Tag Archives: School shootings

Raised on school shootings

15 Thursday Mar 2018

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@BGinKC

Somebody very similar to me committed the first school shooting of the modern era on January 29, 1979, when a 16-year-old girl named Brenda Ann Spencer shot up an elementary school across the street from her house with a gun that her father had given her for Christmas in 1978 just a month earlier.

I got mine for my birthday. When I say she was like me, it was eerie. Red hair…check. Freckles…check. Kinda petite…check. Sixteen years old…check. A hell of a shot…check. Didn’t like Mondays…Who does?

That’s a reason to have a forbidden pastry and an extra shot or two of espresso when you order your coffee, not use the elementary students lining up in the schoolyard across the street for target practice.

Brenda Ann Spencer killed the school principal and custodian, wounded eight children and a police officer was shot in the neck and seriously wounded, to brighten up her day.

A few years later, almost six years to the day, on another January Monday — January 21, 1985 – I was in the McDonald’s PlayPlace at Towne West Mall, close enough to Highway 54 to hear the Sedgewick County emergency vehicles scrambling from western Wichita when the Goddard, KS Junior High School shooting happened.

It had been under 15 degrees with a steady Wichita wind for two weeks. My son was a toddler and I hadn’t gone back to work yet after the birth of my second child. I had been cooped up with the world’s most active 18-month-old and a baby that never stopped nursing for two weeks in a thousand square feet. The day before I had gotten an insurance reimbursement check, and I was getting out of the house the next day, come hell or high water.

I got up early and started the process of getting two-under-two bundled up and buckled up. Once we were loaded up, I went to the bank, then the mall, and parked by the west entrance, by the PlayPlace and the mall presence of the Wichita police department. I got to the mall about 10:30, and by the time I got two kids out of car seats and in the stroller and all the BSE (Baby Support Equipment) that one felt compelled to carry at all times in the mid-80s lest yuppie-moms might set upon us and berate us mercilessly until we developed eating disorders it was probably 10:45 when I finally got inside…

When I got inside, I saw a friend I hadn’t seen since we had been stationed at Davis-Monthan, in Tucson. She had the same idea I did about breaking the “no junk food” rule and taking our kids to McDonald’s and using the indoor PlayPlace as a place for our boys to burn off some energy. We caught up a bit and took turns going to the counter while the other one watched the kids. She had just gotten her order and I was at the counter about to place mine when all hell broke loose. There were ambulances and police cars racing west down Kellogg/Highway 54. The police station in the mall emptied and their cruisers raced out of the parking lot.

That was a few minutes past 11:00. Less than ten minutes after the police raced out of the mall, they raced back, with reinforcements and locked down the shopping center. Because I was a medic on maternity leave, one of the female police officers I knew from answering the same calls a time or two in Tucson (her husband was in the Air Force, too) she gave me some information that wasn’t being made public yet…a Junior high student whose name we would later learn was Alan Kearby, had shot and killed the principal at Goddard Junior High and wounded three others, and he was still at large.

The entire state was in shock. How could such a thing happen in wholesome, all-American Goddard, where you moved if you wanted to get your kids out of Wichita and away from the perils of the city?

I have raised three and a half kids – the fourth one starts high-school next year – and I have never sent my children to school in the morning 100% confident that they would come home alive at the end of the day or that the news wouldn’t break into my day their school was a crime scene. That’s a hell of a fear to live with and has kept a Rosary In my pocket for 30 years.

We moved from Junction City, Oregon to Kansas City about a year before Kip Kinkle killed his parents and shot up the cafeteria of Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon on May 21, 1998, and killed two students. A few days later, my friend Carol called me and said “Guess what Jason and Nicole had to do at school today? A live shooter drill! Can you believe it?” The Lane County Public Schools didn’t waste any time developing safety protocols, I’ll give them that.

Do you want to guess what Kip Kinkle and Brenda Ann Spencer had in common? They both had diagnosable mental illnesses – not to stigmatize the mentally ill, they are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators – but Spencer’s father refused to get treatment for her, and Kinkle’s parents stopped his treatment after only nine sessions, declaring him cured…and the guns they used were gifts from their parents…In Spencer’s case, the month it was recommended she be admitted to a mental hospital because a school therapist was afraid she posed a danger to herself or others.

She wanted a radio. He bought her a gun.

