- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
In 1967, there was a high school shooting at my school, West Leyden, in Northlake, Illinois. One student was killed and at least one teacher wounded, and the gunman, a student, ran off but was quickly taken into custody--If I recall correctly, he was grabbed by the teacher who was shot, but I'm not sure I remember those details accurately and I can't find any reference to it at all on the Internet except one scholarly paper that you can't read without a subscription. That's it. No big deal, apparently. It didn't make the newspapers at the time at all.
Almost immediately after the shooting happened, certainly within 10 minutes, our principal got on the PA and calmly told us what had happened, and to stay in our classrooms until further notice. And that was that. Maybe we were jaded, but we weren't mad at the school, weren't anxious and scared, just sad and disturbed that someone our age would do such a horrible thing.
I have no idea why society is so much more fearful now than when back then I was growing up. Just a year before that killing, Richard Speck had killed 8 student nurses in a horrifying bloodbath. We read about terrible murders in the newspaper all the time. Yet throughout my high school years, ever since I was a 70-pound freshman, I took the bus and el to downtown Chicago a few times every month all by myself, often coming home after dark, and was never scared. Fearfulness, and a belief that we Americans are somehow entitled to safety despite our own record for endangering people in other countries, are new phenomena. I never had a gun, and the only time guns were ever in our house was after my brother returned from Vietnam--that felt like the most dangerous time of my life since he kept a loaded pistol under his pillow and would wake up screaming every night for months. We didn't dare wake him or go anywhere near him, that was for sure. Since he was the only one I knew in the NRA, and since his gun ownership, at least until he got over some of his PTSD, seemed risky at best, I've always had mixed feelings about the idea that guns make people safer.
It was tragic that the police and the VA Tech administration didn't realize that the murderer in today's situation was going to commit additional murders. But to rip off Tolstoy, unhappy mass murderers aren't alike. The 30+ deaths two hours after the original killings were certainly avoidable in an alternate universe. But in this universe, where police and college administrators aren't prescient, outrage should be focused on a horrifying crime and ways we can prevent similar crimes. Lashing out at the administration is unfair and counterproductive.
