This is an opinion column.

Republican legislatures and school boards, and the parents who stormed them in recent years, were so concerned children might feel discomfort or embarrassment about actual history that they called for banning school instruction on race in America.

Which is like banning the study of America.

Better to keep children in the dark than take the chance they might feel bad about themselves. Or their country. Children are delicate, you know.

Since 2019 a lot of states have passed laws or bans or restrictions to protect their kids from such introspection. Alabama did it. Florida did it famously. Tennessee did it, too.

In the time since there have been more than 130 school shootings across this land, according to a database of attacks kept by the Washington Post. More than 180 people have died or been injured in those shootings, in schools where tens of thousands of students — almost 40,000 since 2019 — attended classes.

And we are worried about our children feeling discomfort.

It’s discomforting. It’s so, so much more than that.

It is life and death in the classrooms and hallways and the psyches of our children. It is a plague and travesty that our politicians act swiftly to keep children from feeling bad about the sins of their forefathers, but refuse to budge as deranged or misguided men and women march into schools with military might strapped to their backs. They deflect and pontificate and talk about absolute rights to bear the most deadly weapons, well-regulated militias be damned.

A photograph taken by Nicole Hester of The Tennessean hit hard this week, after the last school shooting, in which six people were killed at a private school in Nashville.The image is stunning, like a slap across the face, if you have the courage to really look at it.

A little girl, her tiny face and hand pressed pleadingly against the window of a Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools bus, cries into our souls. You feel her agony and her pain. You feel the fear and the keening, the sense that something happened in the presence of this child that will never be forgotten. That can never be forgotten. You know she will never see the world the same way again.

As parents and politicians worry that studies of slavery and civil rights are too upsetting for children.

As Congressman Andy Ogles, who represents that Nashville district that includes Covenant, poses for a Christmas card, as he did two years ago, with his family and an arsenal of military style firearms and the Yuletide message that “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil.”

Tell it to the families of the three 9-year-olds killed in that Covenant shooting. Tell it to the other 200 students at that small, safe private school that was supposed to be a haven.

Tell it to the 40,000 children who, since 2019, had their studies interrupted by gunfire, and fear, and a trauma most adults have never known.

Tell it to students who are drilled on what to do when an “active shooter,” marches in, as if it were a tornado warning or a fire drill.

Tell it to the preschoolers who are told to hide behind bookshelves if a bad man comes in. Or behind bulletproof whiteboards that cost more than a lot of teachers get paid in a year.

Tell it to the middle schoolers who are told to hide or run or fight. Tell it to the families of the dead, if you can look them in the face.

It says an awful lot – emphasis on the awful – about what is important to us as a region, and a country, and a culture.

Learning about ourselves, about what made our nation what it is today, is too harsh for our children. They are too delicate.

Giving people the tools to kill our children is a fundamental right.

It’s a little bit more than discomforting.

John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for AL.com.