When Rebel Girl was a child, a teenager and then a young adult, there was no place she felt safer than at school. School was where she went to see how the broken world could come together. She still feels that way, that what we all do together is ultimately world-mending – but it's different now and it was, she realizes different even then, back when she felt so safe; maybe she was just lucky.
Earlier this week, in Oxnard, a 15-year-old student was shot by another student, an 8th grader. The victim was reportedly openly gay and lived at a group home for abused and neglected children. This morning's newspaper reports that shooter's home life may have also been troubled, with his father's record of domestic abuse and drunk driving. No reports yet on the origin of the gun. The victim is now officially brain-dead, on a ventilator and the 14-year-old shooter is facing 50 years to life.
Then yesterday, in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, a graduate student who had stopped taking his medication, opened fire, killing 5, wounding 15 before killing himself. According to this morning's NY Times, the shooter "bought two of the four guns used in the attack — a 12-gauge shotgun and a 9-millimeter Glock pistol — six days ago, and they were legally registered to him, authorities said. [He]carried the shotgun in a guitar case and the pistols and ammunition strapped to his body, concealed by a coat…He proceeded through a side door to the lecture hall’s stage, and immediately opened fire without speaking. Forty eight casings and 6 shotgun shells were found at the scene, indicating more shots than initially estimated by witnesses."
UPDATE: Click on Cold Spring Shops, a blog by Stephen Karlson, a professor at NIU, for a closer look at that campus community in the aftermath of the shooting.
