Monday, April 20, 2009

Ten years ago today...

Ten years ago today, two heavily armed students walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and proceeded to kill 12 fellow students and 1 teacher, as well as wounding 23 others. They later killed themselves.

The victims were (courtesy the Baltimore Sun) -

Cassie Bernall
Steven Curnow
Corey DePooter
Kelly Fleming
Matthew Kechter
Dan Rohrbough
William Sanders
Rachel Scott
Isaiah Shoels
John Tomlin
Lauren Townsend
Kyle Valeasquez
Daniel Mauser

Being the tenth anniversary, there have been a number of memorial activities to commemorate the victims -

A sunset vigil at the Columbine Memorial in Littleton...

A "lie down" pro-gun control rally at the Capitol in Colorado...

In AZ, many Republican legislators (and even a couple of Democrats) spent the afternoon of the 10th anniversary at the Ben Avery Shooting Range in north Phoenix, participating in its own commemorative activity, the deceptively named the "First Annual Legislative Sportsman Shoot."

What a classy crass bunch.


More on the massacre and the anniversary here, here, and here. This is just a very small sample; there are thousands of pieces out there today.

3 comments:

Thane Eichenauer said...

You propose that the legislature should displace important firearms practice because two people chose April 20th, 1999 to murder 12 other people. Perhaps they should have scheduled it for April 19th so as to remind the people of the world of the timeless value and benefit of the private ownership and use of firearms (the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising).

Some times the people who misuse firearms are freelance criminals, some times the people who misuse firearms are organized criminals or call themselves "the government". Attempting to shame Arizona legislators for setting up an important and vital event on April 20th only goes to show that there are plenty of people who haven't learned the Columbine lesson which is that is a far more practical task to arm the good people of the world than it has ever been to disarm evil people.

Craig said...

There are 364 other days in the year. Allowing for holidays and other days that aren't holidays but that could present "propriety" problems (September 11, December 7, etc., there are probably 330 other days in the year that could have better served for Monday's activities at Ben Avery.

BTW - I would never try to shame the AZ lege. It would be a wasted effort - they have no conscience.

BTW2 - I'm not a gun control zealot, but neither do I worship them. A universal firearms ban is no wiser than than requiring universal ownership. Some people would always find a way around a ban, and some people should never be allowed to have a firearm.

"Blanket" laws don't take into account individual variations in suitability for gun ownership.

Eli Blake said...

Well,

In fairness, If you schedule anything it would be tough not to conflict with some kind of anniversary this week.

If you did it last Thursday, it would be the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre. If you did it on Sunday it would be fourteen years since the OKC bombing.

Then Monday you had the shooting of the photo radar guy here in Phoenix.

Something about this week seems to bring out the murderers or something.