School Shooting in Sparks, Nevada: A Gory Red, White and Blue Pattern

Once again an ordinary American school day ended in a cacophony of gunfire. Once again all the guns in the world don’t seem to make America's students and teachers safer. Once again the gun lobby will refuse to admit even simple truths.

Well, let me be the first to say, “Good job, N.R.A.”

FIFTEEN SCHOOL SHOOTINGS SO FAR THIS YEAR.

Unfortunately, the report of yesterday's shooting at Sparks Middle School ought to shock all citizens of this blood-soaked nation.

This time gunfire shattered an ordinary morning on a playground in Sparks, Nevada. Students arriving for school told reporters later that they fled screaming into the building once they realized the “pops” they were hearing were gunshots.

“A kid started getting mad and he pulled out a gun and shoots my friend, one of my friends at least,” a seventh-grade student identified as Andrew told local KOLO-TV. “And then he walked up to a teacher and says back up, the teacher started backing up and he pulled the trigger.”

 “The teacher was just lying there and he was limp, he didn't know what to do, he was just in a lot of pain,” he told KOLO.

 “And me and five other friends went to him and said come on we’ve got to get him to safety. We picked him up, carried him a little bit far and we left him because our vice principal came along and said go, go, go get to safety, get to safety. So we left the teacher there and we went to safety,” Andrew said.

Safety, Andrew said. Where is the safety today? This was the fifteenth school shooting in the United States this year. Two students were wounded. Michael Landsberry, 45, a teacher and former Marine who served in Afghanistan, was killed.

The perpetrator—himself a victim of a national inability to come to grips with gun violence in any way—was 12.

An ABC report noted that an eyewitness described the scene in one word: “chaos.”

Student Thomas Wing said he was walking out of the cafeteria after eating breakfast when he saw a gun.

He told CNN affiliate KOLO that Landsberry was trying to get the student to put the weapon down. After a gunshot, Thomas started running back toward the cafeteria. He heard another shot.

"I was thinking, oh my gosh, am I going to get out of this? Am I going to die?" he told KOLO. "My heart was pounding faster than I could run."

CARNAGE AT SANDY HOOK ELEMENTARY PART OF A GORY RED, WHITE AND BLUE PATTERN.

The carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary garnered headlines last December. But the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut was just one of many. It’s all part of a gory red, white and blue pattern. There were ten school shootings in 2010. There were eight school shootings in 2011. In 2012, there were a dozen awful incidents. Forty-two students and teachers were slaughtered. Seventeen were wounded.

This year the killing continues:

A 17-year-old student at Lanier High in Austin, Texas, died earlier this month after he pulled a gun and committed suicide in the school courtyard.

A 15-year-old at Carver High School in Winston-Salem, N. C. was shot in the neck by an 18-year-old classmate just as a fire drill ended. Somehow, the victim was not safe even though an armed school resource officer (a policeman assigned to the school) saw the shooting and arrested the gunman almost immediately.

In August bullets flew at Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy near Atlanta when a deranged individual carrying an AK-47 opened fire. This time students, faculty and police were probably saved, not by a gun, but by Antoinette Tuff. Tuff, a school secretary, managed to talk the shooter into laying down his weapon.

Six died in a bloodbath at Santa Monica College in June and four others were wounded. The assailant was garbed in black and wearing a ballistic vest. According to police he carried a semi-automatic assault rifle.

The N.R.A. will insist, “We need to arm teachers.” Perhaps they mean we should arm them like Navy Seals, so they’re not outgunned during the next school shooting. There will be a “next.” You can count on that here in one of the most heavily-armed nations on earth.

Just hope your children aren't among the victims.

A student at La Salle High School in Cincinnati, Ohio was critically injured in April after he pulled out a pistol during first period and shot himself.

A former University of Central Florida student died by his own hand in March, after apparently planning a Virginia Tech-style mass shooting. He first pulled a dormitory fire alarm, probably hoping to lure more victims into the open. His plan was disrupted when a roommate stumbled upon him in their room. The gunman pointed a weapon and his roommate fled and dialed 911. The gunman was found dead soon after, lying next to “an assault weapon, a couple hundred rounds of ammunition and four homemade bombs in a backpack.”

January 2013 was a particularly gory month. There were eight incidents. On the 31st classes at Price Middle School in Atlanta were broken up by gunfire when a classmate shot a 14-year-old in the head. A teacher was injured and once more a school resource officer managed to disarm the assailant.

Two days earlier a 60-year-old Alabama man with mental problems boarded a school bus and shot and killed the driver. He then took a 6-year-old hostage and held the child for several days in an underground bunker.

Students at Lone Star College in Houston found themselves hiding in closets when a fight on campus ended with bullets flying. The campus was locked down, and three students were wounded, before police could take two individuals into custody.

Tyrone Lawson, 17, of Chicago, wasn’t safe when both his life and a high school basketball game he was attending were ended. In the parking lot, after the final buzzer, he was hit by multiple gunshots. And this, despite what school officials termed “a significant security presence both inside and outside the gym.” His mother remembered sadly: "He asked if he could go to the game. I gave him the money to go to the game, and [by] 9:30, my son was dead."

Another shooting occurred in the parking lot at Hazard Community and Technical College in Hazard, Kentucky. Three died, including a 12-year-old girl.

After a regular basketball game ended at Detroit’s Osborn High, a pickup game on a nearby court led to an altercation. A pistol was fired and a 16-year-old collapsed to the asphalt, badly wounded.

