Right Back Atcha!
I don't want to spend any time on the details of the school attack in Pennsylvania mostly because a) as a parent I don't really have the stomach to dwell on grown people shooting seven year olds and b) I think I've more than used up my "murdered children" chits on this blog by now. There's a lot to draw from in terms of everyday material, but as a recurrent theme, it's much less interesting than Brad Pitt's dick. I don't say that idly either, I have all kinds of tracking programs running to let me know what you people come here looking for.

What I want to say about this will be brief and probably has been said before, but I feel like it needs to be said anyway.

The fucking Amish?

What the hell?

What kind of a pansy-ass school-storming child-murderer targets pacifists? Seriously, where's the challenge?

If you go out hunting animals, deer at least have pointy horns they could skewer you with. You know, theoretically speaking, if you were using a gun that made you have to get closer than 2,000 feet to kill it. But at least the idea of a tussle exists to feed the phony-baloney need to shoot something out in a field you had to drive past ten supermarkets (with butcher departments!) to get to.

It seems like everytime somebody (students or crazy grown ups) shoot up a school, if it's not Amish, it's always someplace whitebread and suburban. Of course we could argue that there's something about whitebread suburbia that develops the narcissism necessary to foster the cheap-ass outrage required to maintain a blog shoot your friends between classes.

But down that road lies a lot of tiresome psychology and victim-blaming. What I'm wondering is more practical.

Why don't these "school shootings" ever happen in schools with metal detectors? Or out in the non-Amish country areas? I mean, they have metal detectors, so we KNOW someone in there is strapped. Otherwise, why the detectors, right? And out in good ole redneck country, where Clem and Obadiah got them a nice gun rack for their third-generation pickup on their sixteenth birthdays, those schools never get shot up either.

If they have to happen, for once I would like to see someone try a "school shooting" (the press-phrase for it) in a place where we are in a more mundane, less TV-news-graphic way, likely to see a shooting in school. You know, somewhere where it's possible that the targets may actually return fire.

I know it's the American way to only enter into a fight we know we can overwhelmingly win (lengthy occupation period afterward notwithstanding), but come on. Be sporting, at least. The Amish just want to stay home, get up too early, terrorize the livestock, maybe raise a barn and sell you an overpriced quilt. They aren't bothering you. They know better. Every time they leave Amish country they end up witnessing murders in bathrooms and have to be saved by Harrison Ford.

OK, so the source material for my Amish knowledge is somewhat limited. But I do know they no-likey the fighty. People keep trying to tell me this school shooter guy was "crazy" or "disturbed." If you're going to be crazy, be crazy all the way. Attacking those who lack either the inclination, the know-how or the artillery to fight back smacks just a little too much of coldly rational calculation. If you want to show me you're nuts, limit your sprees to schools with all-blacktop playgrounds or the ones named after Nathan Bedford Forrest.

But no rational casing the place to scope out the best places to find cover when the bullets start flying back at you. Remember, you're crazy and crazy means invincible.

Besides, it's only too poetically fitting that someone out of touch with reality should be killed by a gross stereotype.



This post on that Narcissus Scale: 7.0



Pops
- posted by Pops @ 9:26 AM