CNN is reporting yet another school shooting/hostage situation in Lancaster, PA, not even one hour from where I sit. I don’t wish to make this any more melodramatic than it has to be, but even as I note that all such situations are bad, we’re talking about Amish children here. The youth of a simple, humble people that quite ably keep to themselves and only rarely make any sort of trouble. What in the world could anybody have against the Amish?
I’m tired of these lunatics that open up in schools. What are we doing to create these monsters? It’s not exactly unknown in the rest of the world, but the trend seems to be inordinately focused on the United States as the locus of such lunacy. I just don’t get it. I likely never will. It’s all just so tragic. And what’s worse is that it doesn’t end there. This culture extends into Iraq. It extends into the inner cities. As we are now seeing, it even goes deep into the heartland.
With every one of these types of incidents it gets harder to hold my head up and say that I’m proud to be an American. Every one of these incidents takes a little more out of me. What’s worse, my son starts school next year. I can’t allow myself to be paralyzed with fear that something may happen, but I can’t allow myself to neglect the possibility that it might happen and I will be as helpless as the parents of these Amish children are right now.
I’m just all out of words right now. This is too much to bear. We have to find a way to stop this, for your children and mine. The sad thing is that I don’t know where to start (although I am almost certain of what the first step would be for some of you). I’m simply perplexed. I will never understand my fellow man. Never.
Stumbling onto a rerun of The Breakfast Club one night not too long ago, some friends and I sat agape as Anthony Michael Hall described that he got detention because he brought a flare gun to school. In the wake of Columbine, that particular scene has been come incredibly dated.
I don’t think it’s possible for us to understand. These acts are so heinous that nobody in their right mind could do them, so for most of us it’s impossible to comprehend the reason. Why they seem to come in rashes is puzzling, too. Whenever one school shooting occurs, you can almost bet on more in the next week.
It’s not just guns they’re using. Here is a report of arrests made for arson at a church. Note that the three culprits arrested are two 13-year old boys and one 12-year old boy. Also note that these boys had already started their criminal career. They really could’ve “hit this one out the park,” though. Read this article for more info.
Not to lessen the extremity of the story, but I have to wonder how rational your fear is. I mean, what are the odds of your kid getting involved in a situation like a school shooting? Granted, they happen every so often, but it isn’t a daily occurance at every school. It sort of strikes me as similar to being scared of flying because your plane might crash or going to NY because terrorists attack there. The liklihood of anything happening is slim.
And along those lines, I have to wonder if the shooter was indeed Amish. If that is the case, we can look a little deeper into what his reasoning may have been. As someone mentioned in the thread in MPSIMS, the Amish have a long tradition of dirty secrets about sexual abuse and downright physical abuse. That’ll mess anyone up.
IMO, the “success” of one emboldens other lunatics who’ve been nursing similar plans. That’s why they come in rashes.
Personally, I’m as worried about my children being caught up in a similarly styled school attack as I’m worried about them being caught up in a terrorist attack. Both of these are so remote as to warrant no consideration of the risks my teens face on a daily basis.
I think there are sick people out there who basically think “OK, what’s the most horrible thing I can do” then do it (after some obsessing time and possibly too much sugar).
I’m still perfecting my combo mental candling/bug zapper device to take care of this. Basically, everyone has to pass through it (that might be the trickiest part). If they set off the mental candling device, they have to pass through once again, for confirmation. If confirmed, then ZZZZT! Yeah, I know, due process, thought crime, blah, blah, blah…
When I worked as a teacher it WAS my ass. I felt at the time, and still believe, there’s not much to be done about this in terms of security. The “solution” is a societal problem.
The fact is, short of turning a school into a police state, there’s not much we can do about it. And even then… If someone is determined to get into a school building (or most public places) and do harm, they usually can.
Or they could forget about being IN the building and just wait outside. We let the kids out on the playground every so often. And they occasionally have to walk to buses and such where they are exposed.
Sure, we did some common sense things like locking the doors. And also a lot of pointless measures that didn’t do anything, which I believe actually made us less prepared by instilling a false sense of safety.
Actual SECURITY costs big bucks. Multiply that by the number of schools in the country and you’ll see why I don’t think it won’t happen any time soon.
But the good news is that school shootings are thankfully quite rare, despite the happenings of the past month.
Until we develop foolproof personal force fields for safety, we’re going to have to live with the idea that we can’t secure every place to the degree we might like.
My condolences to those affected by today’s events.
Exactly. I’ve never really had even a twinge of fear getting on a plane, pre- or post-9/11. However, I can tell you I’ll have a low-level buzzing in the back of my head all damned day after taking the kids to school tomorrow.
At times like this, it’s vital to remember what’s important: this sort of thing would still happen if kids in our country didn’t have easy access to guns. Don’t blame the poor guns. It’s not their fault.
Apparently, one of the little girls died in the arms of rescuers as they attempted to get her out of the school. I am in awe of any first responder – police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel – who can do their jobs and manage to live a somewhat productive life without waking up screaming every night.
I wouldn’t be too much of a smartass on that point. There was a school shooting in Montreal last month and the targetting of only women reminded me very much of the Polytechnique shooting in 1989, also in Montreal (which spawned our fairly useless gun registry).
Not to make light of this shooting in any way, but in the interest of fighting ignorance, I’m compelled to point out that the Amish aren’t entirely “simple, humble people”. Apparently some have a tradition of Rumspringa, where Amish teens spend several years with loose rein to do whatever they may want to try.