A dispute over financial aid ended in yet another school shooting. A student opened fire at the Stevens Institute of Business and Arts, striking a faculty adviser in the chest. When police approached in a stairwell he turned the gun on himself.

Finally, Ryan Heber—an unarmed teacher in Bakersfield, California—managed to convince a 16-year-old student to put down a shotgun. But not before the boy badly wounded a classmate, fired at and missed another, and not till Heber was hit in the head by a ricocheting pellet. According to reporters one terrified student called her parents from inside a locked closet. Another told her parents “she saw a classmate on the floor in a pool of blood.”

THE N.R.A ISN'T WORRIED.

Still, the N.R.A. isn’t worried. And gun manufacturers continue to enjoy record sales. In 2012, the FBI ran 16.8 million background checks on gun purchasers. In the first six months of 2013 the pace only accelerated. Federal authorities ran 11.4 million additional background checks during that period.

At this rate, perhaps safety will finally be achieved when every American is armed to the teeth.

Then, perhaps, school children and teachers will be safe at their desks. That is: unless a classmate or some crazed individual happens to be planning to open fire.


Addendum:

On the same day as the Sparks shooting the New York Times ran another editorial citing the mediocrity of this nation's teachers as a major problem in education. 

I will comment on this tomorrow.

Guns and Innocent Blood: What Are We Going to Do?

EVER AMERICAN OUGHT TO BE SICK TONIGHT. Gun-owners and non-gun owners, alike, it doesn’t matter. Every one of us should be ill.  

How else does one react to news of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown? We now know that twenty children, mostly first graders, were cut down in a fusillade of gunfire. An elementary school here in America was reduced to a charnel house. Eight adults are dead, too, six of them men and women who rose this morning for work, never expecting to die, and dedicated only to helping children learn to sing and spell and subtract and smile at the dawn of knowledge.  

Maybe, I’m too emotional.  

I’m a retired teacher and a parent and I think about all the terrified children inside that slaughter pen and parents outside, not knowing the scope of the tragedy, praying sons and daughters were safe, learning, horribly, that they weren’t. I think back to my own experience in 1985, when a young man brought a gun to my school to shoot me.  

At times like this, most of us shake our heads and have no idea what to say. There’s no pattern to this kind of violence. It can happen anytime, anywhere, we think. 

The problem is that there’s a pattern. It keeps happening all the time and it keeps happening here, in this country. In Ohio, where I live, a bloody shooting occurred at Chardon High this past February. Before the carnage finally ended three teenagers were dead and two others badly wounded.  

You can find Demetrius Hewlin’s obituary on line if you care. Known as “D” to friends, he was one of the slain. Born March 8, 1995. Died February 28, 2012. A sixteen-year-old gunned down in the cafeteria by another teen with a gun. 

That’s the thread that runs through all these stories, the guns. Don’t you see? Don’t you care? When do we admit that we are already the “best-armed” nation in modern history? When do we agree that guns are absurdly easy to acquire? Already, there are 88 handguns, rifles and shotguns in private hands for every 100 Americans. Boil down the pro- and anti-gun arguments to their essence. You don’t read about people in this country killing each other with hand grenades. That’s because it’s not easy to get your hands on hand grenades. 

Guns are easy, though. 

As a result, we lead all modern nations in murder rates and lead by a gory mile. The murder rate in Iceland is close to zero. In Japan it’s .5 per 100,000 people. If you study a list of 32 advanced nations The Netherlands comes in tenth, with 1 murder per 100,000. Finland is 31st with 2.5. The United States stands last with 5.2 per 100,000.

Guns in America are a problem and that fact is written again in the blood of innocent children. Think of the guns, the guns, the guns. Twelve dead, fifty-eight injured in a theater in Aurora, Colorado. The massacre in Arizona that ended with 9-year-old Christina Green-Taylor and five others dead, twelve wounded, including Gabby Gifford. Thirty-two dead and seventeen wounded at Virginia Tech in 2007. 

The list is long and horrific and it comes down to guns.  

Better than most, I understand what it’s like to have a loaded weapon carried into a classroom. Twenty-seven years ago a young man brought a pistol to school to shoot me and to shoot one of his teammates on the wrestling squad. The other boy had been taunting him about weight and I had caught the boy during class drawing an obscene picture and told him to take it home and show his dad. That was all it took—a teen with emotional issues—easy access to guns—a potential disaster in the making. The boy carried a loaded weapon around all day in our school, hidden in a book bag, but for reasons unknown never pulled it out to start shooting. He didn’t shoot me. He didn’t shoot his classmates by mistake. He didn’t shoot his wrestling teammate. Ten years later, however, he picked up another gun—still just as easily accessible—and shot himself.  

IN THE END, THIS ISN’T about gun owners vs. non-gun owners, or hunters vs. vegans, or conservatives vs. liberals. This is about the massacre of elementary school kids. It’s about blood on the floor—in classrooms —theaters—and malls. 

It’s about guns.  

You can either address the issue in a reasonable fashion or you can keep burying the innocent—this time mostly six and seven-year-olds. Or you can make some absurdist argument that we’re all better off the more guns we have, that first grade teachers (and everyone else in America) should be armed and ready.  

In the face of this tragedy every American should be asking today, “What are we, as a society, going to do?” 

Say a prayer for the dead.

Allison Wyatt, murdered at age 6.
Sandy Hook Elementary.