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As of this writing, it has been nine days since the shooting at Virginia Tech, and the nation is still coming to terms with the tragic loss of 32 students at the hands of a psychotic killer. Those close to the victims and the gunman, as well as people across the world, have responded with utter disbelief. “Shock” is the word that seems most used in news stories. We simply cannot believe something like this could happen in, of all places, a school. The shock and disbelief are surprising, really, considering how many times we have seen similar incidents played out on the evening news. Though school massacres are, on the whole, quite uncommon, they are far from unprecedented.
One of the earliest known school massacres on American soil occurred nearly 250 years ago. On July 26, 1764, four Delaware Indian warriors raided a schoolhouse in what is now Franklin County, Pennsylvania. They shot and scalped the schoolmaster, Enoch Brown, then tomahawked and scalped the children, killing at least nine. Two of the children survived the attack.
The deadliest school massacre in American history took place in Bath, Michigan. Andrew Kehoe, a school board member who was upset about a property tax levied to build the school, used explosives to kill himself and 45 people, most of them children in the second through sixth grades. The year was 1927.
In Houston, Texas—1959—Paul Orgeron, approached a teacher at Poe Elementary School and detonated a suitcase bomb, killing six people, including himself and his own son. Just seven years later in Austin, Texas—August 1, 1966—Charles Whitman, a mentally unstable ex-marine, murdered his mother and his wife, then climbed University of Texas at Austin’s 27-floor tower with an arsenal of weapons and barricaded himself in the observation deck. He shot and killed 15 people on the campus below, wounding 31 before police stormed the observation deck and shot him numerous times.
In 1976, Edward Charles Allaway, a custodian at California State Fullerton, shot nine of his fellow workers, killing seven. Then in 1979, sixteen-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer gunned down eight children and two adults as they arrived at the school across the street from her house. When interrogated by police, Spencer boasted: “It was just like shooting ducks in a pond.” |
Violent Crime 
