David McElroy

When I first heard about the shooting at a high school in Ohio Monday morning, my mind immediately went back to the shootings at Columbine High School near Denver almost 13 years ago. I wonder if this incident will ignite the same hysterical reaction as the one that followed the Columbine tragedy.

In the shooting at Chardon High School, just outside of Cleveland, a lone student apparently came to the school cafeteria Monday morning and fired four or five shots. The student was someone who other students described as an outcast, someone who might have been the victim of bullying.

Roughly 1,200 students and their parents spent the rest of the day being grateful they weren’t directly affected by the shooting — such as the student and her father above — but a few families weren’t so fortunate. Two students died and three others are wounded.

After the Columbine shooting in 1999, there was a renewed push to make guns harder to own. There was also a huge and very expensive push to install metal detectors and upgrade security at schools all over the country. Schools that had been relatively open to their communities because more like fortresses in some cases. Why? Because every administrator was scared that his school system might one day be the site of another random fluke of violence — so every one of them went overboard to show parents that everything was being done to protect their children.

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We’ve experienced some technical difficulties today that knocked the site off the air for nearly an hour this morning and then just briefly a bit later.

If you had trouble accessing the site during that period, I’d like to apologize and assure you that the monkeys and I are doing everything we can to keep the problem from happening again.

I would explain the technical details of what happened, but that might embarrass a certain poor monkey who really didn’t mean to do anything bad when he pushed the button that was labeled, “Do not push this button under any circumstances.” He won’t be getting any extra bananas for dessert tonight, though.

When former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke launched an organization 30 years ago called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, everyone loudly said that it was racist for such an organization to exist.

I had been raised with very liberal attitudes about race, so Duke’s group held no appeal for me, but I was quietly puzzled anyway. Why was it racist for whites to have an organization that pursued things they perceived to be in their best interests, but it was noble and right for blacks to have the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to advance their interests?

I didn’t say anything at the time, partly because I didn’t want to support an admitted racist and partly because I didn’t want to ask a question that polite people clearly didn’t ask. But it was my first realization that standards of what was acceptable are very different depending on what your skin color is.

I was reminded of that again Sunday when I saw some video from Barack Obama’s campaign announcing the launch of African Americans for Obama. (See video below.) Can you imagine the formation of White People for Ron Paul or European Americans for Mitt Romney? Representatives of the black “civil rights industry” would be frothing at the mouth to denounce them. People in the media would be apoplectic with righteous rage. Everybody would denounce such groups for white people as racist. So why is it acceptable when a black politician does it?

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