Apparently a young man went into a high school on an Ojibwa (aka Chippewa) reservation in Minnesota and killed 7 kids (so far) and himself, having already killed his grandparents.
Like the school shooting that I was in, this one was committed with one of the last guns anyone would ban. In today's incident in Minnesota, it was a retired police officer's service gun. In "my" school shooting, it was a shotgun in a subsistence-hunting dependent area in Alaska.
It was only by chance that my students and I were at the Bethel Regional High School on Feb. 19, 1997. It wasn't our school. I had spent the night of the 18th there with some 5th graders I was chaperoning in from the village for an academic competition that was planned for that day. I still have the sheet of paper they gave us the night before, headed EVENTS of FEBRUARY 19th. The paper turned out to be dead wrong. I remember going into the principal's office to use the copier and the principal told me to wait for him to finish putting together the school board packets.
I started to reply with acerbity (don't know if you've noticed I tend to do that sometimes) but then stopped just in time and smiled and said okay which is one of those little things you're always grateful for later.
I've got pics of the kids in their bright-colored qaspeqs (which is a very comfortable traditional Yup'ik garment) sitting in the lobby (where the shootings were about to take place) studying for their competition. We were supposed to be packed and out of the lobby by 7:30 a.m., which I'd grumbled about the night before, not realizing the kids were gonna wake me at 5 a.m. anyway. We took showers in the gym-- they told us the water would run warm if we waited, but we waited and it didn't. By 6 am there were a couple of high school kids jogging in the halls, and one kid with a broken leg walking for PT (remember this is Alaska). We went to the cafeteria for breakfast. By that time school was starting and we had to be out of the way, so we went into an office to study some more, sort of out of sorts the way you are when you're in someone else's school, and we were there when one of my students suddenly became inexplicably agitated so I gave the others a break and had that one down on the floor doing breathing exercises when the running started.
For a long time after that the sound of running feet always made me throw myself under a desk or a table, but on that occasion of course it didn't. I went to look out the window, the sun was just rising, and somebody said "There's been a shooting" and I thought, "Oh, school shootings, I've heard about those. Let's not do that."
Suddenly the hall was full of running people and I was reaching for my students. Somebody said for us to go into the media center so we did, me with my little 5th graders all around me and then there were lots of high schoolers and they were crying and crying. Someone said to stay away from the windows so we did, for just a very long time, I don't know, I guess an hour or so. The perp, a 15-year-old named Evan Ramsey, was exchanging shots with the police but I guess he had stopped killing people by the time we got into the library.
There was a phone and so I called back to the village where I taught and lived, where my students were from, and said that we were all okay. They had already heard about it there. We had no idea what had happened. That was the first time I realized that the people who are actually in an Incident don't find out what's happening nearly as quickly as people watching the news.
Three things are indelibly stamped in my memory. One is that as the kids and I huddled together I kept telling them "It's okay, it's okay. Everything's all right." And we wonder why kids don't believe us.
Another is the night before, which we spent in a teacher's classroom. I remember his shoes were beside his desk and I moved them to roll out my sleeping bag. Then I put them back again in the morning. Those shoes bothered me for a long time. I guess because of the way that everything sort of waits in its place in an everyday way for a disaster to happen.
The third is a gurney with a body on it being carried past us. I don't know whose. I couldn't look. It makes me grateful that there are people who can look, who are ready to take care of the rest of us when we fall.
Our death toll was minor compared to the Minnesota incident-- the principal and a 15-year-old student. The shooter, Evan Ramsey, dropped his gun after exchanging shots with the police, reportedly saying "I don't want to die."
Two other students were injured.
This being Dailykos I feel like I should draw some moral out of this, but what? Just one of those scars we all carry around, and it aches every time some whacko lets loose with his second amendment rights.
A year or so later, Columbine happened, and some of us were reliving "our" shooting the way you do. One teacher gave a very graphic description of what she had seen, which was considerably more than I had, thank God-- I refrain from repeating it here because the victims have living relatives. A minute later I said "This is going to keep happening as long as any idiot can get his hands on a gun" and she said, she who had seen all this said,
"If guns were illegal only criminals would have guns."
That's all.
Oh, and I guess that when you think about how an hour, two hours I don't know, like that stay with you forever, and then imagine that there are places in the world where people have hours like that every single day...
I mean, wow.
Oh, and this will keep happening.
As long as any whacko
can get his hands on a gun.