Editorial: Looking for answers
Date: Oct 4, 2006 9:43 AM
PUBLICATION: The Chronicle-Herald
DATE: 2006.10.04
SECTION: Editorial
PAGE: A8
WORD COUNT: 436

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Looking for answers

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HOW do you rationalize the irrational? How do you prevent the seemingly
unpreventable?

Based on what’s known, it is difficult to fathom how anyone could have
predicted the horrific slaughter of innocent Amish schoolgirls in
Pennsylvania by a lone gunman on Monday morning. The killer, who then
took his own life, was a 32-year-year-old lifelong Christian with no
criminal record or outstanding warrants, no history of mental illness
and no connection with, or known complaint against, the Amish. Charles
Carl Roberts, in fact, was described by those who knew him as a
churchgoing, hardworking, normally jovial milk truck driver, and by his
wife as a loving husband and caring father of three young children.

Something obviously snapped within Roberts. His last conversation with
his wife, by cellphone while barricaded inside the school, along with
suicide notes he left at home, together pointed to a 20-year-old memory
of molesting young girls and a desire to do so again. Roberts apparently
was also still angry over the death of an infant daughter nine years
ago. The grisly result was the planned siege of a one-room schoolhouse
close to his home – picked, apparently, for its proximity, vulnerability
and availability of intended targets – which left five Amish girls dead
and five more in hospital, four in critical condition, with gunshot
wounds to the head and back. All had been separated from classmates,
bound and shot at close range. None, however, were sexually assaulted.

The Pennsylvania school shootings were the third in a week in the U.S.,
and come not long after a lone gunman stormed Dawson College in
Montreal, killing one student and injuring 20 more.

Federal U.S. authorities are now planning a summit on school violence
for next week, when education and law enforcement officials will discuss
ways to help communities prevent violence, as well as deal with its
results. It’s a worthy initiative and hopefully some practical ideas
will emerge, but short of draconian measures, schools – like so many
other avenues of our daily lives – can never be made 100 per cent safe
from people like Roberts. Many criticize the media’s massive coverage of
such incidents, saying it inspires others to commit similar crimes. But
not reporting is not a realistic, nor a desirable, option, either.

Sometimes there is no truly effective societal response, or defence,
against monstrous acts of aggression like these. The tragedy is that the
innocent almost always pay the price.