When a near-Columbine hits your hometown....

Well no guns found yet but my kid's high school had a 3 hour lockdown on Friday because of what appeared to be an imminent threat.

Principal sees a threat in the girls bathroom; 18 yr old posts on social media picture with the heading "I am Death" then does not show up on Senior Picnic Day.

My kid was fine and funny thing is I was not thinking Columbine at the time because the local police immediately sent out alerts and all classes were locked down but reflecting back now, maybe I should have been more worried. Even last night during regular hoops with my buddies, no one mentioned it.

Living in a bubble, I never thought it would hit my hometown but damn, I'm out of my dreamworld now. Scary.

 

I covered one of the big ones where we had people in the newsroom who had kids who were students there.

I didn't have kids at the time, but covering that thing colossally fucked me up. I wrote two stories and contributed on another that day related to the shooting and to this day I don't know how any of us were able to do it. I walked outside to throw up once and there were several people in the newsroom who just lost their shit at random points during the day.

In the days that followed, we had writers from one of our sister papers come in to lend a hand and quite a few of them couldn't keep it together and this was a couple days after the incident.

It was fucking rough.

 

This from today .... next county over ....

Police say two Hawkins County teens studied the 1999 Columbine school shooting massacre and wanted to correct the mistakes made by those shooters for the purpose of maximizing the number of student and faculty deaths in their planned Volunteer high School massacre.

http://www.timesnews.net/article/9078056/hawkins-teens-ages-16-and-17-accused-of-planning-mass-school-shooting

 

Good God... If they read the Columbine book they would probably know everything they could possibly need to. That's really scary.

 

You know, it's times like these where my resolve to uphold privacy starts to waiver.

My biggest fear in life was my death would be causes by someone else, not necessarily murder, but someone doing something stupid. Ever since I've had kid, that fear has tripled, except them instead of me. You can raise your kid to be a saint but that doesn't mean the next parent did. And even if they did, the kid could simply be evil.

If it's one student or 20, if that student is yours, does it matter what the body count is?