It doesn’t matter who you are.

It doesn’t matter where you’re going.

If you live, work, play, or travel in the United States of America, you have to have a plan. You have to be ready. What will I do, where will I go, if a mass-shooter starts shooting wherever I’m going?

Movie theater, bank, school, post office, nightclub, grocery store.

Phone, wallet, keys, plan of escape.

I want to take this young woman out for a date. Let’s make sure I have flowers, dinner reservations, movie times, and the willingness to shield her body from a hail of bullets.

I need to drop my kids off at school. Do they have their backpack, lunch, and a way to convincingly play dead in a pile of their peers’ corpses?

I have some errands to run today. Laundry, ATM, groceries, and the conviction that I will be the person who fights back against the shooter so the overall body count will be lower.

A couple of you reading this are undoubtedly saying that packing your own gun is part of your preparation. Of course, it’s likely then that you’ll still die in the event of a mass-shooting, just mistaken for the mass-shooter in the chaos of death. Maybe your race or privilege will shield you from this outcome, but it’s probably best to have your will in order before leaving the house just in case.

Hyper-vigilance is a post-traumatic response to stressful events. One begins to picture that every building, interaction, happening is an opportunity for the horrific past to repeat itself. This is how we, as a species, learned to not repeat endangering mistakes like wandering into the den of a saber-toothed tiger without a plan. In the contemporary era, it’s seen as disordered thinking, paranoid, not realistic.

But now we live a time when people are experiencing multiple mass-shootings. Sometimes they survive a second time, sometimes they don’t. If you’re heading out in the US, it’s always realistic to consider the possibility that a man with a high-powered firearm will start shooting and you will have seconds to react and try to live. Fight, flight, or freeze?

In all this planning, you might think that the nation itself would formulate a plan. That the country’s leaders, its government, its tech giants, its visionaries, would come forward with some form of prevention. Oh sure, we have bulletproof backpacks on the back-to-school shelves this August and body armor to don when going to get gas. But these are just moneymaking reactions, treating the very last of the symptoms rather than the cause. Who is working on the cure for shootings, the plan to get us out of this mess?

For a country so excited to respond violently to every instance of violence it endures, we’re lost when there isn’t a clear target to hit with shock and awe. One terror attack hits our largest city and we destroy two countries for decades in retaliation. But the mass-shooters can come for our kindergartners and concert-goers, our shoppers and diners, and the most we do is shoot the one man doing it in the moment. We can’t wear shoes or take water through a plane security checkpoint, but we can take a gun damn near anywhere we go.

And for all your planning, it’s pretty much dumb luck whether or not you survive. Any plan you develop is overridden by the caprice of whether you’re right next to the shooter when he starts his rampage, whether you have a hiding place accessible, whether he’s rapacious or easily exhausted, whether he thinks you’re part of his most enraging target demographic. Plan all you want, but you’re only tweaking the chances slightly.

That said, it’s your life on the line, so better safe than sorry.

Tomorrow is Monday. More likely than not, you’ll have a job to go to. Drive safely, work hard, and be ready to dive under your desk when the time comes.