Not Again

 Okay, it was a pretty sick joke at the time, but it's starting to feel even more grotesque: The suggestion that the best thing about kids going to school online for a year meant that there weren't any school shootings. For a year. 

We were so focused on protecting children from the deadly coronavirus, we completely overlooked the potential lifesaving potential of keeping them out of the crossfire. The shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan this past week took the lives of three teenagers, wounding eight others. The killer is fifteen years old and was taken into custody moments after the shots were fired. 

This is the part in the story where those in the community start to wonder how "something like this could happen here." But at this point, why would anyone imagine that a high school is a safe place for anyone? What is especially troubling in this case is the number of signs pointing to trouble ahead of this. Oakland County Undersheriff Mike McCabe downplayed the significance of an incident in early November when a deer head was thrown off the school roof, which he said was “absolutely unrelated” to the shooting, this was in addition to allegations circulating on social media that there had been threats of a shooting. 

There were reports of numerous students who chose to stay home and submit their assignments online rather than head back to a place they felt held danger for them. These were not the students who were making what are now the somewhat commonplace texts made from behind barricaded doors, underneath desks, assuring their parents that they were okay. 

Okay? 

How can fifteen to twenty shots from a semiautomatic handgun fired in anger inside a school be construed in any way to be "okay?"

At least they had masks on? They were all vaccinated? Somebody help me out here. I get that we are all struggling to reenter society and that we are having a tough time of it. Homicides are up twenty-five percent across the country, even while the overall crime rate is going down. 

All of which makes me reconsider taking all my business, retail and otherwise, to the relative safety of Al Gore's Internet. Is there a vaccine for this?