On January 4, one sixth grader was killed, seven students and staff members were injured, and the 17-year-old shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a high school in Perry, Iowa. The high school and middle schools in Perry share a building and are connected by a hallway adjacent to the cafeteria, where the shooting occurred. The cafeteria hosts a breakfast program for all middle and high school students before school.
The shooter’s weapons were a pump-action shotgun and a small-caliber handgun. Later, police found and disarmed a homemade bomb in his belongings found at the school.
ETA: It was just reported that the high school principal, Dan Marburger, who was shot in this event, died today, Sunday, January 14, as announced by his widow Elizabeth on a fundraising page created for her husband. The article I read also included this:
In a Facebook post on the night of the shooting, the principal’s daughter, Claire Marburger, called her father a “gentle giant” and said it wasn’t surprising that her father tried to protect his students.
“As I heard of a gunman, I instantly had a feeling my Dad would be a victim as he would put himself in harm’s way for the benefit of the kids and his staff,” his daughter wrote. “That’s just Dad.”
Marburger had been principal since 1995.
“That’s just Dad.” I haven’t stopped crying since reading this. I know my own father, who was both a high school teacher and an assistant principal after he retired from the Army, would have done what so many others on school administrations and staffs have done: sacrificed their own lives to try to save the lives of kids.
This is just not the way it should be, and I don’t understand how everyone in the country isn’t screaming for gun reform. Every country has criminals. Every country has psychologically and emotionally compromised individuals. But not every country has gun violence on this scale because they don’t have the number of guns in circulation, and certainly not the complete lack of regulation and oversight, that we have in the U.S.
We have a knife crime problem over here, especially amongst kids, it seems. However, one has to get up close and personal with a knife, so there are (thankfully) less mass killings. Not that any killing is okay.
Yes, I read about stabbings, not just in the UK, but in other countries. If someone is determined to kill and destroy, a way will be found. The kinds of weapons available here allow absolute slaughter on such a horrific scale. There are things that can be done to stop it, and people who try desperately hard to make others see reason. Reason is not persuasive to the unreasonable.