An Internet hub with domestic and international news, analysis, original reporting, and popular features from the left, center, indies, centrists, moderates, and right
Virginia Tech and A Grisly Historic Footnote
The massacre of 32 students this week at Virginia Tech University was not the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history.
That long-forgotten distinction belongs to the Bath Township (Michigan) Consolidated School, where 45 people were killed and 58 injured on May 18, 1927 in a dynamite explosion set off by school board member Andrew Kehoe.
Kehoe was upset that a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of the school building and blamed the additional financial hardship to foreclosure proceedings against his farm.
Click here for Hell Comes to Bath, a lengthy account of the incident.
opinions powered by SendLove.to
9 Responses to “Virginia Tech and A Grisly Historic Footnote”
Broken people, a scourge on the world no matter what day and age.
Judging from the title, I expected to hear of multiple bear attacks.
*wink*
So, does this mean every one should pack dynamite as self defense?
That was a dumb thing I just said. The days-long arguments finally got the better of my judgment.
Hey, hey! The title changed.
Oh lets not forget 300 blacks slaughtered in Tulsa, 1921 and their financially successful town burned to the ground. Hell with easy gun procurement, you can start your own damn war.
The TMV Proofreader struck!
Shaun – If you’re still monitoring your post the link doesn’t work. A little Google helped with the Bath Water. The farmer and John N. Collins are imfamous Michigan serial/mass murders. Does Derby bath or shower with Krauthammer in a biblical sense.
Thanks for the link, Shaun. This is one of the events I was thinking of when I remarked earlier that the problem isn’t a shortage of gun control, or too many firearms too readily available. The problem is dealing with an unstable element in human nature, and there is probably no way to make ourselves entirely safe from it.
But as my original point was – look, you can kill just as many, or more, with alternative methods as with firearms. Box cutters and suicidal jihadists turned airplanes into firebombs. An angry school board member blows up a school. The Oklahoma City bomb was manufactured from fertilizer and fuel oil. Guns are not the real problem – the real problem is dealing with the violent aspec t that appears in many people.
Note – I do NOT say “Americans” or “Moslems” or name any nationality or group. We are all probably prone to this to varying degrees, and killers have included born in USA former servicemen, religious extremists from overseas, foreign born folks, and all sorts of others. I think we are not helping when we suggest that this is one group’s problem. It is the human race’s problem. I am not sure how we can prevent future occurances. I would like to think we can, but I am enough of a realist to believe that such a hope is naive at best. Maybe not sensationalizing these events would be a start. Again, I do not seriously expect that to happen.