The feeling that you get the moment that you realize that a loved one is trapped by an armed madman is very difficult to describe. You get a partial chunk of information—a gunman is in the school—and before you can even fully process the meaning of those words, your heart plummets towards your stomach and you find yourself already in motion, doing everything in your power to get there and MAKE. IT. STOP.

It is in moments like these that you realize just how fragile and precious life is. Novelist “James Viser” (his pen name) is one of two thousand fathers that recently had that experience in Centennial, Colorado, when he son was trapped in a high school during a school shooting.

This is his story, told from the panicked moment his wife informed him that their had been a shooting at Arapahoe High School, through reuniting with his son, through the following morning as he thought about the shooter, and how much in common the shooter had with their son.

Of course, the Arapahoe High School shooter wasn’t “just like Peter.”

Viser’s son may have been at the same school and participated in the same activities, but he didn’t bitterly cling to a failed political ideology that says it wants to make everyone “equal,” and yet has always been quite willing to accomplish this through depraved mass violence when persuasion failed. Quite in contrast to communist shooter, who wanted to carry out a mass murder, Viser was concerned that his son “Peter” might become a victim because he raised a young man with the character to run towards the sounds of danger to save others, putting his own safety second.

Make sure you read the parts about Viser carrying a concealed weapon—he’s one of us—and of the despicable behavior of the news media, who were attempting to frame an anti-gun op-ed before the “active shooter” situation was even resolved.