Not the first time either. There was a 6-fatality shooting at a Christian school in Nashville last year (also done by a female) and a couple weeks ago, one at a small Seventh-Day Adventist school in California, although the only fatality was the shooter.
I’ve said before, and will again, that it’s nothing new. There was a non-fatal shooting at my junior high in Des Moines in 1972, and I never knew about it even though I went there just a few years later until people mentioned it on that school’s Facebook page. There was a murder/suicide a decade later at a high school, between a boy, and a girl who rejected him. One of my friends was her best friend, and he had harassed and stalked her relentlessly for a couple of YEARS but his lawyer daddy would keep getting him off the hook.
For 9 1/2 years, I assumed that the only reason we talked about Sandy Hook was because it was mostly white kids from upper-class families, and that if something similar would happen in a low-income community to mostly black and/or Hispanic kids from a low-income area, it wouldn’t even make the local news, and hoped my theory would never be put to the test.
BREAKING: Samantha Rupnow is allegedly the shooter at Abundant Life Christian school. She was a biological woman. Witnesses are claiming that the shooter "looked like a transgender.
There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Natalie/Samantha was trans, or even gender nonbinary. (Maybe her given name was Natalie Samantha, or Samantha Natalie? I’m a fan of unconventional middle names myself.)
I have noticed something in school shootings post-Uvalde that would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic: there is always a cop giving a report about how fast officers were able to respond and how they engaged the suspect right away. Every time this happens (only a few times that I have seen but still a few too many nonetheless) some sheriff has to get on the mic and declare for the public “we’re not like those Uvalde cops”.
I have a couple teachers among my small extended family. It’s a high stress job with a heavily female demographic.
I’d not be at all surprised to find “teacher ‘goes postal’ at her work = school” to be an up-and-coming thing. Just as males for many years specialized in “going postal” at their USPS branch.
I wouldn’t think teachers in general would shoot their students though (except in cases where they have been materially harassed by their students). The school board, OTOH…
My wife is a substitute teacher at an elementary school. Two days ago, she was consoling a teacher (taught there for 30 years) who was in tears, because an awful-behaving child (in kindergarten!) had been sucking up so much of her time and energy. The kid even hits teachers sometimes — and the parents don’t care.
We agreed that this is unsustainable. Public schools strive to serve all kids, but at some point Social Services has to help create another solution.
Anyway, I’ll end this hijack here. This is for another thread.
ETA: @Gyrate 2 posts up.
I should have included that. Shooting their school’s administration or the school board or certain parents, sure. Or maybe a peer teacher. But kids? 99.999% no way in hell.
I think you’re implying that there’s some lesson we need to learn or some action we need to take as a result of this particular incident, but without knowing more (e.g. why the shooter did what she did, how she obtained the gun, and whether reasonable safety precautions could have prevented this), I’m not sure what that is.