Parents Open Up About Why Their New Documentary on School Shootings Left Them Freaked Out for Their 8-Year-Old

For filmmakers Jessica Dimmock and Zackary Canepari their latest documentary on the $3 billion-dollar active shooter preparedness industry and its impact on students and educators hit a little too close to home.

The filmmakers, who have an 8-year-old daughter, say the six-year project gave them a ringside seat into the dystopian world that their little girl — like millions of other American children — has inherited.

“Our daughter has active shooter drills at her school, but she doesn’t totally know what the drills are for,” Dimmock tells PEOPLE. “She’s just doing because the teachers are telling her to, but at some point, and I don’t know exactly when that will be, she’s going to realize, ‘Oh, we’re doing this because sometimes bad people come into schools and shoot people.’ ”

“I’m so curious about when she is going to cross that line and what it will do to her,” adds Dimmock. “It’s like this loss of innocence that hasn’t happened yet. But like all American kids, she’s basically going to realize that this thing they’re doing is to prepare them for something very real and terrifying.”

It’s this very real and terrifying reality that the couple explores in their new documentary Thoughts & Prayers, which debuts on Tuesday, Nov. 18 on HBO.

Their film combines candid interviews with disturbingly realistic scenes that chronicle how schools and communities around the country are dealing with the epidemic of school shootings by using drills to teach pupils how to fight off shooters and use technology like bullet-proof desks to stay safe. It also explores the emotional toll that these constant preparations are having on students.

“They’ve grown up preparing for this,” says Canepari. “They’ve grown up being told that in the middle of math class they should pause and practice for mass death for a few minutes, then go back to their math class. I think the most haunting thing we learned is that kids are thinking about this in the background all the time.”

Thoughts & Prayers (the title is a play upon how Congress’s response to these mass shootings is to simply offer sympathy to the victims and their families) doesn’t serve up any solutions to this problem.

Instead, the documentary attempts to vividly capture this strange world we live in, complete with entrepreneurs hawking things like a robotic search and rescue dogs to bullet-proof window shutters and ballistic shields that students can use to protect themselves from gunfire while fleeing from an active shooter.

“Everything you see in the film,” says Canepari, “is about practicing for when it eventually happens and not actually preventing it.”

By now, the statistics are familiar but still horrifying.

Between 2000 and 2022, according to USAFacts, there were 1,375 school shootings, resulting in 515 deaths and 1,161 injuries. (And in the first ten months of 2025, there have been 141 incidents of gunfire on school grounds across the country, killing 44 people, according to Everytownresearch.org.

“If there’s only one takeaway from our film, it’s that guns are the number one killer of children in the United States,” says Dimmock. “That’s a uniquely American number and our film is 100 percent built around that statistic.”

Their documentary, she adds, isn’t a “hopeful film, but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope.”

“Are there other solutions to this situation? There surely are,” she says. “What we tried to do is show what we’re doing now [to address this issue] and ask, ‘Is this going to be the way we get out of this mess?’ ”

Thoughts & Prayers debuts on HBO on Nov. 18 at 9 p.m. ET/PT and will be available to stream on HBO Max.