Twenty-five years ago, March 24, 1998, two of the youngest mass shooters--11 and 13 years old-- committed a sniper-style rampage on their school, Westside Middle School, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. They served juvenile life; each getting out at age twenty-one. Both were able to legally purchase weapons--which they did. The older boy served a prison sentence as an adult for weapons charges.
The night before their rampage, the two boys amassed an arsenal of 13 weapons and over 2,000 rounds of ammunition. They loaded the weapons and ammunition into a van belonging to a mother of one of the boys. They also packed food, drinks, snacks, and camping gear. All of this activity went unnoticed by all the adults around them.
The next morning, one of the boys took his mother's keys and drove her van to pick up his accomplice. He was 13 and didn't know how to drive very well. It was later reported by a neighbor that he saw the van almost take out a stop sign and land in a ditch. No one reported the near mishap.
After picking up the younger boy, they needed to get gas. Neither of the boys knew how to pump gas and asked for help at two different gas stations but people declined to help. At the third gas station, someone did help the boy to pump gas into the van. But not one person called police to report two little boys driving around by themselves without an adult. No one asked the boys why they were out driving, or asked where their parents were.
Apparently no one in these boys lives or in their community paid any attention to what they were doing. Tragically.
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There are many lessons in this tragic shooting. Parents need to be more involved in the lives of their children--these parents didn't even know that their van was being stocked with weapons, ammunition, camping supplies, etc.! The guns were stolen from the grandfather of one of the boys; the weapons were only minimally secured. Apparently no one noticed the weapons were missing. Same with 2,000 rounds of ammunition--no one noticed it was missing.
The driver of the van nearly wrecked. A neighbor saw it happen but didn't report the incident. A handful of people saw the boys trying to get gas. No one asked them anything, or reported them.
And that's for starters. Each school shooting incident teaches what went wrong and what could be done better in the future. Twenty-five years have passed. It seems we have not learned anything. And there seems to be no interest in learning. And these tragedies will keep occurring until people get serious. And I don't mean screeching at politicians--on all sides--on social media. That's easy. Anyone can do that.
While people screech for "commonsense gun laws," they think that's all they need to do. There were more than 40 laws broken for the Columbine shooting to take place (to be included in a future post). Were those laws not commonsense laws? If a warrant for Eric Harris on other matters had been served in a timely manner, Columbine may not have happened. We already have laws against killing others. But as we often see on the news, laws are sometimes not enforced. Unenforced laws are no laws at all. The 5 year enhancement for gun charges is seldom applied now. Every law, "commonsense" or not, can be broken. All laws can be broken.
And, as we have seen, human error contributes to school shootings--parents with felony records who pass background checks because no one took the time to do the research. Some school officials fail to have threat assessments in place, or to use them properly, and sometimes don't take it seriously when told of threats by students. Sometimes doors are left unlocked. Law enforcement who didn't serve timely warrants, or act on tips.
The shooting on
March 23, 2023 in Colorado at East High School shows that the shooter was attending school while on probation for previous gun charges. He'd been kicked out of one school and to enroll in another school, he had to agree to a "safety plan" that included daily pat-downs for weapons. So much for that "safety plan."
Why do I study school shootings and share what I learn? Hopefully to get others to learn these things, too. Parents, community, schools, law enforcement all play a part. One thing people better be aware of, especially school officials--school shooters study previous shooters. They find out the mistakes made, what went went right, what to do better, what not to do, best times to act. They often hope to out-do previous shooters. It would serve school officials well to study these tragedies--because potential school shooters do study them. The Columbine shooters planned for 13 months...
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