Be alert, not afraid

A rash of recent headlines would scare any parent or grandparent. “College shooter showed rage, no motive.” “Hostage horror.” “Lancaster school shooting: The awful truth.”

In Montreal, a 25-year-old man whose favorite video game was Columbine Massacre killed a college student and injured 19 other people before turning the gun on himself. In a Colorado school near Columbine, a drifter took six girls hostage and sexually assaulted some of them before killing one and himself. In a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, a milk-truck driver fatally shot five Amish girls before taking his own life.

Sadly, there are more. A 19-year-old in North Carolina fired shots outside his former high school; a 15-year-old in Wisconsin killed his principal with a gun taken from his parents’ bedroom; and a 26-year-old went to the elementary school where his ex-girlfriend taught and became another murder-suicide shooter.

It’s enough to prompt a family to try home-schooling.

That is an understandable impulse. But any parents who see safety as the reason to pull their children out of school should make sure to avoid the mall, the movie theater and Sunday rides to grandma’s house.

School shootings are like plane crashes: They garner a lot of attention, but you are more likely to have a fatal mishap on the drive to the airport than in your seat. About 40,000 Americans die each year in car crashes; thousands more die from the flu. The odds of a school shooting remain rare, even if they’ve grown more frequent of late.

We in Butte County got a wakeup call this week. Oroville school administrators put Las Plumas High on lockdown Monday morning after students saw a man with a handgun seated in his car at the front of the campus. Deputies took the 18-year-old into custody at a nearby store. No shots were fired.

Vigilance and quick response may well have prevented a tragedy. Those qualities, more than isolationism, are the best ways to keep our children safe.