In the end there were 38 children dead at the school, two teachers and four other adults.
I’m not talking about the horrific shooting in Connecticut today. I’m talking about the worst school murder in American history. It took place in Michigan, in 1927. A school board official, enraged at a tax increase to fund school construction, quietly planted explosives in Bath Township Elementary. Then, the day he was finally ready, he set off an inferno. When crowds rushed in to rescue the children, he drove up his shrapnel-filled car and detonated it, too, killing more people, including himself. And then, something we’d find very strange happened.
Nothing.
No cameras were placed at the front of schools. No school guards started making visitors show identification. No Zero Tolerance laws were passed, nor were background checks required of PTA volunteers—all precautions that many American schools instituted in the wake of the Columbine shootings, in 1999. Americans in 1928—and for the next several generations —continued to send their kids to school without any of these measures. They didn’t even drive them there. How did they maintain the kind of confidence my own knees and heart don’t feel as I write this?
They had a distance that has disappeared. A distance that helped them keep the rarity and unpredictability of the tragedy in perspective, granting them parental peace.
“In 1928, the odds are that if people in this country read about this tragedy, they read it several days later, in place that was hard to get to,” explains Art Markman, author of “Smart Thinking” (Perigee Books, 2012). “You couldn’t hop on a plane and be there in an hour. Michigan? If you were living in South Carolina, it would be a three-day drive. It’s almost another country. You’d think, ‘Those crazy people in Michigan,’ same as if a school blows up in one of the breakaway Republics.”
Time and space create distance. But today, those have compressed to zero. The Connecticut shooting comes into our homes–even our hands–instantly, no matter where we live. We see the shattered parents in real time. The President can barely maintain composure. This sorrow isn’t far away, it’s local for every single one of us.
And of course it brings up Columbine. Two horrors, separated by years and miles, are now fused into one. It feels like terrible things are happening to our children all the time, everywhere. Nowhere is safe.
As a result, I expect we will now demand precautions on top of precautions. More guards. More security cameras. More supervision. We will fear more for our kids and let go of them even more reluctantly. Every time we wonder if they can be safe beyond our arms, these shootings will swim into focus.
Will this new layer of fear and security make our children any safer? Probably not, but for a reassuring reason: A tragedy like this is so rare, our kids are already safe. Not perfectly safe. No one ever is. But safe.
That’s a truth the folks in 1928 America understood. We just don’t feel that way now.
Not when there’s no distance between us and the parents in Newtown.
Since the perpetrator in 1928 was a school board official who had taken time to prepare the crime, it’s unlikely that modern-style security would have helped. If the same thing happened today, it would be harder for people to demand important officials be searched every time they enter the school, than to demand random adults should be searched. This accounts for some of the difference in reaction.
These things are huge triggers for me. It drives me mad that society has the reaction it does when this event killed as many people as die every eleven seconds. If we had a proportional societal reaction to all deaths, maybe we’d have solved the problem by now.
They had a distance that has disappeared. A distance that helped them keep the rarity and unpredictability of the tragedy in perspective, granting them parental peace.
As Monbiot observed: “there can scarcely be a person on earth with access to the media who is untouched by the grief of the people” in Newtown. The exact opposite is true for the children and their families continuously killed in the Muslim world by the US government: huge numbers of people, particularly in the countries responsible, remain completely untouched by the grief that is caused in those places. That is by design—to ensure that opposition is muted—and it is brutally effective.
By sickening use I mean that I see no way that a large-scale conventional operation in Northern Pakistan would’ve even been approved—nor a reason to start a military operation there, instead of the U.S. handling the real problem—the unstable, aggressive and brutally incompetent Pakistani government. In my opinion, it ought to have been pressured to provide good administration and good policing in the troubled areas, to eliminate the roots of insurgency and terrorism instead of continuing the cycle of violence.
A regime that has nuclear weapons, a modern army and a huge “security” apparatus but can’t prevent chaos, poverty and tribal warfare in its own backyard is being coddled just because it’s politically expedient for the US. Unless the Americans are willing to blast every single inch of Pakistan, I see no way how drone strikes could be helping the whole mess. But oh, the CIA and the military have some dead insurgents to show for it; no more frags could mean no more promotions and no more huge budgets!
