theboondork's RV blog

the Columbine school shooting memorial

6/7/2018

One of the things at the park I visited yesterday is a memorial to the infamous Columbine school shooting. In fact you can see Columbine school from the park, there actually right next to each other and the memorial is pretty much right behind the school.

The memorial was to say the least very moving, and it brought back memories that I had just as soon forget. Even though I was living in the mountains 70 miles from Denver at the time it was such a horrific event it affected everyone in this lightly populated state.

If you had to pick a location for such a terrible tragedy to happen, Columbine would be at the bottom of your list. It's an area of upper-middle-class homes with trimmed shrubbery, flowerbeds, and shiny new cars in the driveways. Clean streets, and manicured medians are everywhere you go. There are no signs that pure evil could live and flourish in a place like this.

But flourish it did and now the country is paying the price for the media making the perpetrators of this heinous crime famous and worthy of worship by thousands of disaffected and marginalized teens all across the country, who see an attack on unprotected schools as a way to become as famous as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. And dying in the process will give them status among their peers rather than simply taking their own life in a way that is easily ignored by the press.

theboondork

4 Comments

Tim

6/8/2018 09:03:15 am

I can relate. I live very close to Sandy Hook and drove past the house where the shooter lived (I don't even want to say his name on a blog post) many times before the shootings. I know many people affected by the tragedy since it's a small community, although I don't know anyone personally that lost a child.

It's all so weird that this is happening. I blame a lot of things going on in our society, including the notoriety that the shooters get. If I could, I would pass a law that would forbid anyone from every saying their names again, but any mass murderer would be assigned a number and that's how we would reference them from now on, even after they are executed (and I think they should all be executed).

I'm amazed that the Aurora Colorado shooter only got life in prison. Are you kidding me? Seriously, shot up a movie theater killing 12 people and injuring 70 others (most severely) and he only gets life in prison?

Whoops, sorry; touched a nerve - rant mode off.

Tom

6/8/2018 12:30:13 pm

I'm nowhere near smart enough to figure out what can be done to stop the school shootings, but I'm old enough to remember an America where it was inconceivable.

Seems like with all the studies that go on at universities somebody would be smart enough to compare the America I grew up in and the America of today, look at the differences and decide which ones might turn kids into killers. Right now all they do is point at guns.

One of the advantages of being an old geezer is I grew up at a time when people were armed. Being a baby boomer I was witness to tens of millions of World War II surplus weapons given to, or sold dirt cheap to American citizens. M1 carbines and German Luger's were available through the mail, brought right to your door, to anyone with the $20 to buy them. And millions of people did.

Did it cause millions of murders? No it didn't, in fact crime was very low, America was a safer place when I was young. When I was 13 years old I had a 22 rifle and so did my two best friends, we hunted together, and we walked down the streets of our neighborhood carrying our rifles to go hunting. And the thought of taking our rifles to school and shooting anyone never crossed our minds. But for some reason now it does. It seems like someone could figure out what the difference was between then and now, maybe they can, maybe they don't want to.

And as for the Aurora shooter, the definition of insanity needs to be narrowed to what it used to be and stop allowing people that are just plain evil to be declared legally insane. That and a quick trip to the electric chair after a couple of appeals would solve a lot of our problems.

But I'm just a boondocker and boondocking is my area of expertise, so anything else I ramble on about should be taken with a grain of salt.

Tom

6/8/2018 12:54:14 pm

Well, at least you have the boondocker credentials, I don't even have that, so anything I post should be taken with two grains of salt.

I don't know what has happened over the last few years. However, it's not a new phenomenon - do you remember the University of Texas shooting in Austin back in the late 60's? Also, back in 1927, a guy blew up a school in Bath Michigan. Although back then it seemed rare, and now these kind of things are happening on a weekly and sometimes daily basis.

I do think if we took a harder line with people like the Aurora shooter that maybe it would deter others from following suit. Other than that, I don't have any answers either. I do hope someone can figure out some solutions soon.

6/8/2018 02:40:35 pm

It won't take long to get some street cred. just get lost in a big city while pulling the trailer, back into the only tree in the county, make reservations at the wrong campground, or pull away from your campsite while still hooked up to the water faucet.

Doing one or all of those things will make you an RVing expert. But becoming an expert boondocker will require far more mistakes than that.

I do remember the University of Texas shooting, I was in the Air Force at the time and I remember watching it on television, but the Bath Michigan thing was way before my time.

Those things are well remembered because they were so rare. It's like the outlaws of the wild West, they were so rare we can still remember some their names, like Billy the kid and Jesse James, but how many robbers and killers of the present can people remember, there's so many of them who cares.

There's more people today which might explain some of it, and there's 24 hours a day media coverage of anything and everything which makes life seem way worse than it really is.

But I don't think anybody really knows what is so different about today's society, maybe people are less religious, maybe there's not enough armed people walking around, or maybe liberalism has destroyed morality, personal responsibility, and the dignity of a job well done, who knows?

Living in an RV and moving around the country gives me a strange feeling of detachment from all of this. Not having real roots anywhere kind of makes me feel like I'm not a part of anything going on in America, that I'm on the outside watching it like a movie, and nothing affects me, so I don't give much thought to solving societal problems anymore. I just sit in my easy chair munching some popcorn and watch the world go by.

Tom

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the Columbine school shooting memorial

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