Late last week I saw images and read stories in multiple forms of media about people, primarily men, strolling into businesses; restaurants and department stores, openly carrying loaded assault rifles. For the cameras and reporters and anyone who would listen they pretended to be surprised why anyone would feel afraid in “what must be the safest place in town right now.” They sought and gained national, maybe international, attention for flaunting their second amendment constitutional right to bear arms in America. It was at the same time an incredible, outrageous, and effective demonstration. At our church we have posted signs at each entrance banning concealed carry. Our church. There we are following another directive “Thou shall not kill.”
Monday in Las Vegas Jerad and Amanda Miller, a married couple, steeped in the anti government rhetoric of the Cliven Bundy ranch encampment in Nevada, enter a small restaurant and assassinate two policemen seated at a table eating pizza for lunch. The policemen are apparently killed simply because they are policemen in uniform. The killers shoot and kill them policeman because they are “oppressors.” They throw two flags down over or near the bodies; a yellow Gadsen Flag and a Swastika. The Gadsen Flag is the iconic American symbol of a coiled rattlesnake snake with the caption “Don’t Tread on Me” printed in black.
They proceed, armed with more weapons and ammo taken from their car in the parking lot, to a Wal-Mart across the street where they intend to barricade themselves in the back of the store and kill more policemen in what they hope will be a deadly standoff. Inside the store Jerad Miller shoots his rifle into the ceiling, commands the employees to leave, and announces “the revolution has begun.” A 31 year old armed shopper, exercising his right to carry a loaded weapon, approaches Jerad Miller. It is assumed he did not realize Jerad’s wife Amanda was nearby and similarly armed. Amanda shoots and kills the armed shopper, shoots and kills her husband as previously arranged, and carries their deadly plan to conclusion by shooting and killing herself. Five gun deaths on a sunny morning amid the clean streets, the parked cars, and of big box stores of America. Somewhere buried under all that violence and death lays a twisted political statement I don’t understand.
On Tuesday, the second to the last day of school at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Oregon, a city of 16,400 people 12 miles east of Portland, 15 year old Jared Padgett, a student at the school, shot and killed 14 year old freshman Emilio Hoffman in a locker room. He wounded a teacher who was also a coach and had attended the school as a young man. Jared had come to school with an AR-15 rifle and a brown paper bag filled with more than 15 fully loaded magazines, as well as knives. They were concealed in a guitar case and a duffel bag. Police on Wednesday said they know of no link between the shooter and his victim, and no motive. He exchanged gunfire with police before taking his own life, Anderson said. He shot and killed himself while seated on a toilet in a stall in the locker room. The police sent a robot into the stall to determine if he was indeed dead and if bombs were present. It was over quickly.
By the way, when you Google Oregon School shooting you must choose between a numbers of pop up entries: Oregon School Shooting 2012, Oregon School shooting 2013, or Oregon School Shooting 2014.
In the eighteen months since the Sandy Hook school shooting in December of 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut there have been 74 school shootings identified primarily through media reports. An organization called Everytown released data that include incidents that were "classified as school shootings when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds, as documented in publicly reported news accounts," and "includes assaults, homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings." The data was also mapped on Zeemaps by The Huffington Post's Mark Gongloff. (Both Everytown.org and Zemaps can be googled for more information. My links didn't make it to the blog.)
At Sandy Hook 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children and 6 adult staff members. Prior to driving to the school, Lanza shot and killed his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the scene, Lanza killed himself by shooting himself in the head. Sandy Hook was the deadliest mass shooting at a high school or grade school in U.S. history and the second-deadliest mass shooting by a single person in U.S. history, after the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre at which a senior at Virginia Tech, shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, before shooting and killing himself.
All this was preceded by the incident which seemed to plant this phenomenon of school shootings in our collective American conscience, the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in April of 1999. There two senior students Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris staged a complex and highly planned attack involving a fire bomb to divert firefighters, propane tanks converted to bombs placed in the cafeteria, 99 explosive devices, and bombs rigged in cars. They murdered a total of 12 students and one teacher, injured 24 additional students, with three other people being injured while attempting to escape the school. Both boys then shot and killed themselves.
School boards and administrators, kids, parents, teachers, and law enforcement officials have all gotten smarter and better at reacting to these incidents and reducing the carnage. Consultants train them. Everyone knows the drills and employs similar security measures. Nothing stops it. Besides prevention measures like lock downs everything is after the fact. And after the facts are established, the stories accurately written, the cases studied, little or nothing of substance happens. We seem as Americans frozen, numb maybe, but seemingly powerless to react. Is it possible that we are together unwilling to act in any meaningful way, even to protect our children and ease the fears of their parents?
There is this, being circulated on Face Book this week, an invention now on sale to protect your child in school.
It is The Bodyguard Blanket, designed and manufactured by ProTecht, and advertised as a 5/16-inch thick bulletproof rectangle that students can wear over their back in the event of a tragedy at school. The product comes adorned with backpack straps and is reportedly able to protect against nails and shards of metal as well as bullets. ProTecht, which posted a video of a test blanket being shot with test gunfire, is made with the same material that makes up the body armor military, police officials, and police dogs rely on. Price is a problem. Each blanket sells for nearly $1,000. School funding being what it is I don’t see it happening. There are cutbacks you know. What have we come to?
My kids are out of school, in their 20’s and 30’s, living in Chicago, making their own choices and exposing themselves to risks of other kinds. They no longer face the possibility of dying because they go each day to a school in which my wife and I enrolled them. I feel for my young friends, many of them teachers and exposed to the double whammy of being also the parents of children in American schools. This is the America they live in. I have made it to the relative safety of this shack. They live in a world, media stoked yes, but one that contains a real and statistically higher level of violence and trauma than my children and my family ever faced at that stage of our life. How do we help young American families raising kids cope with this fear?
I don’t think we will change this deadly dynamic of gun violence in America until we find the political will to do so. Do you? What is more important than this? Where do we start?
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