James Castagnera: The Amish School Tragedy
[Jim Castagnera, a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, is the Associate Provost at Rider University. He writes a weekly newspaper column, “Attorney at Large.”]
I’ve been writing newspaper columns since I was an undergraduate at Lancaster’s Franklin & Marshall College in the 1960s. My “MO” has been humor. Take the Congressman Mark Foley affair… sad and sordid as it is, it’s brimming with humor, too.
The shooting deaths of nearly half a dozen Amish girls in a one-room school house not far from my alma mater’s campus leaves me with nothing to laugh about. To the contrary, the reporting I heard on the radio as I drove to work this morning left me infuriated. A psychology professor from Elizabethtown College lamented the lack of professionals at the Amish school to handle grief management. The next report --- predictably --- was about how the community is rallying to deal with the tragedy.
In America we have come to accept these horrible mass murders as natural disasters. This community has been hit by a hurricane. That one has been torn up by a tornado. Oh, and that one over there has been blasted by a madman with a gun.
We used to say, “Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” Should we now say, “Everybody talks about gun violence, but no one does anything about it?”
I live in suburban Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love has averaged one homicide per day in 2006. We are well on our way to setting a city record. Here, too, children are, often as not, the innocent victims of gun violence gone out of control.
Yeh, I know… guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But these killers are better armed than ever before. When I was an F&M student, I witnessed plenty of fights, often of the town v. gown variety. A group of fraternity punks, such as myself, might get a bit rowdy in a local tavern. The blue-collar crowd at the opposite end of the bar might take umbrage. The upshot might then be a quick exchange of fisticuffs. On a rare occasion a knife or a broken bottle could come into play.
My point is: nobody carried a gun.
By contrast today, if you are confronted by a belligerent bar fly, run for your car. Odds are better than even the guy is packing.
Our state legislators are taking up the issue of guns and violence this week in Harrisburg. My question to them is, how high must the body count be, before you take meaningful action?
The Canadian college professor, Marshall McLuhan --- best known during my college days for saying “The medium is the message” --- asserted that Americans live in “Bonanzaland,” i.e., the Wild West of the 1880s. Well, folks, that time is long past. Our lawmakers in Harrisburg might take a drive south, through the Cumberland Valley. Along the route of the Appalachian Trail, thousands of new homes are being built. The bucolic image of the hunter with his shotgun and his beagle is being displaced by the horrific image of the suburban head-job with his gun collection and his neurotic grievances.
Lawmakers, take your eyes off your rearview mirrors and take a hard, sober look at the road ahead. How much road kill can you tolerate, before you take action?
There’s nothing left to laugh about in Pennsylvania this morning.
I’ve been writing newspaper columns since I was an undergraduate at Lancaster’s Franklin & Marshall College in the 1960s. My “MO” has been humor. Take the Congressman Mark Foley affair… sad and sordid as it is, it’s brimming with humor, too.
The shooting deaths of nearly half a dozen Amish girls in a one-room school house not far from my alma mater’s campus leaves me with nothing to laugh about. To the contrary, the reporting I heard on the radio as I drove to work this morning left me infuriated. A psychology professor from Elizabethtown College lamented the lack of professionals at the Amish school to handle grief management. The next report --- predictably --- was about how the community is rallying to deal with the tragedy.
In America we have come to accept these horrible mass murders as natural disasters. This community has been hit by a hurricane. That one has been torn up by a tornado. Oh, and that one over there has been blasted by a madman with a gun.
We used to say, “Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” Should we now say, “Everybody talks about gun violence, but no one does anything about it?”
I live in suburban Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love has averaged one homicide per day in 2006. We are well on our way to setting a city record. Here, too, children are, often as not, the innocent victims of gun violence gone out of control.
Yeh, I know… guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But these killers are better armed than ever before. When I was an F&M student, I witnessed plenty of fights, often of the town v. gown variety. A group of fraternity punks, such as myself, might get a bit rowdy in a local tavern. The blue-collar crowd at the opposite end of the bar might take umbrage. The upshot might then be a quick exchange of fisticuffs. On a rare occasion a knife or a broken bottle could come into play.
My point is: nobody carried a gun.
By contrast today, if you are confronted by a belligerent bar fly, run for your car. Odds are better than even the guy is packing.
Our state legislators are taking up the issue of guns and violence this week in Harrisburg. My question to them is, how high must the body count be, before you take meaningful action?
The Canadian college professor, Marshall McLuhan --- best known during my college days for saying “The medium is the message” --- asserted that Americans live in “Bonanzaland,” i.e., the Wild West of the 1880s. Well, folks, that time is long past. Our lawmakers in Harrisburg might take a drive south, through the Cumberland Valley. Along the route of the Appalachian Trail, thousands of new homes are being built. The bucolic image of the hunter with his shotgun and his beagle is being displaced by the horrific image of the suburban head-job with his gun collection and his neurotic grievances.
Lawmakers, take your eyes off your rearview mirrors and take a hard, sober look at the road ahead. How much road kill can you tolerate, before you take action?
There’s nothing left to laugh about in Pennsylvania this morning.