[I remind readers that my blog posts are periodically made into hardbound volumes to preserve and pass on to my descendants research and stories about our family history, my thoughts on genealogy in general, and my opinions on the issues of my time on this planet. These occasional letters to my descendants are intended to share and explain my experience during various momentous events and issues that happened in the course of my life. As such, they contain my personal opinions. Others are free to disagree as to what the events and issues meant from their point of view and they should record and preserve their thoughts and beliefs for their descendants to read and judge just as my descendants will do.]
By now you know that the digital blog I wrote during the early years of the 21st Century was printed in multi-volume book form in order to preserve it and pass it on to you and others. When the following post was written, the blog had already been preserved in six hard bound volumes. At least three copies of each volume were produced–two of them were given to my sons, Jonathan and Christopher. The blog was always a genealogy/family history blog devoted to those subjects generally and more specifically to posts about our deep American family roots. I stated in earlier posts, that this blog was never intended in any way to be a political treatise or diatribe, but rather it was begun as a way to pass on family history and to communicate directly the views that at least this ancestor of yours held on various issues. These occasional "Dear Ancestor" missives are to reveal to you my opinion of circumstances that I lived through. [See, the posts dated November 9, 2016 and January 20, 2020 in blog Vol. 6.]
I began my education when I entered kindergarten at Highland Grammar School–a public elementary school in Holyoke, Massachusetts that no longer exists. Over the next thirteen years my education at public schools continued at five different schools in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey until I graduated from high school in Cinnaminson, NJ in 1970. I then went on to earn three academic degrees through college, graduate school, and law school in the period of 1970 - 1981.
During the late 1950s when I was just beginning my education in elementary school, there were children who were also attending elementary and secondary schools to get their education. And their parents, like mine, were surely proud of the abilities they were gaining and looking forward to the futures they would have. For example, in late October of 1956, Hector Miranda was a 14 year old 9th grader at Booker T. Washington Junior High School in New York. He was considered one of the top students in his grade and he served as school monitor charged by the principal to prevent students leaving the cafeteria at lunch from going up the stairs to the upper floors rather than out onto the school yard.
On October 1, 1957, Silas Brown was 16 years old and a student at Metropolitan Vocational High School in New York. He played the drums.
The future professional baseball player, Joe Pepitone, was 16 years old and a student at Manual Training School in New York on Tuesday, March 4, 1958. He was taking business-related courses including one called "business machines."
In late April, 1958 Timothy Wall was a 15 year old freshman student at Massapequa High School in New York.
I did not know any of the above-named students, but they all attended secondary school in the 1950s while I was in kindergarten through 2nd grade. This was all that those students had in common with me. They did, however, have one thing in common with each other. Each one of them was shot by a gun while in school.[1] From October 1956 through May 1958 there were four reported gun shootings in K-12 public or private schools in the U.S. and they were committed in Jr. and High schools.[2] Of the four students named above, only one was killed (by a sawed-off shotgun brought into a boys rest room). The others were wounded, respectively, by a home made zip-gun, a .32 caliber handgun, and .38 revolver. They all recovered, including Joe Pepitone who was shot in the stomache. Timothy Wall was not so lucky. He was shot by a fellow student who brought a sawed-off shotgun (bought for his 16th birthday) into school and intentionally shot Wall after laying in wait for him in a washroom stall.
During the decade of the 1960s, while I passed from elemenatry school through junior high and graduation from high school, there were thirteen reported gun shootings in U.S. K-12 schools (all at the secondary level).[3] Of the thirteen school shootings, seven involved fatalities of students ranging in age from 13 to 17. There were four students and two teachers wounded during the thirteen shooting incidents and three additional deaths involving the killing of a teacher, a principal, and an admistrator during the thirteen incidents. The firearms involved during these 1960s shootings were a target pistol, a .22 rifle, and similar guns. No use of automatic or semi-automatic firearms were reported.
On April 20, 1999 one of the most infamous school shootings in the U.S. took place in Colorado and shocked the nation. Two seniors at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado acquired a small arsenal of weapons/explosives and brought them into the school. The guns included two 9mm firearms, and two 12-gauge shotguns. The two shooters had thirteen 10-round magazines, one 52, one 32 and one 28-round magazine. They had each sawed off the barrel of their shotgun (a felony in itself under the National Firearms Act). They also had constructed 99 improvised explosive devices, which included pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, and propane tanks converted into bombs. When their deadly rampage was over 12 students, one teacher and the two shooters were dead, but an additional 21were wounded and three others were injured while trying to escape the school. On that day my two sons were 13 nd 15 years old in middle school and high school, respectively, in Loudoun County, Virginia.
