America has sad history of violence

By By Michelle Blaylock, Mom’s Corner
Why? Why did he shoot that boy? What was he thinking? Why did she shoot those professors? Did she think it would get her job reinstated and allow her to reach tenure? What are things coming to? These are the questions many people are asking.
They are hard questions with no answers and unfortunately this is not the first time they have been asked by grieving communities.
May 18, 1927. For most people this date probably has little or no meaning. It was a beautiful spring day in rural Bath, Mich.
As in most farming communities, men were in the fields by early morning and mothers were shooing children out the door school and encouraging them not to dawdle on their way.
Thirty-two of those families would be faced with the deaths of their children. Several families would face the deaths of more than one of their children.
This was the first act of school violence in United States history. A local man decided he was losing his farm due to the high taxes created by the building of a new school.
I refuse to use the man’s name, because he doesn’t deserve to be remembered only his victims do.
The man gets a job working at the new school part time as a handyman. Over the course of several months, this man intricately wired the entire school connecting an estimated 1000 pounds of dynamite that he had hidden in the floors, ceiling and walls. He attached all this wiring to two alarm clocks and set them to detonate at 9:45 a.m. obviously, hoping for the greatest loss of human life.
If he had just wanted to destroy the school he could have blown it up at midnight, but no, he chose to do it when most of the students would be present.
The man’s morning began when he killed his wife and then blew up his home and other buildings on his farm.
His neighbors hearing the blasts and seeing the fire rushed to his aid, only to hear more horrific explosions a few minutes later coming from the direction of the new school.
Since the farm was a lost cause, the firefighters and neighbors quickly turned their attention to the school in an attempt to rescue as many people as possible.
What rescuers saw upon arrival was mind numbing. Their 5-year-old school, with its two stories, was missing an entire wing. Rescuers were greeted by debris and the screams of children.
By one account, the explosion had been heard up to several miles away. Within minutes parents were on the scene frantically looking for their children. As rescuers were trying to uncover survivors and recover the bodies of the deceased, the perpetrator showed up and called the school superintendent over to his car.
The perpetrator proceeded to get into a very heated argument with the superintendent, then he set off America’s first car bomb killing himself, the superintendent and wounding many others. Also about this time, it is discovered that there are still approximately 400- 500 pounds of unexploded dynamite in the other wing of the school. All rescue efforts had to cease until the dynamite could be safely removed.
When all is said and done, 38 children, and seven adults lost their lives Almost every family in the area was impacted in someway by this tragedy. I cannot even begin to describe the horrific details of this tragedy.
Just as now we cannot explain the reasoning behind the Discovery Middle School and UAH tragedies, in 1927 the reasoning behind the Bath School Disaster could not be explained.
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