Lydster: talking about school shootings

January 17, 1989, in Stockton, California

Active Shooter DrillsAt the end of the summer, my daughter was waiting for her friends, who were late. She calls me at home, and she brings up the subject of school shootings.

She wanted to know if I had to think about these things growing up. Heck, no, but I’m better than a half-century older than she is. This got me to look up the Wikipedia page for List of school shootings in the United States. Ah, such a convenient tracking of carnage.

There were shootings back in the 19th century, but most involved zero to two casualties. An exception took place on March 30, 1891, in Liberty, Mississippi when “an unknown gunman fired a double-barreled shotgun into the mixed audience, made up of black and white students, parents and teachers. Fourteen people were wounded, some seriously.”

Six were killed in a melee in Charleston, West Virginia on December 13, 1898. I’ve written about the 1966 University of Texas shooting, the first crime of its sort that I remembered.

20th century

Hmm, they counted Kent State and Jackson State from 1970. I have no recollection of the December 30, 1974, Olean (NY) shooting that killed 3 and injured 11.

The worst shooting in the 1980s was on January 17, 1989, in Stockton, California. A 24-year-old fatally shot five children and wounded 32 others at an elementary school, before taking his own life. “The victims were children of refugees from Southeast Asia.” The shooter “had a history of violence, alcoholism, and drug addiction, and criminality.”

Then April 20, 1999: Littleton, Colorado, with 15 dead, including the two shooters, 21 wounded. I had to admit to my daughter that I had managed to forget the March 21, 2005 incident at Red Lake, Minnesota, where five students, one teacher, and one security guard were killed, wounding seven others, after the shooter previously killed a couple of relatives.

I do remember the guy who killed five Amish girls in Pennsylvania in 2006. The Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 made the international news. Then Newtown, CT; Parkland, FL; Santa Fe, TX. I remember that my daughter was particularly upset by Santa Fe after she and her classmates protested following Parkland.

How stressful her life, and the lives of her friends, must be. She so related to the disturbing Sandy Hook Promise ad here or here or here.

We had duck and cover, but I don’t think we took it too seriously. They have active shooter drills, and they have reason to believe it COULD happen “here.”

Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

One thought on “Lydster: talking about school shootings”

  1. It seems to me that school shootings have accelerated in recent years.

    I remember Columbine – I was still living at my parents’ house (just finishing up my Ph.D., later that year I’d move down here) and I remember watching it in horror on the little tv in what I used as my sitting room at the time. And I remember Virginia Tech with particular horror, as it was the first big university campus shooting (I was teaching here at the time) and a colleague of mine lost a cousin in the shooting.

    They make us sit through an hour-long seminar on it every year and it’s kind of awful. At least they don’t show the horrible “re-enactment” video of Columbine that they used to show, that was kind of traumatic. Also there are things that COULD be done to keep us safer (things to do with making the doors more easily lockable) but there doesn’t seem to be the will to make it happen; I am hoping there is never a reason for them to enact those things after-the-fact.

    We had tornado and fire drills in school. I didn’t think much about the fire drills; I guess as a kid I assumed we’d just all crocodile our way out the doors and get safely outside. Tornado drills scared me more because I remembered hearing about the 1974 outbreak on the news, and I kind of suspected the “kneel down and use your hands to cover your brain stem area” wouldn’t really protect much against flying debris. An active-shooter drill would have REALLY made me paranoid. I already worried about too many things as a kid; I’m glad “someone might shoot up the school” wasn’t another thing on the list.

    Abductions were a bigger concern when I was a kid but that was mostly addressed by the “adults” – students could not be picked up by anyone other than a parent or someone their parent had designed in writing as an “OK person” to pick the kid up, and also, the playground was carefully monitored. I didn’t ever worry about that very much.

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