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.
About eight billion dollars/year by my math.
The Bath School disaster may not be such a good example for opponents of gun control to bring up. The main explosive used by the perpetrator was something called pyrotol. According to Wikipedia: “distribution of pyrotol for farm use was discontinued in 1928” (the following year).
I believe that the surplus supply was used up in 1927/1928. The excess was gone so the need to distribute it was also gone, not the Bath disaster.
Hey Travis, the sheriff? that just finished the presser said he knew nothing about what was on the shooters person.
Interesting.
All the stories were to distract from the beginning. He had a kid there; Mom was a teacher there; ID, age, guns were legal (within an hour of the event in Business Insider), yet no one knew if he was killed or killed himself/hence the above presser statement weirdness, even though if he had his brothers ID, it would have been 24, not 20; Girlfriend missing; they said he got in a fight there the day before, yet he went to get a gun 3 days before and was denied; Why was he there? Later they said the mom didn’t work there and no further mention was made of the kid (or the mother of the kid ever); The type of weapons used; The story of her and shooting practice with the ‘uncontrollable’ kid (who also drives, but can’t get a gun); Such a problem, yet mainstreamed in school; He’s flat with no empathy, then he’s explosive enough to lose it (SSRIs anyone? I hope he wasn’t on Abilify in a cocktail either). I’ve never witnessed so many scrubbed previous and updated columns/reports. They reported the dad was killed or was it some other guy in the house, then I found out the dad and new wife were in hiding since the paparazzi hit the home..
BTW, as someone that worked with Aspergers K-12, this is BS.
Unless... he was smoking weed; a hard core gamer (depends on the games), and from this pic, drinking monster energy drinks; As Willie Degel would say, “That
s a red flag”, especially if that’s a Maxwell House coffee container under it (probably a different can).
They have huge caffeine and sometimes saccharin issues. A little helps you focus/have conversation (a fast one); or aggravates the hell out of you (and with even a bit of weed, may bring out schizo qualities.
I wish I could get his IEPs. 10 to 20, it will be bi-polar by tonight.
Three the libs want to forget.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cokeville_Elementary_School_hostage_crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Chowchilla_kidnapping
And more.
Pennsylvania school house massacre 1765
Fort Dearborn school children massacre 1812.
Hamilton TX school massacre. 1866.
Can’t have a massacre without semi-auto rifles now can we?
I’m suprised after OKC the goobermint didn’t ban rental trucks.
What does “on medication” mean when people ascribe SSRIs the blame?
Does that mean they had a prescription?( that’s not the same as they’re taking their meds.)
It’s a chicken and the egg scenario. We’re they mentally ill before or after the drug was prescribed?
Were they taking their medication as prescribed?
I see the ‘rats making a 2-fer based on emotions:
further advancing more socialized medicine under the guise of ‘free’ mental healthcare for all AND more restrictions on the 2nd Amendment.
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