In the last two decades (2000 - 2020) the number of K-12 school shootings has increased in the U.S. From 2000 to 2009 there were at least 34 killed and 78 wounded during shootings that took place in K-12 schools in the U.S. During the years 2010 - 2020 there were at least 109 killed and 231 wounded during shootings in K-12 schools in the U.S. 2018 was a particularly bloody year with 36 killed and 68 wounded.
The last decade has involved two horrendous massacres in American K-12 schools.
On December 12, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut the deadliest mass shooting at an elementary school in U.S. history took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Twenty innocent children between the ages of six and seven and six adult staff members were shot dead before the shooter shot himself in the head. The shooter was armed with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle (a semi-automatic AR-15 style weapon) and ten magazines holding 30 rounds each.
On February 18, 2018 in Parkland, Florida the deadliest high school shootings in U.S. history took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The lone shooter was armed with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle and multiple ammunition magazines when he took the life of 17 people (fourteen students between the ages of 14 and 18 and three adult staff members). The shootings lasted for about six minutes and alll of the victimes were shot within a period of less than four minutes. An additional 17 people were wounded and survived.
While there is no official count of the number of guns owned by Americans, a June 2018 report from the Small Arms Survey estimated that American civilians owned 393 million guns (legal and otherwise) and this was up from 270 million domestically owned guns in the U.S. in 2007. In 2018, the year of the Parkland high school massacre, the population of the U.S. was 327,096,265 giving us 4.29% of the total world population[4], yet we had 46% of the world's stockpile of civilian-owned guns.[5] That amounts to significantly more than one gun for every man, woman, and child in the country (about 120 guns for every 100 people); and since 1999 the mass shootings in our schools and elswhere have been getting progressively and increasingly deadly![6]
Recently, on Tuesday, November 30, 2021 (five days after Thanksgiving) a 15-year old student at Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan brought to school a Sig Sauer semi-automatic 9mm pistol his parents bought him as a Christmas present. He began shooting "during passing time between classes when hundreds of students were in the hallway transitioning from one classroom to the other."[7] When the shootings ended, four students were dead and seven were injured. It was the 28th shooting incident at a K-12 school in the U.S. this year and the deadliest since May 2018. It was the 651st incident this year in the U.S. where at least four people were shot (whether fatally or not) according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks mass shootings.[8][9] As of December 15, 2021 there have been 32 school shootings in the U.S. this year and since 2018 there have been 90 shootings in U.S. schools.[10] School shootings have taken place in 19 states in 2021 with Texas leading the pack at four shootings this year. Deaths have occurred at school shootings in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Delaware, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and Michigan among others.[11] School shootings are not limited to one state or region of the country or to big cities and major urban areas. It is clear that we have been exeriencing an epidemic of school shootings in our country unknown during the time I attendend elementary and secondary school decades ago. Why??
Within days of the Oxford High School killings and the arrival of the holiday season of Christmas and other religious observances we were treated to what can only be described as a mystifying juxtaposition of holiday messages in the wake of the killing of innocent children. During this time of traditional tidings of peace and good will toward others, two members of the major political party perhaps best known for touting their Christian beliefs and family values decided to send out Christmas cards praising and promoting gun use by children and families. A strange juxtaposition indeed!
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| Rep. Massie's (KY) caption? "Merry Christmas ps. Santa, please bring ammo." |
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| When Rep. Massie was criticized, Rep. Boebert (R-CO) posted her Christmas card with the caption, "The Boeberts have your six @RepThomasMassie" |
Perhaps by the time you descendants read this, the country will have found a way to slow and even reverse the out of control proliferation of guns in this country. I hope so! I fear that we have gone too far in reading the Second Amendment to allow virtually unfettered ownership and display of private firearms. We have seen open carry laws proliferate throughout the country so that protesters bring semi-automatic rifles to demonstrations on government property and into public parks. A few years ago a restaurant in Leesburg, Virginia offered a discount to anyone who wore a gun into the restaurant on a designated pro-gun day each week. And now we see some of our elected officials touting semi-automatic weapons as part of their celebration of the Christmas season -- a season and holiday traditionally held up as a time to celebrate peace and goodwill. What has happened to us??
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[2] The school shooting statistics here present only shootings in school k-12 whether public or private and do not include the many shootings that took place in colleges and universities during the periods discussed. Also not included are shootings where no one was killed or wounded or that were committed by adult non-students on K-12 school grounds. The statistics are not based on any governmental study of the gun violence problem due to the Dickey Amendment of the 1996. That amendment put forth by Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Arkansas) prohibited the CDC from spending money to "advocate or promote gun control" and so for the last 25 years no federal studies of gun violence were funded. The first CDC funding for a gun violence study occred this year to study gun-related injuries and deaths in Houston. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/us/politics/gun-violence-research-cdc.html
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Copyright 2021, John D. Tew
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