A young high school girl, blood pouring down her face from a bullet hole near her temple, laughed with her friends.

This was the picture that caught my eye.

She wasn't really injured. She's a member of the drama club at Troy Buchanan High School in the outskirts of suburban St. Louis. She and several other thespians volunteered last month to help recreate a school shooting as part of an active intruder drill. It gave school officials, teachers and first responders a chance to practice what would happen in such a worst-case scenario.

Principal Jerry Raines said it's the second active intruder drill at the high school and the 12th one in the district this year. The drills take place with adults and the students who are re-enactors, not the entire student body.

That's not necessarily the case in other districts around the country.

Masked "intruders," armed with guns, fired blanks at a group of teachers in a library in a rural Oregon school last year. A student at Central York High School in New Jersey writes about the deafening noise when armed police officers burst into her dark classroom to "rescue" the students during a realistic intruder drill. An El Paso district took it a step further with a surprise intruder drill so realistic that students sent panicked texts to parents.

Drills of any sort -- fire, tornado, earthquake -- are believed to save lives because they reduce the panic in an actual emergency. It makes sense to test systems, to make sure the school staff and police officials know what to do to protect students in any kind of emergency.

Shootings shouldn't seem as inevitable as the forces of nature, but these days, they do.

A recent Associated Press analysis finds that there have been at least 11 school shootings this academic year alone. That doesn't include colleges and universities, malls and movie theaters, where shooters have also opened fire.

So, how do we prepare our children to respond?

My fifth grader described what happens during a lockdown or intruder drill at her school.

"The teacher makes sure we are all lined up against the wall, where no one can see us. She rolls down paper on the windows and makes us stay silent until they say 'all clear,'" she explained. "I bet it's only 10 minutes, but it feels like an hour."

So, the defense we've given our children since massacres at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook is very often: Turn off the lights, stay quiet and hide.

That's certainly easier than trying to make even the smallest reforms to the country's gun laws. Congress hasn't been able to pass gun control legislation on assault weapons and background checks, which the vast majority of Americans support, because of the power of the gun lobby. School security is an industry now, with trainers and equipment and realistic drills, meant to convince us that teaching children to dodge bullets at school is somehow a normal part of growing up.

Children of the '50s and '60s may remember air raid or 'duck and cover' drills to survive a possible atomic attack during the Cold War. If students saw a flash of light outside (possibly from a bomb), they were instructed to kneel under their desks with their hands over their heads and necks -- never mind the radiation fallout.

These days, no one practices surviving a nuclear attack. Our security rests on keeping such weapons out of the hands of madmen.

Today's parents didn't grow up rehearsing what to do if a classmate walked into their school firing rounds of bullets into the hallways. We didn't grow up with scenes of slain first-graders shot dead in their classrooms.

When our children get older and ask us what we did to best protect them from school shootings, we might tell them about more police officers in schools, metal detectors, surveillance cameras and intruder drills. But they might have a different answer for their own children. This generation, who is growing up with the threat of gun violence so real that they have recreated scenes from a horror movie for the sake of their own safety, may feel differently about the ease of access to the machines capable of such depravity.

When you have to imagine yourself getting shot, and your teacher hiding you -- year after year since you were 5 years old -- that creates some sort of impression. When a threat is so real to you that you can hear screams and shots fired and smell sweat during the trial runs, that changes a child's perception of his safety, despite the fact that schools remain one of the safest places for children.

If a homicidal young man armed with semi-automatic weapons, assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition breaks into a school, it's not a matter of whether any innocent people will die. It's a matter of how many.

That's the reality our children face.

I wasn't expecting an open casket.

My children and I walked into the room to see the mother lying lifeless, surrounded by those who loved her.

My son, then 6, tightened his grip on my hand when he glanced at the coffin. He needn't have worried. I wasn't headed anywhere near the young mother. It wouldn't have been appropriate to be any closer to the circle of grief around her.

We would have been strangers to Carolyn Dutta. My daughter, then 9 years old, played with her daughter on the playground at school. She was the only one of the three of us with the faintest connection to anyone in the room. And she was behaving as if this surreal moment was completely normal.

When I got the email from the school principal during Christmas break a few years ago, about the car accident that killed Carolyn and injured her daughter, I wondered how I would break the news to my daughter. I waited a week, until a day before the visitation.

"Maybe you could make your friend a card?" I said. She loved making cards for nearly any occasion.

She asked if she could write "We're so sorry about what happened" on the cover. I suggested she stick with "So sorry" on the front and write the note inside.

She carried the card tightly in her left hand, slightly crumpled in her grip.

When we walked into the funeral home, I realized there were few children among the hundreds of visitors. Esme, her friend who had been hurt in the accident, wasn't there when we arrived. I told my daughter we would find a relative to deliver the card to her friend.

News reports described Carolyn as a devoted, energetic mom, who loved to cook and play with her three young children.

