Notorious School Shootings –Trend, Competition, or Elite Killing Club

Crazy! Evil! Mentally disturbed!  Just a few of the descriptions being pushed to describe the latest school shooter, Nikolas Cruz.  February 14, 2018, Valentine’s Day, Cruz entered his former high school Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School armed with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle (Smith & Wesson M&P15).  He engaged the school fire alarm and once students poured out of their classrooms began firing upon them – shooting to kill.  At the end of the surreal massacre, he killed a total of 17 people (3 teachers and 14 students).  It is now known as the third worse school shooting in recent history.  He currently still lives to remember the details and his reasons for his horrific act.

On April 20, 1999, Columbine High School massacre: 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold, students at Columbine High School, killed twelve students and one teacher. They injured 21 additional people, and three more were injured while attempting to escape the school. The weapons used in this school massacre were Intratec TEC-DC9, Hi-Point 995 Carbine, Savage 67H pump-action shotgun, Stevens 311D double barreled sawed-off shotgun, 99 explosives and 4 knives.  They were armed for a military-like assault.  The pair committed suicide at the end of the massacre. 

April 7, 2007, 23 year old student, Seung-Hui Cho, killed thirty-two students and faculty members at Virginia Tech.  He wounded another seventeen students and faculty members before committing suicide.  His weapons of choice were a Glock 19 pistol and a Walther P22 pistol.

The one that hurts my heart most is the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.  This murder rampage was committed by 20 year-old Adam Lanza.  He killed twenty-six people: twenty first-grade children aged six and seven, along with six adults, (four teachers, the principal, and the school psychologist.)  Lanza then killed himself as police arrived at the school.  By the way, he killed his mother at their home before taking her guns and driving to the school.  Lanza was armed with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S(.223) and a Glock 20SF (10mm).

How much preparedness can anyone have when they are being barraged with a surprise attack. Nikolas Cruz was an ex-student and he knew his way around the school.  Even if the school was equipped with all the safety aids being mentioned for schools, he would have been able to enter the school, one way or another, and successfully do the damage that he did.

 

We are a nation who believes in guns, who believes that we should be armed and ready and prepared for a shootout.  Guess what, that shootout is not going to happen for those gun owners unless they pick up their guns and start the shootout themselves.  That’s what these crazy, evil, mentally disturbed young men did.  They wanted to use their guns, they wanted a shootout, perhaps like the ones they saw on TV, movies, games, etc.   Every single gun owner will argue ad nauseam about why they need their guns.  Yet that home break in, that mentally disturbed person never enters their life.  You hear them rant about, “if that “expletive” would have come at me, he would have been gunned down.”  Yeah, right!  No. 1, you would not have the gun with you because we are not living in the wild wild west where we carry our guns on our hips.  No. 2, the fear in you would cause you to freeze and probably wet your pants.  No one knows exactly what they would do if confronted by a killer who is locked and loaded and ready to the end your life and perhaps theirs.

Neither of the four killers mentioned above used the same type of weapons.  These scenarios are always different in some way.  It’s almost impossible to be completely prepared for such an assault unless you barricade yourself indoors in the attempt to prevent these types of murders.  Maybe the killers are competing with the last massacre but without a confession, we will never know.  They are however, in the history books and will be remembered and talked about forever.

America is the only civilized country whose citizens truly believe in the boogeyman and feel that they must be armed to protect themselves and their family against this boogeyman.  How many times have we read or watched the news about someone accidentally shooting and killing a family member.  Yet they insist that guns are safe and are locked up.  Children under age 12 die from gun accidents in the United States about once a week, on average. Almost every death begins with the same basic circumstances: an unsecured and loaded gun, a guardian's lapse in attention. USA Today  

If assault weapons were made illegal after Columbine some 19 years ago, I truly believe a number of the dead killed from gun violence since then would still be alive today.  We as American citizens must do better.  We can be outraged, and we will be outraged for a short time.  But in a couple of weeks we all will go back to our new normal; though those families who lost a loved one will still grieve but we won’t see them grieving so we will go on with our lives – until the next gun massacre in the United States of America.  (Side note: Maybe we should remove the word United from the name of our country and perhaps we should be called State of America.  There is nothing United about this America.)

©Radiance Smith aka Radiance Lite 2018