How

 "How could it have been worse?" This was the question that a local news anchor was asking a field reporter after a shooting in front of an Oakland school this past Wednesday. Rather than simply announcing that the good news was that six people were wounded and all are expected to recover, it seemed that there was a tinge of disappointment with the tragedy.

She went on to mine the possibility of an "active shooter" scenario, as opposed to the somewhat random and haphazard way that the gunman opened fire just before one o'clock in the afternoon. What if the shooter had gotten inside one of the four schools situated on that block? What if there had been more than one shooter? What if, indeed.

Oakland is currently coping with a record number of homicides. Seven over the course of the previous eight days. Those were killings, and therefore didn't need to be examined through the "what if" lens. They were part of a running total that rings in at ninety-six so far this year, continuing an ugly trend that began on 2020 with the outbreak of the pandemic. How COVID-19 fits into this puzzle is anyone's guess, but even though there are vaccines for the virus, and boosters to continue to protect us from mutating germs, there has been no real progress on the lead poisoning front. 

Of course, there were questions about how Oakland has chosen to remove police presence from their schools and how this may have impacted the events of Wednesday afternoon. If the assigned officers had been outside on the spot at the moment that the blur of violence swept in, the outcome might have been different. 

Maybe. 

It is more likely that the shooting happened at a place at a time that no one would be around to shoot back. That its kind of the way this stuff works. The fact that none of the victims were children is something of a gift, if there is such a thing, since there were children as young as five were nearby at a nearby charter school. Ironically, the campus is also home to Oakland's center for distance learning that was opened in the wake of the pandemic. No students were on site there. 

How could it have been worse? Knock that off already.