Friday, October 06, 2006

The first school shooting

Only it was far worse than that.

In the past I have written about London's first suicide bomber and the first car bomb. Now Mark Ames on Comment is Free points us towards the extraordinary story of the Bath School disaster.

As Wikipedia records:
The Bath School disaster was a series of bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, USA, on May 18, 1927, which killed 45 people and injured 58. Most of the victims were children in second to sixth grades attending the Bath Consolidated School. The bombings constituted the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history, claiming more than three times as many victims as the Columbine High School massacre.

The perpetrator was school board member Andrew Kehoe, who was upset by a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of the school building. He blamed the additional tax for financial hardships which led to foreclosure proceedings against his farm. These events apparently provoked Kehoe to plan his attack.

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