‘Thoughts and Prayers’ Review: The Business of School-Shooting Survival

If you didn’t know you were watching a documentary, you might assume this film was part of some wildly exaggerated dark comedy. And perhaps, deep down, Thoughts and Prayers: How To Survive An Active Shooter In America really is one: a story so tragic, and so consistently ignored, that the horror begins to look absurd—almost laughable in its sovereign stupidity. For decades, the United States has been trapped in a cycle of bloody violence in public spaces: concerts, churches, cinemas, and, most shockingly, schools. These attacks leave behind dead children and teachers, wounded survivors, traumatized communities, and a national debate that restarts every time but never moves forward. Everyone knows the only solution with real impact—restricting or banning firearms—yet nothing happens. Politicians send victims and family members the usual “thoughts and prayers,” and the cycle continues.

The film focuses precisely on what has grown out of that political emptiness: an industry. Every new school shooting triggers hand-wringing, mourning, angry statements on TV, and then the same dead-end conversations—guns are too easy to buy, mental health is underfunded—and then politicians, governors, congress members, and presidents insist that the solution lies elsewhere, protected by the Constitution, the Second Amendment, or whatever justification is convenient. Eventually, the debate stops entirely. People die, the country sighs in grief, and everyone braces for the next massacre.

What Thoughts and Prayers reveals is the enormous market that has risen in the vacuum created by government inaction. With no gun control and no structural treatment of mental health, schools are left to fend for themselves using every band-aid solution the market can provide: traumatic active-shooter drills, armed-staff training, and a shopping list of defensive products designed to help schools “fight back” when the inevitable happens.

At times, the documentary plays like a trade expo from some dystopian future. Small family-run companies—many of them led by retired military personnel—present bulletproof desks that swivel 90 degrees to become shields, reinforced windows, framed artworks designed to stop rifle rounds, motion-tracking surveillance systems, robotic guard dogs, bulletproof backpacks and devices of all shapes and functions. And that’s just the hardware. There is also a booming sector dedicated to training teachers how to shoot, complete with advanced VR simulations. Some companies even hire specialists to recreate full mass-shooting scenarios to “prepare” staff and students, as if real trauma were another training module on a corporate checklist.

This bizarre “death circus” forms the spine of the documentary. On one hand, we follow the preparations at a school in Oregon staging a simulated mass shooting—an ambitious, expensive, strangely Hollywood-like production involving the entire community. On the other hand, we watch entrepreneurs selling products of highly debatable effectiveness. And then come the film’s toughest scenes: interviews with children and educators who speak about their fear, about learning algebra while mentally calculating their escape routes, about going to school unsure whether they will return alive.

If one overlooks the reason this industry exists—because lawmakers refuse to restrict firearms—some of these measures could almost seem rational. But the elephant in the room is massive. Nothing substantial is done to keep guns out of classrooms, nor to identify and meaningfully treat the people who might commit such acts. Instead, children learn to hide behind framed posters like pint-sized Captain Americas. And that’s before considering the psychological damage of simply living with the constant threat, whether an attack ever happens or not.

Directors Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock also touch on the exhaustion of teachers, already overwhelmed by increasingly aggressive students, low salaries, and now the added expectation that they learn to fire weapons to protect their classes. Many educators understand that this is one reason why more and more teachers are leaving the profession. Meanwhile, the companies profiting from fear admit—let’s say with unconvincing sadness—that every new massacre is good for business. School districts buy more gear, more drills, more guns, triggering a self-feeding arms race that resembles, in many ways, international military escalation.

Dramatic and, at times, deliriously absurd, Thoughts and Prayers forces viewers to consider how easily this logic could expand beyond the U.S. In an era of cultural polarization, imported political rhetoric, and a growing admiration for some of America’s worst social habits, it doesn’t sound impossible that other countries might someday respond in the same way: not by preventing tragedy, but by preparing for the next one, offering condolences when lives are lost, and gearing up for the next predictable and preventable war on their own school grounds.