As I sit here in front of the computer this evening, I'm just not sure where to start in the latest journal entry in TWIT. To say I'm deeply saddened by yesterday's heinous killings at the Amish school is putting it mildly; as soon as I found out about the shootings when I got home yesterday afternoon I was almost sick to my stomach over it. Yesterday's shootings comes on the heels of another high school shooting just last week. When I heard that the girls were all killed execution-style, it made me get weepy. This isn't supposed to happen to kids in school. I know it's not supposed to happen to anyone, but the kids today have it hard enough already - now they have to worry about getting shot and killed while they're at school. It's just not supposed to be this way.
When I was in school, getting shot or killed at school was something just unthinkable. It never occurred to any of us. We didn't even see something like that happening in the movies or on TV - it just didn't happen. Locally, it hit home in 1997 when Michael Carneal, then 15 years old, shot and killed five students at his Paducah high school and wounded five more. But once he was given a life sentence in prison, we forgot about it until the tragic Columbine killings. This was a massacre on a bigger scale, and affected the whole country. After that incident, school shootings unfortunately became all too frequent. Then yesterday, people were glued to their TVs as the shootings occurred in the small Amish town of Quarryville, PA. The crime had an eerie resemblance to an attack on a high school in Bailey, CO., where a 53-year-old man took six girls hostage and sexually assaulted them before fatally shooting one girl and killing himself. That attack occurred last Wednesday, the day after the Amish school gunman began buying materials for his siege.
I feel deep concern for my friends that have children. They send them off to school every morning, hoping and praying that the children will return home to them in the afternoon safe and unharmed. Their concern and worry is probably ten-fold what I feel right now. It's times like these when I'm thankful that I don't have children.
2 comments:
Makes you wonder if our children are safe anywhere
After watching a (kinda) scary movie on t.v. this weekend my 8 year old son asked me if it would make me have bad dreams. I told him my bad dreams weren't about monsters. Mine involve something like this happening to my kids. Tragic, just tragic.
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