I’ll say it…The adults have been failing since before I was one, and I’ve been pissed about it for thirty-nine years. I couldn’t get my own generation to do anything worthwhile about the damage bullets do using ballots, so I raised and educated one.

You’re welcome.

Tammy the Teacher

Roy Blunt and the NRA: Married on the way to the bank

15 Thursday Feb 2018

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According to The New York Times Roy Blunt is one of the top ten “career”recipients of NRA largess in the congress. His take: $4,551,146. That’s right. Our boy got himself over four million of those NRA dollars. And I don’t think anyone would disagree that he’s done himself proud when it comes to earning his fee.

All of which prompts one to ask what he has to say about the latest mass shooting event at a school, a spree that took 17 lives and wounded at least 12 other children. The Sedalia Democrat offers the following quote:

In an interview, Blunt said that “I don’t think we have enough information yet to know that a change in any law would have impacted what happened in Florida.” But, referring to reports that the FBI had been warned by threats that the killer had made on social media, Blunt added: “Whether it is bizarre anti-social behavior or terrorist activity, when people see something they should say something.”You have got a guy parading around in a gas mask with weapons making threats and putting that on social media; that needs to be reported,” Blunt, R-Mo., said. “And the people that is [sic] reported to need to respond to that report.”

Blunt echoed the president in his imputation that the correct way to protect against mass school shootings would be for the “normal” folks to report aberrant behavior on the part of troubled individuals. Happened here, didn’t work, not going to work, just stigmatizes folks with emotional problems.

In the past Blunt has resorted overtly to the tack taken by Donald Trump today which is that it is mental illness that kills people, not guns – in spite of the fact that those suffering mental illness have been shown to more often suffer violence than they are to commit violent acts,  that when they do act out violently, they themselves have frequently been previously victimized, and they are more likely to do so within institutional settings rather than in public.

All of this is just a way to frame the simple-minded NRA bumper sticker that says in one variant or another that “people kill people, not guns.” If Kim Jong-un, who may or may not be mentally unstable, doesn’t realize that he’s dealing with a possible mental case in the White House, push comes to shove, and hundreds of folks, possibly in the U.S. as well as North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia are killed, will Republicans excuse the holocaust with a similar slogan: Crazy people kill people, not bombs? Funny that. Or not.

Of course, the real thrust of Blunt’s response was that he just doesn’t have enough facts to say anything substantive. While I know he’s unlikely to read this screed, I’d sill like to supply him with a few hard and fast facts:

  1. A disturbed young man, who, incidentally, had been reported and investigated by the authorities, was able to legally buy a military-grade weapon.
  2. President Trump, in his haste to destroy any remnants of Obama-style common-sense regulation, stopped a rule that would have made it more difficult for the mentally-ill to buy firearms.
  3. Republicans like Blunt have consistently refused to vote for legislation that regulated civilian acquisition of military-grade weapons in spite of the fact that they seem to be the weapon of choice for mass shooters.
  4. A conservative analysis by The Washington Post tells us that “more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.”
  5. In the first 45 days of this year there have been six school shootings that have injured students.
  6. States are skint. They aren’t willing or able to pay to supply the school security officers that schools are requesting. Florida schools, scene of the most recent shooting, are among those that have experienced growing enrollments but have received less money to pay for necessities like increased security for which they have requested funding.
  7. A spate of studies report that states – and developed countries – with more guns have more homicide deaths and suicides. States and countries with better regulated gun ownership have fewer.

There are lots more facts like these. And I’m willing to bet that Blunt knows a few of them already. He just doesn’t care.

Nor, as Blunt’s GOP pals like to claim, do these facts suggest that gun ownership should be illegal; nobody’s 2nd amendment rights should be violated. But we have to be clear that the Supreme Court ruling, District of Columbia v. Heller, authored by conservative, gun-loving Judge Antonin Scalia, specifies that that the right to own firearms is subject to regulation, specifically in the case of “prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons’.”

So what’s keeping the pot boiling for a dangerously out of control NRA, an organization that wants to persuade us that even talking dirty about guns is not only a violation of a poorly understood 2nd amendment, but an invitation to “jack-booted government thugs” to steal our liberties? Look no further than Senator Roy Blunt and an NRA-whipped GOP.

But hey! Four million dollars is one heckava payout. And Blunt wasn’t even number one on the list.