Tuesday, October 03, 2006

lockdown

i really feel i need to address this.

What is wrong with our society, where someone can feel justified in taking a gun to a school, and slaughtering whomever they choose? After seeing a third deadly school shooting, this one with the most innocent of people, the Amish, I have severe concerns for the sanity of us as a people. What i do know, is that there are 5 dead little girls (and the rest are in serious/grave condition), and a dead principal, and one dead teenage girl. all those lives, ended so abruptly, with no real rhyme or reason.

I sat liam down last night, and asked him about his school's lockdown policy. he had no clue what i was talking about, or what to do. That frightened me. Liam is such an innocent. I emailed his principal last night. this school has over 600 students, so i'm sure she was just inundated, but i received an email within an hour, telling me the school's plans, and that they had a drill last spring, but had called it an emergency drill, so as to not frighten the children. now they're going to call it a lockdown. while this does relieve my mind a bit, this school had an armed robbery last fall. a pizza delivery guy was going out a west door, and was held up, during school hours. the school then instituted a policy that ALL doors except the front one (on the northeast corner of the building) would be locked after the kids were in. that might help the invasion problem, but still. i'm scared for my kids.

aren't you?

4 comments:

fillyjonk said...

I don't have kids, and I'm scared. Scared for my former students who teach. Scared for my Youth Group kids or the kids of my friends.

(Hell, I'm scared for my OWN safety sometimes. When my dad was a prof, there was a kid who failed chem for the second time, flipped out, put his fist through a plate-glass display case, and said he was coming back with a gun for the chem prof. He never did because the security guards came and escorted him to jail and also a "restraining order" was filed on him immediately and all campus police/security were informed to ARREST HIS BUTT if he was seen anywhere on campus....)

But yeah. I know I say this about every six weeks, but: did the human race get broken recently or is this just the first I've heard of it? There have been so many incidents this fall - this one, the Montreal one, the one in Colorado, the principal in Wisconsin who got killed...and a couple of ones where the armed person went in but they were luckily able to talk him down.

And I don't get it. There are almost no situations in life where that kind of final action (and even if the shooter doesn't get killed or kill himself, it's a final action as he will be spending most of the rest of his life in prison) is justified.

Are kids not learning perspective any more? No, wait..several of these shooters were adults. Are adults not learning perspective any more?

What's wrong with us as a society that we can produce people who think shooting kids in school is a valid way of addressing their grievances with the world? (FWIW, I don't think the availability of guns is necessarily to blame; think of the 1800s where every family had guns...there were, as far as I can determine, far fewer cases of shootings then). And I don't think "But we're at war in the world" works either, because we were at war (even more noticably so on the home front) during WWII and you don't hear of school-massacres in the history books...

mamaloo said...

What really scares me is what this world will be like in 10 years when my son is entering high school.

If the world is this effed up now, what will it be like in a decade?!

Anonymous said...

It is times like this when I thank god that I live on a little island in the middle of know where. We have no gun crime (our gun laws are the same as England ie no guns. but even here things are changing. We had our first stabbing that has resulted in a death, where is it all going to lead...

AR said...

I'm scared for my kids. I'm scared for this entire world. I can't believe that I was in high school 14 years ago, and it's so different and dangerous. What happened to humanity?