Another Knoxville shooting: conclusions we cannot draw
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.
