The back-to-school season always puts me in my feelings about what my son is old enough to do.

I am well aware my baby is not my baby anymore. He looms over me by several inches, and I need him to get things off high shelves, which really drives that point home.

But, at 16, he is in a gray area of what is and isn’t allowed. They often come up around his part-time job. He isn’t allowed to use dangerous equipment such as a deli slicer or wood chipper. He couldn’t perform demolition — although his bedroom would suggest he does it at home for free. He isn’t permitted to use woodworking machines.

This list of deadly things he is considered too immature to handle ran through my mind as I watched the coverage of the Apalachee High School shooting in Winder, Ga. It left two students and two teachers dead and nine people injured.

Many stories focused on the shooter, Colt Gray, 14, and the Georgia laws that placed no limits on the guns this child could buy, much less use. How could anyone think a kid barely in high school is old enough to walk around with a weapon, when my son is considered too young to put cardboard in the recycling compactor?

But that is not my focus. My attention is on the other kids and what people believe they are old enough to face.

There is a belief that it is too soon to talk about what to do about guns when a terrible gun crime just happened. But there is no thought to it being too soon to tell a kindergartner not to cry during an active-shooter drill.

A fourth grader can be too young to see a PG-13 movie, but not too young to talk about what to do when a classmate brings a gun to school. A 17-year-old can’t buy a zombie apocalypse video game because it’s rated M. But he can testify about seeing his classmates murdered.

Our children are ours to protect — as parents and as a society — until they are 18. We place limits on what is beyond their capabilities physically, mentally and emotionally. They can’t drive a car until this age, be left home alone until this age or sit in the front seat before this age.

How do we continue to ask them to do something none of us would want to face? How do we send them into war when they need permission to use the restroom?

I cannot think about the shooter. It makes me angry. I cannot think about the victims because it breaks my heart. The students were 14 years old, too. The educators made teaching math their life’s mission. That shouldn’t end in bloodshed.

But what I can think about is the other kids, the ones in every school in every state. Every day we don’t do something to protect them is a day we are feeding them into a system as deadly as all those tools my son isn’t allowed to use at work.

Because he is too young.

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