How could any adult American, let alone a school superintendent, say this? Little kids take out their ghost guns and execute each other on the sidewalk in front of your school, and you tell your community it’s hard to understand the “incident”?
No event could be more pedestrian, more transparent, and more expected. It happens very, very frequently – more and more frequently – in the junior high schools and high schools of the United States. (I’m afraid this list is not up to date, but it will have to do.) Happened a few days ago at a high school nine miles from my house.
There are about four hundred million guns in the US, and some of them are in the hands of the parents of the superintendents’ students. They’re all over their living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. How many is the superintendent herself hoarding?
Some of these households have fifty guns and more. These are arsenals, and children are growing up around them. Guns, these children come to know, are there to solve problems. And they are ridiculously accessible, either by taking them from one’s home arsenal, ordering a ghost gun and assembling it, or borrowing one from a friend.
Teenage guys fight all the time. One of the most amazing accomplishments of this country is that while until recently they’d deal with these utterly routine “incidents” with their fists or a pair of scissors or something, we’ve now made it that they can pick off a couple of the folks’ Glocks and kill their enemy.
Get with the program, superintendent. People are going to start laughing at you if you keep saying stupid things.