I think you are absolutely right about the optimal response / change in procedures (basically, don’t change anything) given these awful events. Given the rarity of these types of events, the expected value of any security program is essentially identical to what it was two weeks ago. It’s a crying shame that this kind of cost-benefit analysis is not the universal reaction to proposed changes in policy arising out of unusual events.
… except that the parents in 1928 were wrong. The causes of school shootings clearly *weren’t limited to “those crazy folks in Michigan”. These risks affect everyone in America more or less equally, and the sense of “distance” granted by, well, distance was giving them a false sense of security.
No. Their feelings and plans where pretty well calibrated to the actual risks, much better than ours are. Instrumental rationality is clearly on their side.
You may however say their rationale was wrong, but recall that you just read a modern take on their rationale, you aren’t talking to or even reading actual thinking done by parents from 1928. Why be so uncharitable? Why didn’t you focus on a different take the author claimed was better understood by 1928 America:
A tragedy like this is so rare, our kids are already safe. Not perfectly safe. No one ever is. But safe.
The deadliest school massacre in US history was in 1927. Why its aftermath matters now
Since the perpetrator in 1928 was a school board official who had taken time to prepare the crime, it’s unlikely that modern-style security would have helped. If the same thing happened today, it would be harder for people to demand important officials be searched every time they enter the school, than to demand random adults should be searched. This accounts for some of the difference in reaction.
These things are huge triggers for me. It drives me mad that society has the reaction it does when this event killed as many people as die every eleven seconds. If we had a proportional societal reaction to all deaths, maybe we’d have solved the problem by now.
Edit: I accidentally the math
Yes! I really liked this tweet from Thom Blake on the matter:
I did too. I think I retweeted that.
The other side of the coin - how this very distance can be put to a sickening use with drone strikes.
By sickening use do you mean more pinpoint attacks that kill fewer people than conventional means?
By sickening use I mean that I see no way that a large-scale conventional operation in Northern Pakistan would’ve even been approved—nor a reason to start a military operation there, instead of the U.S. handling the real problem—the unstable, aggressive and brutally incompetent Pakistani government. In my opinion, it ought to have been pressured to provide good administration and good policing in the troubled areas, to eliminate the roots of insurgency and terrorism instead of continuing the cycle of violence.
A regime that has nuclear weapons, a modern army and a huge “security” apparatus but can’t prevent chaos, poverty and tribal warfare in its own backyard is being coddled just because it’s politically expedient for the US. Unless the Americans are willing to blast every single inch of Pakistan, I see no way how drone strikes could be helping the whole mess. But oh, the CIA and the military have some dead insurgents to show for it; no more frags could mean no more promotions and no more huge budgets!
I think you are absolutely right about the optimal response / change in procedures (basically, don’t change anything) given these awful events. Given the rarity of these types of events, the expected value of any security program is essentially identical to what it was two weeks ago. It’s a crying shame that this kind of cost-benefit analysis is not the universal reaction to proposed changes in policy arising out of unusual events.
But it is a logistical fact that faster killing devices kill more people per incident.
… except that the parents in 1928 were wrong. The causes of school shootings clearly *weren’t limited to “those crazy folks in Michigan”. These risks affect everyone in America more or less equally, and the sense of “distance” granted by, well, distance was giving them a false sense of security.
TL;DR: distance ≠ difference.
No. Their feelings and plans where pretty well calibrated to the actual risks, much better than ours are. Instrumental rationality is clearly on their side.
You may however say their rationale was wrong, but recall that you just read a modern take on their rationale, you aren’t talking to or even reading actual thinking done by parents from 1928. Why be so uncharitable? Why didn’t you focus on a different take the author claimed was better understood by 1928 America:
Not updating the odds of a school shooting in your local school is different to updating them insufficiently.
Also distance = difference is a very reasonable heuristic for humans to use.
In most cases, yes. For example, I’m Irish, and this doesn’t cause me to update the odds of a school shooting in my local school.