A man killed twenty-four small children and a dozen adults in a nursery school in Thailand at the end of last year. You might have heard about in the news.
Did you know, however, that around the same time a man in his thirties shot and killed 17 people including 11 children in a school in central Russia?
The magazine The Week, in their October 1, 2022 edition reported it, otherwise I would not have known it had happened
Some crimes make some kind of sense to us. But children?
In Texas, the Uvalde school shooting Robb Elementary School was in the news again around the same time because the entire police force was suspended because of their failure to act when the killer was loose in the school and the police could hear shots.
Now, reported in February, Uvalde has hired two new school district police officers, being the first appointments to rebuild the district’s police force. That’s five months after the entire force was suspended.
What happened to policing and crime detection in that five months?
The reports are that Uvalde wasn’t a racial hate crime, and that the young man who killed the children may have been abused as a child.
Perhaps childhood trauma links the killers in all these cases.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps it is just fashion. You may know that newspapers under report suicides because suicides are contagious.
It kind of makes sense that a disturbed person who had been abused as a child would want to kill children to rebalance the hurt that was done to him as a child. By killing children he erases his own childhood.
Maybe.
As my wife Tamara said, but to go on one after another, stabbing, shooting small children?
And that makes me think of war, and the madness of somehow it being alright to shoot people and blow them up ‘in certain circumstances’. Of course there are defensive wars – but still – injuring and killing people and seeing it as ‘alright’. What are we that we couldn’t figure out a way to say it is not alright?
Photograph Works 