Thursday was the thirtieth anniversary of something we are used to now. A school shooting. The shooter was Laurie Dann, and her story is strange, she set fires, went into buildings and stole paper with letterhead on it and then used those pages to type out and mail harassing messages. She was in someone's house and piled shit underneath the couch cushions.
Her father was able to keep charges to a minimum, all of the crimes were in the wealthy north shore suburbs. She was able to buy guns. And one day picked Hubbard Woods Elementary School in Winnetka to walk into, choose a class at random, and wound six kids and kill another. The same range in age as the Sandy Hook victims.
It didn't stop there, she fled to a nearby house, entering a kitchen door and telling a mother and her son that she had been raped, then showed them the gun and was going to hold them hostage. The father came home and surprised Dann, who shot the son. The bullet punctured both lungs, but he survived. She then ran upstairs and fatally shot herself.
One of the headlines I saw on the network news was WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED IN THIRTY YEARS.Sixteen hours later I was watching news coverage on CNN, another school shooting. Ten dead. Sante Fe, Texas. The girl in the photo above is Paige Curry. Asked by a reporter if she was scared, she said that she had always expected it to happen at her school, and it finally did.
She is speaking with her head down, so if you go over to that wonderful Media Matters website, they are already posting that Curry is a crisis actor who was reading from a script the reporter was holding out to her. One person even called her stupid for needing a script. Just as Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg were called out after the Stoneman Douglas shootings in Parkland, Florida on Valentine's Day.
What have we learned in thirty years? Regarding gun control and mental illness? Nothing. But in 1978 we weren't having shooting survivors being called out as crisis actors.
"But in 1978 we weren't having shooting survivors being called out as crisis actors."
ReplyDeleteInvalidate the victims to nullify the reality. This is the sword that smites hope and justice. The Catholic Church, murderous regimes, corrupt politicians and law enforcement, amoral corporations, the NRA, even our own current president - they all wield this simplest of weapons to defeat the truths that would bring them down and raise us up. Invalidate the victims to nullify the reality.