Like me, Colby Cosh was thinking of the Bath School Disaster yesterday:
Grasping about for easy analogies can be hazardous.
The Bath School killer was supposedly angry about high taxes, for example. Ooops.
And as I replied to Cosh, those who blame Madelyn Murray O’Hair for “taking prayer out of schools”tend to be the same people who try to point out that “gun crimes are down/rare anyhow so nyah nyah.”
Which is it: is A Long Time Ago better or worse?
We do need to examine decades’ worth of the valorization of insanity, from RD Laing through so much of pop culture (M*A*S*H-isms like “If you’re not paranoid, you’re crazy”).
However, it seems that crime in England has gone up since the British finally began to lose patience with the “eccentrics” it once treasured like a protected species.
My not really joking solution to school shootings is to ban schools.
