Posted by Frank James at 10:09 am CDT
Politico.com reports today that a spokesman in the office of Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican and presidential candidate, has corrected journalists who have described the Virginia Tech massacre as the worst in American education.
While it was evidently the worst shooting in terms of the numbers of victims, Tancredo’s spokesman said there was a horrible school attack in 1917 in Michigan by a rabid anti-tax attacker which had a higher death toll. The mass murderer back then used explosives.
The point being made by Carlos Espinosa, Tancredo’s spokesman, is that if gun-control advocates think they can blame guns for the worst massacre in a U.S. education setting, they’ve got another think coming.
Espinosa’s corrective probably won’t much slow the push by gun-control advocates for stricter legislation, however.
Here’s the Politico.com story by the aptly named reporter Ryan Grim:
The office of Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) would respectfully like to offer a correction. In fact, said Tancredo spokesman Carlos Espinosa, the worst school rampage occurred when an anti-tax zealot blew up a school in Bath, Mich., in 1927, killing around 40 children and a handful of adults, including himself. (Accounts of the death toll vary, but all reported a number larger than 33.)
“As far as U.S. school tragedies go, this isn’t the worst. I know it’s splitting hairs, but particularly Democrats and … the anti-gun people are saying that this proves that guns” are to blame for the massacre, Espinosa said. “And while it is a horrible tragedy that no one should ever have to experience, they shouldn’t be able to shape it into their own political agenda by covering up the facts.”
The facts to which Espinosa refers are these: On May 18, 1927, Andrew Kehoe, a school board member upset about a property tax increase, blew up the 250-student Bath Consolidated School, using hundreds of pounds of dynamite.
In 2000, The Associated Press interviewed a survivor and described a scene after the explosion: “Moments after the blast, Kehoe drove away in his dynamite-laden truck. He caught up to the school superintendent and fired his rifle into the truck, killing himself, the superintendent, two other adults and a child who had escaped the first explosion.”
A 2002 account in the local Lansing State Journal, provided by Espinosa, counts 46 dead — 38 children and seven adults, plus Kehoe.
Espinosa said he has been correcting reporters and is also ready with a rebuttal for gun control advocates who might want to use the Virginia Tech shootings — regardless of historical rank — as fodder for more gun control laws.
“One, he shouldn’t have had a gun on campus, and two, killing people is also illegal. Clearly, he had no intention of following the law to begin with,” Espinosa said.
As posters to the Politico.com article noted, anyone who claimed the Virginia Tech attacks are the worst in Amerian history would be wrong. The 9/11 attacks were obviously more vast and there were massacres of Indians that had more victims too. The comparisons are more accurately made within the terrible and thankfully small universe of school massacres. In that limited group, the atrocity cited by Tancredo’s spokesman may indeed be the worst.
