Red Lake
Yesterday's tragedy at the Red Lake Indian Reservation high school is a horror indeed:
A teenage boy opened fire inside the local high school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation on Monday, killing seven people before turning the gun on himself.
The boy, identified by a law enforcement official, a school employee and two students as Jeff Weise, 17, apparently shot and killed his grandfather -- a Red Lake police officer -- and his grandfather's girlfriend before heading to the school in his grandfather's Red Lake squad car, sources said Monday night.
Seven school children dead (eight with the shooter) in a town of under 5,000 people. In proportion to the size of the communities, that'd be like eighty dead at Columbine, or 250 at a Minneapolis school. And in a small town like Red Lake, that's a big piece of the future of the town and the reservation dead.
And that doesn't even address the individual human tragedy in each of those families, for whom I urge you all to pray or do whatever you do.
Which is all that belongs "above the fold"
Now that we're below the fold...
You can almost count the seconds until the Twin Cities' commentators, the Colemans and Sturdevants and Perrys, not to mention the insta-authorities like Rebecca Thoman, start to blame "the bloody guns".
And yet Red Lake High School is a monument to things done exactly the way they wanted it.
By federal law, schools and the 1000 yard bubbe around them are gun-free zones; the law-abiding are legally disarmed. Schools - Red Lake, Cold Spring/Rokori, Columbine, wherever - are little pieces of DC or Chicago, places where one is safe purely at the sufferance of the authorities. School shootings are a refutation of the leftist ideal of gun control, not a symptom begging for more of it.
I keep returning to the story of the Pearl, Mississippi shooting in 1997. The incident, which left two dead, was ended by an assistant principal, Joel Myrick, who had his national guard pistol stored "illegally" in his car, less than a thousand feet from the school. ith the gun, he was able to apprehend Luke Woodham, the shooter.
Cesare Beccaria, the Italian noble and criminologist much admired by Thomas Jefferson, said:
Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty... and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer?
Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.
There have been
dozens of school shootings and other lethal assaults in the past decade. Saying "more restrictive gun laws would do no good" isn't a guess or a wish; the schools
have the laws already. Schools are exactly as people like Citizens for a
Supine "Safer" Minnesota want all of society to be; disarmed by law.
As usual, it's the damned criminals and psychos that keep messing things up.
Posted by Mitch at
March 22, 2005 06:23 AM
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If we're talking about driving through the reservation on 89, my wife and I do so almost every time (weather-permitting) we drive up to see her family, and we've never felt threatened or unsafe. (My wife is sometimes a bit jittery because of years of everyone talking about how dangerous it was, but as an outsider I don't have that built-in fear, and nothing has happened to instill it.) Admittedly, we're less inclined to drive that route at night and we don't stop anywhere -- at least partly because there isn't much of anywhere to stop -- but the most danger I've been in while driving through the reservation is when we had to stop to let a bear cub cross the highway.
Not that I wouldn't mind having a gun in the car on principle, but I haven't yet had the training that would make me comfortable with that idea...
Posted by: Steve Gigl at March 22, 2005 09:12 AMThe only reason this particular shooting is national news is because it happened at a high school. And because shootings and stabbings on the res usually happen in ones and twos and go on month after month, it's all just too "icky" for the liberal establishment in place around here to do anything but ignore it. But a smoking ban we got.
Mitch is exactly right: Red Lake is a monument to the failed policies of liberal orthodoxy. If you give 10,000 people each $50,000 and come back in a year, 9,900 people will be indigent and 100 people will not only have all the money, but will present themselves as "the authorities" and demand the process be repeated, for the children, of course, and nevermind the meth labs.
All to which the liberal establishment will happily comply to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the very policies that produced this atrocity. Nothing will change on the reservation until things change in Bemidji, and that will not happen until the DFL nod'n'wink crowd is held accountable by the constituency they have exploited and deprived for a generation.
They reap what they sow.
Posted by: Eracus at March 22, 2005 11:43 AMI WAS HEART BROKEN WHEN THIS SHOOTING HIT THE NEWS. OUR RESERVATION ALSO HAS MULTIPULE SITUATIONS THAT IS NEVER COVERED BY THE LOCAL NEWS OR NEWS PAPERS. OUR TRIBE HAS THERE OWN POLICE DEPARTMENT AND OWN LAWS...YET THERE IS JUST TO MUCH HAND SLAPPING AND JUDGES DROPPING CASES DUE TO LIMITTED SPACE FOR OFFENDERS. OUR SMALL SCHOOL HAS ALSO HAD A COUPLE OF HUSH HUSH INCIDENTS, WHERE STUDENTS BROUGHT(TO SCHOOL) HAND GUNS, KNIFES AND ALSO POSTED NOTES OF NAMES OF VICTIMS TO DIE (ON THERE BIRTHDAY). YET YOU DONT HEAR THIS ON THE NEWS OR READ IT IN THE PAPER. HOW MANY OTHER NATIVE AMERICAN CHILDREN LIVING ON RESERVATIONS ARE HURTING EACH OTHER OUT THERE!ITS COME TO A PINT THAT WE DONT WANT ANY "OUT SIDERS"TO KNOW AGOUBT THE BAD THINGS GOING ON THE RESERVATION,BUT THIS NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED! HOW MUCH LONGER WILL THE TROUBLED YOUTH BE OVER LOOKED OR GIVEN ANOTHER SLAP ON THE HAND? GOD FORBIDE THAT ONE OF THE STUDENTS ACT OUT THERE ANGER AS THIS STUDENT HAS DONE, TO MY CHILD OR YOUR CHILD...
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