BRENDA BLAGG: Westside to Parkland

Arkansas introduced to mass school shootings 20 years ago

A schoolyard shooting ended the lives of an Arkansas teacher and four students 20 years ago this week.

Ten more were injured as two of their Westside Middle School classmates ambushed them from an overlooking hillside just outside of Jonesboro.

These were children shooting at children and adults they knew and who knew them.

One of the shooters had pulled a fire alarm beforehand, causing dozens to flood out of the school and into the field of fire.

The young shooters, one 13 years old and the other 11, used multiple firearms in what remains Arkansas' only mass school shooting to fit the FBI criteria of a single incident in which a shooter kills four or more people.

It was, of course, one mass shooting too many. They all are.

Reporting in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette recently took readers back to that bloody schoolyard.

What was inexplicable then remains inexplicable now. These were senseless murders of girls, two of them aged 11 and two more who were 12, and a 32-year-old teacher.

This remembrance comes, however, in a changed environment.

On Saturday, which is coincidentally the actual 20th anniversary of the Westside shootings, American youth plan a nationwide March for Our Lives.

Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School will lead a march on Washington, D.C., in what is projected to be one of the biggest youth protests since the Vietnam War.

Seventeen students and adults died at the Parkland, Fla., school on Valentine's Day. More were injured.

Ever since, students there have mobilized to lead their peers across the nation, demanding safer schools and stronger gun control laws.

Surprisingly, they actually got action from Florida state lawmakers and their governor within weeks of the mass shooting on their campus.

It wasn't all the students wanted, but it was progress. And it was accomplished in remarkably little time.

Last week, students at Arkansas high schools joined hundreds of thousands of students across the U.S. who walked out of classes in a common protest.

"Enough is enough," they proclaimed, showing support for the Parkland students and demanding action from state and federal lawmakers to end the violence.

What were planned as 17-minute observances one month after the Parkland shootings often lasted longer.

In Arkansas, some of the protesting students faced discipline for leaving their classes but did so anyway.

All of these young people were born since the Westside shootings. They are the generation who have that has practiced what are sometimes called "bad man" drills their entire school lives, being taught to fear, even to expect, shooters in their schools.

As one Fayetteville student demonstrator's sign said, what happened at Parkland "could have been here."

It did happen at Westside and Columbine and Sandy Hook and so many other schools and colleges across the nation.

Even on Tuesday, there was another school shooting, this one in Maryland. Two students were shot; the gunman is dead.

The current focus is what is happening in the schools. But violence is violence, however and wherever it occurs.

For the record, according to the Democrat-Gazette's reporting, another nine shooting incidents on Arkansas school and college campuses in the last 40 years left others dead or injured, too.

Their lives were tragically lost or altered, just as were the Westside victims' or the victims of off-campus violence in some bucolic Arkansas hamlet or on the mean streets of some big city somewhere.

Enough is enough.

This weekend, the nation's young people -- and their many supporters -- will send another message to the nation's leaders to do something.

Will the leaders hear them now?

Pity those who don't.

Commentary on 03/21/2018

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