her to ask how she was doing. She said they were still locked down, and wanted to know if she could get a ride with her friend’s mom when everything was over. She did, and they went to our local “village” where kids from different schools all mingle together every afternoon. Later, she would put things into some kind of perspective when she said she was “so bored” after being stuck in her English class for three hours. School was closed the next day so that police could finalize their investigation and the kids could decompress after what they had just been through. My daughter used the day to spend $43 to order some kind of pink vinyl Taylor Swift album.

By now, you can probably tell that I’m not writing this to serve as any kind of anti-gun manifesto, or to blame anyone for “letting” a shooting happen at my kid’s school. The day ended like it should have. No one was hurt. Kids went home and did what they have always done. They hung out with their friends, had dinner with their families, and complained about their schoolwork. It was a boring end to a day that, aside for one unusual event, was just as steady and boring as almost any other school day.

And we were lucky it ended that way.