Another Knoxville shooting: conclusions we cannot draw
August 21, 2008 By: almostgotit Category: Church shooting, Knoxville, Knoxville Shooting, Uncategorized, parenting, school shooting
Child taken into custody following Knoxville school shooting |
At Knoxville’s Central High school today, a student gunned down and killed another just before classes began.
This shooting was a sad, sad thing in our city, still suffering from another senseless church shooting and murder just a few short weeks ago.
Already, the speculating has begun. Some folks are trying, as they always do, to make the tragedy into an argument supporting their own cause (e.g., “Public Schools are Bad.”) Others are simply trying to find meaning in meaningless acts of hatred and violence. In both shootings, however, the perpetrators were deeply troubled individuals whose actions can not be made into “see, I told you so!” examples of anything much, except what broken people can sometimes do.
Most unemployed people do not go on shooting sprees, after all. Even unemployed people who read Conservative Books. Nor do most public school children go on shooting sprees.
I was very impressed by Central High today. School administrators there were doing their job when they locked down the school to keep everyone safe. They were also doing their job when they turned back the throngs of parents who immediately began gathering at the school: emergency personnel needed time and space to focus on the scene until it was secured, and information about individual children could not be released until authorities could be sure that it would not further endanger or mislead anyone.
Maybe we shouldn’t allow our children to play so many violent video games. Certainly we shouldn’t have so many guns lying around where people with very little impulse control can so easily get ahold of them. But relying solely on any of these answers is too dangerous, seducing us too easily into the belief that we can ever control every risk factor or make our children perfectly safe.
We can’t.
In fact, I am much more disturbed by what happened earlier this week, at another high school in Knoxville. A boy suffered a brain injury at Karns High school after falling from the back of a pickup truck he was riding in a school parking lot, while moving school equipment, and while under the supervision of a shop teacher. Student Eric Law then waited in a semi-conscious state at the school until his mother arrived to take him to the hospital — 911 was never called – and died later that morning.
Central High faced a random incident today but had a plan; Karns should have seen that one coming and did very little to stop it. Who will protect our children from criminally-stupid shop teachers and grossly-negligent school nurses and office personnel?
There may be individually abusive priests and predatory neighbors, but I’m still sending my own children to church the neighborhood park. I’m still appreciative of public schools too, but no – I will not be sending any child of mine to Karns.
August 21st, 2008 at 9:46 pm
I’m not certain, but I am pretty sure that Karns is a much better school than Central as far as test scores and student discipline is concerned.
I think that both tragedies are senseless, but should be forgiven.
I also am sooooo happy that my kids are still in elementary school, where it seems that for now, they are still safe. (Only because we transferred them out of our inner city school with major discipline problems) My daughter got her hair cut three times in the 2nd grade and she was a well liked student at her old school.
I think that public schools can still succeed, but we have got to get rid of the thugs and we obviously have to train staff members better on what actions to take in an emergency.
Overall, I was very pleased with how well Knox County did with securing all the schools today.
God bless the families of both victims…I cannot even imagine what they are going through.
August 21st, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Thanks for commenting, Alice! I’m glad you have found a safe place for your children, wherever that may be.
My son recently graduated from a scrappy and diverse little public high school in Knoxville (neither Karns nor Central) that combines a high drop-out rate with (by far) the highest percentage of National Merit Finalists in the county.
More to the point, though: one time my son skipped breakfast and fainted at this same school… and the school had an ambulance and several EMT’s on site in nearly nothing flat, because that’s their protocol whenever there is any possibility of trauma or injury. The two shootings were random and senseless; what happened at Karns, however, was not random, but rather an accident that both should have been anticipated and could easily have been prevented.
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm
While standing in a group of people last night at a fundraiser honoring women who do remarkable work in our community, someone wondered aloud, “If this shooting happened at an inner-city school in a larger city, would anyone even hear about it?” Another individual in the group said that he had grown up in Philadelphia (rather recently since he was maybe 26) and that shootings and violence were so common in their schools that they didn’t even make the news. This doesn’t make the shooting at Central High in Knoxville any less tragic but we are also in an age of media frenzy and instant radio/TV/computer coverage. I mourn for the families and kids involved in the Central community but also for the rest of us. I think I liked it better when we didn’t hear all the worst news in the world instantaneously. I’m not an ostrich but I don’t mind a little happiness with me morning coffee instead of constant gloom.