uesday is my day to help out with the book-of-the-week in my daughter's first grade class.
This week, my group read a story about a red hen. Then we picked out words to look up in the dictionary. One boy, unconvinced that the task was fun or worthwhile, used the dictionary to hit himself on the head - not hard enough to hurt, just hard enough to distract everyone else.
I walked out thinking how tough it could be to teach first grade. Soon afterward, I learned what happened that day in another first grade class. A 6-year-old boy shot and killed a 6-year-old girl in a school near Flint, Mich.
The chance of a shooting incident happening at a school near you is statistically remote. Because of the ages of the children involved, this is an especially extreme example.
But the statistical remoteness did not stop my daughter from hearing the news on television and asking some difficult questions before she left for school the next morning:
''Mommy, why did the boy shoot the girl? How did he get a gun?''
The 6-year-old who shot Kayla Renee Rolland will probably never be able to explain why he did it, although we are already drawing some conclusions based on what we know about him so far.
Before this incident, his life was a shambles. He had a father in prison and a mother who sent him to live in a crackhouse. He had no real home, let alone anyone to teach him values.
The story forces us, once again, to analyze a culture that not only celebrates guns and violence, but allows some unfortunate children to live with them.
I don't know about you, but this story also forces me to do something else: focus more clearly on issues during this presidential campaign. That is something I have avoided, not unlike the little boy in my daughter's class who refused to open the dictionary.
Why does a .32-caliber bullet fired into the chest of a 6-year-old do that? Because it pierces the bubble of superficial, even irrational, thinking about personality and style that has permeated so much of the presidential campaign to date. Such thinking is surprisingly seductive, even to someone who never stepped foot on the ''Straight Talk Express.''
Character counts. So does heroism, although heroes do not always choose that role; often, fate foists it upon them.
But at some point, issues must count, too, issues like a person's feelings about guns and what that person is willing to do to control them.
Of all the special interests, the country's gun lobby remains incredibly potent, stronger, it seems, than the will of its citizens.
Soon it will be the one-year anniversary of the 12 shooting deaths at Columbine High School, an execution carried out methodically by two teenage boys who easily obtained guns.
None of the publicity about that horror, nor any other shooting to date, has made it any harder for anyone in America to get a gun.
The killing of the Michigan first-grader prompted President Clinton to appeal to the American electorate to make tighter gun control laws an issue of the 2000 presidential campaign.
Vice President Al Gore advocates registration for all new handguns. Bill Bradley, his Democratic challenger, has called for the registration of every handgun in America - and why not? We register cars. Why not guns? Texas Governor George W. Bush and US Senator John McCain oppose all handgun registration.
Gun registration is not the solution to violence, but it is a piece of solving the puzzle, along with safety requirements like trigger locks and laws to make adults criminally responsible for their children's violent acts.
Republicans are generally deft at turning the debate away from gun control and toward theory - the impact of violence on television, the movies, video games, and the Internet.
There is plenty to theorize about when it comes to trying to figure out why a 6-year-old boy would think of a gun as a solution in his young, sad life. As the Michigan prosecutor investigating the case put it: ''He is a victim in many ways. It is very sad, we need to put our arms around him and love him.''
But there is nothing theoretical about the gun that killed Kayla. It was loaded and lying in a bedroom. A little boy picked it up and took it to school. Now a little girl is dead. A gun, not the circumstances of anyone's life, killed her in what should be the safest of havens - a classroom.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist.
