Here are some of my truths about school slaughter.

Everyone thinks it can’t happen here, no matter where “here” is.

The trumpeting that “we must do something now” will produce nothing. Why should this time be different from the previous? The scene is set for the next horror. Expect decades of classroom slaughter.

You doubt decades? The Columbine killings were on April 20, 1999. It’s already been decades.

People are willing to pay with the lives of other people’s children so they can shoot some free food and thrill at firing an AR-15, secure in the knowledge they would never slaughter anyone and it could never happen here. Good, unimaginative people choose to disbelieve the truth that many now painfully know: It can happen anywhere.

We’re told repeatedly that people who commit these crimes are monsters or maniacs. This falsehood is designed to suggest we can identify them before they act. But they’re not monsters. They’re people. They’re human just as Russian President Vladimir Putin is human. Their deeds are monstrous. Humans sometimes do monstrous things.

We are told by deceitful senators that guns don’t kill people, people do. Blaming guns, they say, is a liberal error. They lie that the problem is a mental health problem, that if no gun were available, the mentally ill monster would gather twigs and kill 21 people with the twigs. That’s how ill they are.

Mass shootings don’t only happen here because the United States is the only country with mentally ill monsters. Nor is it something in the water. No, it is the delightful mix of greed, hatred, fear, racism, politics, guns and Kevlar that we treasure, that makes us who we are.

Guns are big business and big business spends big bucks to legally bribe Congress to protect that big business.

The absurdity of the above truths calls for absurd solutions. Many have been offered, such as arming teachers. I too have one to offer.

I hope no one will interpret it as humor and castigate me with “too soon, too soon.” (As if it could ever be too soon, considering there is never a “respectful” interval between one slaughter and the next.) No, this is legitimate absurdity to meet a desperate need.

We can’t beat the gun business. They own too many senators. Saving kids will require support of gun manufacturers. If we can’t beat them, we must retch and join them.

How to get the gun merchants to save kids? There has to be money in it for them. That’s the kind of guys they are. Selling more guns and more armor must be an integral part of the solution.

We’ve seen at Uvalde, Texas, the fathers rush the school and the police rush them. Nineteen police, in between tackling fathers, delayed for 75 minutes while students phoned out asking for police to come in. This argues for parents being the school protectors.

So let each school have its own parents militia, armed to the teeth, dressed in battle armor, legally receiving paid leave for guard duty, surrounding and inside schools, showing our kids how real Americans protect their young. There would be gun and grenade caches in the classrooms for the children to help repel the intruder. What could go wrong?

Schools would train students in preparation for their future parental duties as militia members. Parents would be drafted into their militia and could not decline. Even those with preschool children would have to enroll them in day care because militia duty comes first.

With about 49.4 million K-12 public school students, there’d be roughly 25 million parents to be armed and armored. That should get the attention and support of the gun industry.

And parents will get to know one another. The militias could be called Parent-Teacher Militias and meet twice a year for coffee, doughnuts, ammunition checks and weapon inspections.

Skeptics will of course want to know how we will pay for this exercise. Suppose arms and armor costs $25 billion. That’s only twice what we’ve already spent on Ukraine. The other big expense would be the paid leaves for militia duty. I suggest this come out of the defense budget.

Oops! I forgot militia training. We can’t have untrained folks handling weapons. More bucks from the defense budget.

Bonus: The nation will be better prepared to repel an invasion by Mexico and Canada. You never can tell what those pesky neighbors are up to.

Richard S. Bogartz is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.