Bailey and Lancaster

Bob Allen, a clerk at a bookstore in the Amish country tourist town of Intercourse, said residents see the area as being safe and the Amish as peaceful people. "It just goes to show there's no safe place. There's really no such thing," he said.(Yahoo! News, 10/2)

Last week it was a school tucked into the mountains that was empty of any security personnel that day; today, it was an Amish community.

Yes, it would seem that there is no safe place, and if these these two school hostage crises indicate anything, it's that the "safest", most "peaceful" locations are the most vulnerable, and hence the most appealing targets to a murderous pustule of a human being who would carry out such a shooting. Excuse me for a moment while I play amateur criminologist on incomplete information, but I don't think either killer was seeking any kind of glory or even a sick legacy. When someone like this is merely looking to maliciously punish some section of humankind for some unrelated transgression, don't be surprised that he follows the path of least resistance. Besides, what morally shriveled coward on God's Green Earth would attack schoolchildren in an Old Order Amish community? The same kind who would line the girls up in front of the chalkboard and execute them, doing Lord knows what in between. When we're dealing with that level of human indecency, no one is too innocent so to be "safe".

Perhaps the most frightening and infuriating aspects about the Bailey and Lancaster school shootings are the suicides. The killers escape our corporeal grasp, and thus we must leave it up to God or some other force if we are to seek comfort in the concept of justice. Oh, the things we would have done to them had the bastards lived. It simply leaves us feeling helpless.

I was also shaken to find that these were men with almost no connections to the schools they struck. At least our society's post-Columbine adjustments led us to more successfully recognize and prevent possible threats from violent students within the school system. What do we have for some random man whose choice of school seemingly has no motive? It used to be that we only scrutinized the students, themselves, but now we are reminded that the threat is much wider.

It especially hurts to see that we maybe haven't come that far in seven years. Now, it wouldn't make sense for an Amish community to apply any post-Columbine measures, but this was the most prevelant issue-- with the Bailey crisis last week. Platte Canyon High was originally blueprinted with anti-Columbine measures in mind, which authorities said kept the killer in one room throughout the ordeal. But even something as proactive as that design served not as prevention, of course, but as damage control. But that can be said for most safety measures in school that still manage to leave the comfortable learning environment intact. Little can be done to keep a school shooting from ever taking place if the perpetrator makes any preparations to speak of.

Lastly, the shootings beg the recurring question: if suicidal individuals wish to carry out some vile fantasy of theirs before leaving this earth, what's to stop them? Clearly, divine punishment is something they neither believe in or concern themselves with, so it theoretically makes no difference to them if they take a few innocents.

So without any practical means of making it even tricky for an armed man to walk into a classroom, what are we left with? The persisting faith that someone will not strike us where we are most vulnerable -- where that someone can knowingly succeed in wrecking us. But we're always living in just that condition (if we are truly living at all), and schools have always been vulnerable. I don't think an ordeal like this indicates some societal shift: it simply shakes what remnant faith in human decency some people may have had.