"Picture Mother Teresa on roller skates, moving very fast," is how her sister described her, according to reports after the funeral.

Carolyn had been 44 when a drunk driver killed her during a family trip in Canada. Her husband, Suman, would be raising Esme, 8, Liam, 5, and Vivienne, 2.

At the visitation, we quickly found a relative of the family, handed her the card for Esme and left within a few minutes of arriving. We talked in the car about how many people they had to take care of them and love them, and that we would keep praying for their family.

I have thought about those three children frequently.

I took my children to that visitation because I wanted them to know that people can survive the worst kind of tragedies. And that it's important to show respect and compassion for another person's tremendous loss.

But I also needed to be reassured. This mother's death shook me. I wanted to see all the love and support that would surround her babies.

When I became a parent, my life became so much more dear to me than it had ever been. Only I know the way I can love them. I know the way in which they need me.

The Windsor (Ont.) Star reported that the week before her death, Carolyn had called her sister-in-law almost in tears.

"I panicked because Carolyn never cried," Linda McFall said at the funeral, the paper reported. "I asked her what was wrong and she said 'No, nothing's wrong. I'm just standing at the window and I'm watching Suman play with the three kids in the backyard and I'm just so happy right now.'"

I know that feeling. That poignant joy that comes with seeing your children carefree and playing and loved.

This mother, whom I had never known in her life, revealed to me something essential and timeless after her death.

Love doesn't die.

Leading up to the country's annual cultural spectacle, an NFL cornerback gave a post-game interview that instantly became a national Rorschach test.

Seattle Seahawks defensive back Richard Sherman was either vaunted as an inspirational success story for his rise from Compton to Stanford graduate to NFL All-Pro, or derided as a classless thug for calling out an opponent as a "sorry" and "mediocre" wide receiver.

In fact, his behavior can encompass both.

When more than 100 million of us plop in front of our wide-screen TVs to witness this subplot in the Super Bowl drama, it may be worth explaining to the youngest viewers among us that those portrayed as heroes and villains on the screen are usually more complicated characters.

Sherman's case in point: He harnessed his insatiable ambition and work ethic to propel himself, the son of a trash collector, from a rough neighborhood in L.A. to salutatorian of his high school class. He motivated others to reach, not just for a football or basketball, but for their academic potential. He started a charity focused on giving inner-city kids the most likely keys to success: school supplies and textbooks.

Isn't that the kind of professional athlete we love to cheer?

He's also got a mouth that won't quit. He's a sportsman with a skewed sense of sportsmanship, in the eyes of many parents.

Like many other parents, we watched the NFC Championship game with our young children. Our 8-year-old son, in particular, cheered Sherman's spectacular play that clinched Seattle's trip to the Super Bowl.

Watching the post-game interview, he immediately looked to gauge our reactions after Sherman delivered a rant fit for a costumed professional wrestler ready to throw a metal chair.

"Did he just say some bad words?" our son asked.

"No, he didn't say any bad words. But he said some bad things about another player. And you would never say anything like that after winning a game," my husband said.

Odds are great that the vast majority of our children will never play in the NFL, NBA, NHL or MLB. They are not going to be among the world's elite athletes playing on the largest stages. But there will be millions of children playing in countless youth sporting events every weekend of the year.

Obviously, we want them to learn how to be gracious in victory and defeat.

The Super Bowl -- this annual most-watched, sexed-up and violent affair -- might be a strange place to look for life lessons. But it's an event that influences so many young notions of who and what is awesome. It's rife with teachable moments.

As someone who has loved the game since watching with my dad as a child and then cheering for my younger brother when he played in high school, I realized as a parent that watching professional football with children comes with some responsibility beyond that of a zealous fan.

We take for granted -- or relish -- the inherent brutality of the game. Just prior to Sherman's scene-stealing denouement, we witnessed another player's gruesome knee injury, replayed over and over during the game. There's also the issue of the lifelong damage done by repeated concussions, which the league attempted to settle with $765 million to brain-damaged former players. A judge refused to approve this settlement because it may not be enough to cover the damages.

President Barack Obama recently said that if he had a son, he wouldn't want him to play professional football, comparing it to the known risks one takes when smoking. Sports medicine and emergency room doctors have said they wouldn't let their sons play the game at any level.

There's an opening to talk about the importance of prioritizing one's long-term health and safety over the competitiveness in a game.

Besides the physicality of what happens on the field, the Super Bowl provides plenty for parents to discuss with their children during or after.

The $4 million ad spots are bound to glorify drinking, include some patently sexist images and detail the pharmaceutical solution to erectile dysfunction. The halftime show is unlikely to be as racy as a Beyonce number or lead to any wardrobe malfunctions, but it's still best to watch with the remote in hand.

Sherman's rant, much like the sport itself, was emotional, loud and over-the-top.

But within 24 hours, he apologized for "attacking an individual and taking the attention away from the fantastic game by my teammates."

There's a quote worth sharing.