Reply #50: Have you heard of "zip guns"? [View All]

[TahitiNut]

Once upon a time, cars had radio antennas that were conveniently-sized for 22-cal rounds. It took little skill to break off a car's antenna and make a zip gun.

School violence goes back a long ways. I recall the story of a school bombing that went only so far ... and a large amount of explosives didn't go off even though enough was detonated to cause damage and casualties.

I remember "Blackboard Jungle." I remember investigative journalism in the 50s doing stories - mostly ignored - regarding school shootings and stabbings.

As populations increase and larger and larger numbers of students get packed into "factory method" "consolidated" schools ... wiping out the plethora of small schools staffed by "teacher's college" graduates ... there has been an increased depersonalization and segregation. Thus, the sheer scope of such incidents has been facilitated by the political processes ... and made more "newsworthy." It's not that such violence didn't exist ... it's that we've combined the populations in which they've existed such that we have fewer locations with larger numbers of students in each.

Take 20 or 30 schools and combine them into one school - where one of those 20 or 30 might've had a shooter, the 'arcade' was small. Put the same shooter into a more "target-rich" (consolidated) environment and (voila!) we get "news."


Let's also consider the context. We had "duck & cover" - the terror of nuclear holocaust. Compared to that, what was a kid with a gun? We had polio victims in virtually every school. Compared to that, what was a kid with a gun? We had wars - WW2 and the Korean War. People were killed every day in those wars - every neighborhood had a family who lost someone.

That context is nowhere nearly as pervasive today. So, what's "news"?

I'll add this ...

The Bath School disaster is the name given to three bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, USA, on May 18, 1927, which killed 45 people and injured 58. Most of the victims were children in the second to sixth grades attending the Bath Consolidated School. Their deaths constitute the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history. The perpetrator was school board member Andrew Kehoe, who was upset by a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of the school building. He blamed the additional tax for financial hardships which led to foreclosure proceedings against his farm. These events apparently provoked Kehoe to plan his attack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster