A post from Mike Huckabee, former presidential candidate and late Conservative rock star, is making the rounds on Facebook:
Michael Tremoglie on the Italian website, Academia Res Publica, offers some food for thought about the Sandy Hook school shooting. He writes that the worst school killing in history wasn’t committed by a disaffected teenager, didn’t involve a gun, and happened before there was violent entertainment and before God was taken out of schools. In 1927 in Bath, Michigan, a middle-aged farmer blew up a schoolhouse, then detonated a car bomb. He killed 38 kids and six adults, and nobody ever figured out why.
Tremoglie notes that the only scholarly study of mass school killings was published by an Ohio sociology professor in 2007. It found that there is no holistic approach to investigating school killings, where interdisciplinary experts examine every possible angle and share their knowledge. Instead, different groups quickly seize on the tragedy to advance whatever angle they already believe. Liberals blame lax gun control laws. Conservatives blame violent media. Mental health groups say it shows the need for more funding. And so on. The study suggested that until we start investigating these tragedies the way we do other disasters, where experts from many different fields work together to discover the truth, we may never learn what really causes them or how to prevent them from happening again.
So much of this is untrue, it's pathetic.
The bombing was the work of a "farmer." Well, EVERYONE in Bath, Michigan at the time was a "farmer." But the bomber was also the former school district treasurer, a person known for being difficult, impatient and violent. He was bitter over his loss in a recent school board election, and was also facing foreclosure, and his wife was dying of tuberculosis. He had stopped working his farm, tried to give his horses away to a neighbor. He planted the explosives months before the event, and blew his own house up.
Mike Huckabee can't figure out why Andrew Kehoe blew up the Bath school building. I can't figure out why anyone should listen to Mike Huckabee about anything.
The FBI has a very clear set of profiles for mass killers. The problem isn't that we need more investigations. The problem, clearly, is that we've created a culture where there's a prevailing abhorrence of guns and gun owners, and where people are unprepared to protect themselves. We've seeded the landscape with "gun-free zones" that are nothing more than target-rich environments for potential shooters. Paradoxically, we've simultaneously conditioned a generation of disaffected young men into numbness regarding gun violence via video games and movies. And to top it off, we've created a media system that sensationalizes the relatively rare mass killing incidents while largely ignoring murder rates in poor and minority communities.
There have been 76 people killed in mass-shooting incidents within the past 10 years. There were more than 440 school-aged children killed in Chicago in the past year. I submit that if we want to do something to protect children, we would be further ahead forcibly relocating the population of the greater Chicago area than we will either by more gun control or by putting police in schools.
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