Like many middle-aged white women, I am a big fan of Trevor Noah. He’s so cute, talented, and polite, and he speaks of his mother with respect tinged with fear. He reminds me of my own sons.

Sometimes we disagree though, and it happened this week, when he scoffed at a plan by a school in Pennsylvania to arm its classrooms with buckets of rocks for students to use in case of a school shooting. I thought it was a brilliant idea.

When I took self-defense for women, one of the main takeaways was Create a Surprise. Nothing complex: you create a surprise by yelling and fighting back. Armed creeps expect obedience, and its opposite discombobulates them. In the happiest case, the miscreant is startled enough to give you a chance to escape. Another heavily-emphasized strategy was Run.

A gunman entering a schoolroom expects the students to cower and avoid eye contact. If instead they all started yelling and throwing rocks, that could be a game-changer.

Taking my cues from Obvious Man, I do not think that arming anyone with anything is the correct approach to school shootings. (If I don’t have to explain this to you, skip to the next paragraph now.) Obviously, that “solution” assumes there will be school shootings and we are trying to reduce the body count, whereas an actual solution would call for America to catch up to the rest of its peers and forestall such events.

The fact is, school shootings are accomplished with guns, and mostly with guns that no one not licensed as a mass killer needs, namely guns that spray bullets. If you are spraying bullets at target practice, you have no idea if you are any good or not, but probably you are not. If you are spraying bullets while hunting wild game hunting, you are the opposite of an apex predator, and also unclear on the concept. If you are planning to spray bullets for self-protection at home or in public, you are clearly unconcerned about collateral damage, ie, not the sort of person who should have a gun.

But people do have bullet-spraying guns in the US, they do and they will. So I recommend we fill our public and private venues with lots and lots of rocks. Rocks under every school desk, at every theatre seat, beneath every pew, on every restaurant table, at every workstation and customer counter. Rocks in every bedroom, in homes and hotels and dorms.

Instead of See something, say something, if you See a shooter, throw a rock. You may want to yell, too.