Yet I can’t help but carry my own disquiet. It comes and goes, but it never fully disappears. It tags along to the movies, and the Stop & Shop where I buy groceries. It’s there when I think about my nephew, who starts kindergarten in September. It’s here now on a stormy afternoon as I sit and write at that library. It’s a specter that has crept into every conceivable public place I visit or think about, and it has irrevocably changed how I see them. The openness means there’s nowhere to hide. The unpredictability that was a joy now seems like a liability. I spend more and more time thinking about the regularity with which these spaces have become stages for ghastly, mass-scale tragedies.

—Sophie Kleeman, in “Fighting the Fear of Public Space”