The online headline in the New York Times was pretty shocking: “School Shooting in Kentucky Was Nation’s 11th of Year. It Was Jan. 23.”
School shootings are a gravely serious matter, so it surprised us to learn that there have already been 11 in 2018. The shooting in question took place in Benton, but the Times story began with a survey of some of the others: “On Tuesday, it was a high school in small-town Kentucky. On Monday, a school cafeteria outside Dallas and a charter school parking lot in New Orleans. And before that, a school bus in Iowa, a college campus in Southern California, a high school in Seattle. Gunfire ringing out in American schools used to be rare, and shocking. Now it seems to happen all the time.”
The print headline was only slightly less sensational: “School Gunfire Every Other Day.”
Golly.
We hadn’t heard about all these shootings, and since the Times online editors helpfully supplied hyperlinks to the stories from Iowa, Southern California, and Seattle, we checked them out. From Iowa: “Police in north-central Iowa say no children were hurt when a window of their moving school bus was shot out.” The window shattered, according to the local newspaper, “after being hit by a shot from a pellet gun.” From Southern California: “Shots were reported on the Cal State San Bernardino campus on Wednesday night, canceling classes, forcing students and staff to shelter in place and prompting a search by law enforcement for potential evidence. No injuries were reported.” And from Seattle: “A bullet was fired into New Start High School Thursday, but no one was injured, the King County Sheriff’s Office said. The ‘round entered office window and lodged in a three-ring binder,’ the sheriff’s office tweeted.”
We don’t want to minimize the danger of gunfire, but there were no arrests made in any of the linked stories. Nor were there any injuries, unless you count the three-ring binder. The story from the San Bernardino Sun doesn’t make it completely clear that there even were any shots fired. As for the pellet gun and the broken school bus window, “police say they know who is responsible for the shooting and believe it was an isolated incident.” That must be a great relief to area residents.
America has come a long way since 1952, when E. B. White in Charlotte’s Web could tell us that Avery Arable grabbed a doughnut and a gun on the way out the door to catch the school bus. Nowadays the bus would be surrounded by a SWAT team and young Avery hauled off to juvenile court.
In another sense, though, we wonder if 2018 is really so different from a half-century or a century ago. We suspect that if the mischief wrought by a pellet-gun-wielding rascal could count as a “school shooting” back then—and if major newspapers had desperately scoured the nation’s news reports in search of anything resembling a campus gunfight—we’d find that ours is a much more peaceful time than we often suppose. More angst-ridden, but more peaceful.
A Parking Spot of One’s Own
We’ve all seen parking places designated for the handicapped and for expectant mothers, but leave it to China to take that trend to a new and controversial level.
It seems that a handful of new parking spaces at gas stations in Zhejiang province have been marked for female drivers only. The spaces are 10 and a half feet wide (one and a half times the usual width) and are marked with a large black stiletto heel logo on a pink background.
The Australian Broadcasting Corp. reports that “the purpose of the spaces has been hotly debated on Chinese social media site Sina Weibo, with many netizens saying they reinforce the stereotype that women are bad drivers while others say it is a considerate design.” The new spaces “join a growing number of extra-large designated women parking spots being unveiled around the country.”
South Korea, the network reports, also has women-only parking spaces, “outlined in pink and marked with a pink skirt-wearing figure.” (The question of where to park one’s automobile is presumably not an issue in neighboring North Korea.)
Of course, women have it rough in China. The country has 34 million more males than females because of a longstanding preference for boys when the government cruelly limited couples to one child. Maybe the new parking spaces are a respite from an overabundance of aggressive male drivers.
