Maniacs intent on mass murder will find a way.
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Posted on 12/17/2012 5:43:25 AM PST by Notary Sojac
In the end there were 38 children dead at the school, two teachers and four other adults.
I’m not talking about the horrific shooting in Connecticut today. I’m talking about the worst school murder in American history. It took place in Michigan, in 1927. A school board official, enraged at a tax increase to fund school construction, quietly planted explosives in Bath Township Elementary. Then, the day he was finally ready, he set off an inferno. When crowds rushed in to rescue the children, he drove up his shrapnel-filled car and detonated it, too, killing more people, including himself. And then, something we’d find very strange happened.
Nothing.
No cameras were placed at the front of schools. No school guards started making visitors show identification. No Zero Tolerance laws were passed, nor were background checks required of PTA volunteers—all precautions that many American schools instituted in the wake of the Columbine shootings, in 1999. Americans in 1928—and for the next several generations —continued to send their kids to school without any of these measures. They didn’t even drive them there. How did they maintain the kind of confidence my own knees and heart don’t feel as I write this?
They had a distance that has disappeared. A distance that helped them keep the rarity and unpredictability of the tragedy in perspective, granting them parental peace.
“In 1928, the odds are that if people in this country read about this tragedy, they read it several days later, in place that was hard to get to,” explains Art Markman, author of “Smart Thinking” (Perigee Books, 2012). “You couldn’t hop on a plane and be there in an hour. Michigan? If you were living in South Carolina, it would be a three-day drive. It’s almost another country. You’d think, ‘Those crazy people in Michigan,’ same as if a school blows up in one of the breakaway Republics.”
Time and space create distance. But today, those have compressed to zero. The Connecticut shooting comes into our homes–even our hands–instantly, no matter where we live. We see the shattered parents in real time. The President can barely maintain composure. This sorrow isn’t far away, it’s local for every single one of us.
And of course it brings up Columbine. Two horrors, separated by years and miles, are now fused into one. It feels like terrible things are happening to our children all the time, everywhere. Nowhere is safe.
As a result, I expect we will now demand precautions on top of precautions. More guards. More security cameras. More supervision. We will fear more for our kids and let go of them even more reluctantly. Every time we wonder if they can be safe beyond our arms, these shootings will swim into focus.
Will this new layer of fear and security make our children any safer? Probably not, but for a reassuring reason: A tragedy like this is so rare, our kids are already safe. Not perfectly safe. No one ever is. But safe.
That’s a truth the folks in 1928 America understood. We just don’t feel that way now.
Not when there’s no distance between us and the parents in Newtown.
I saw an article in one of the big on-line British newspapers that declared the Connecticut shootings as the ‘worst school shooting in U.S. history’.
I almost dropped them a line to correct their assertion, but decided against it.
Who am I to argue with the top brains of mass media?
The leftist freaks are all excreting some “31 school shootings since 1999” — I guess to tie it all in with Bush years, but THAT’S the buzzwords they’re running with.
Saw another leftist moron proudly proclaim that “gun rights end” when her child is involved or some such horseclinton.
Hussein’s Fast and Furious American-killing gun-running wasn’t as effective as his newest “political capital” in Ct.
Correction - not shooting, but massacre. My mistake.
Maniacs intent on mass murder will find a way.
Please copy and share on FP, Twitter, etc.
Some of the eternally damned insist on making a grand murderous entrance into the fiery abyss below.
Later
/just wait till the Left finish their total gun control, then they will start their crusade on gasoline.....
He gets it right except for this...”The President can barely maintain composure.” I’ll never believe that the kenyan has a caring bone in his boney little body except for himself.
We attended our youngest’s graduation ceremony yesterday at Appalachian State, held in their indoor convocation center/arena. Just inside each entry door were “bag check” tables that the crowd had to file past in order to gain entry. ONLY THE PEOPLE with bags were checked (the majority women w/pocketbooks). No metal detecting pass-thru’s, no wanding, no frisking. Practically all men walked right by without a glance from the student bag-checkers.
I asked my mother-in-law “What do you think they were looking for?” She said...”I don’t know...guns maybe?” I DID NOT SAY...”Oh, you mean like the one in my pocket?” (No, I didn’t have one.) I didn’t tell her what I thought about the situation because she’s old...didn’t need her to pass out right there.
I knew the answer, of course, because the same procedure is used at the football games (and other athletic events). No bag, free pass thru. I’d even asked a bag-checker once and was told alcohol and weapons.
It was hard to relax during the graduation ceremony.
It wasn’t a school massacre, but the worst massacre of children was at Waco.
Even FOX has been going 24/7 on the Newtown school killings.
Imagine this headline and article:
2,800 Pre-Schoolers Killed Yesterday
Yesterday approximately 2,800 babies were killed in abortion mills around the USA.
This is typical of an average day, 365 days per year, year after year.
However, the daily average has been dropping in the last decade and federal officials are puzzled as to the cause.
Officials have taken steps to prevent further reductions including various programs to make abortions free, or more
affordable, through various programs that subsidize the industry.
What would it cost to have two former GIs as school security guards armed with MP 5s at each school? Would that not be a deterrent and an opportunity for discharged Vets?
Ditto that
And there’s our kneejerk reactionary in chief decrying “US will have to change”.
http://www.exposingtheleft.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-deadliest-school-massacre-in-us.html
Absolutely. I’ve stated this about our view of history. The AmRev did not have any real images at all, and news T best might reach people the next day. No immediacy, no urgency. And for posterity, we hardly identify with this heroic conflict. ACW there were photos of real dead bodies and other real men, and telegraphs and locomotives could bring all that news faster. People got more shocked and posterity better understood how men lived and died and cared more about them. WWII we have film and see everything, and people then could get news almost instantaneously.
That’s part of why there is more knee-jerk reaction instead of reason in these matters. We see it as it happens and are worried how we can save everyone who is in the crisis, and when we can’t, project it to action for future incidents. In the old days it wasn’t immediate and in our grasp, so no-one rushed to judgement and hand-wrung about what to do, because the crisis was well past.
Horrible idea, misses the whole point of the article.
Schools are already as safe as they are ever going to be in a free country.
Liberals create “Gun Free Zones” that are the most dangerous places in American.
Obama did the worst ‘fake crying’ from a politician that I have ever seen
He wiped his eye on the side that tears dont come from, then wiped his finger down his cheek...as if he was searching for or trying to remember where tears are supposed to come from
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