”
I know exactly where I was when …
”
The first time I heard anyone say that was when my mother told
me about the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Over the years I’ve learned everyone has at least one of these
stories. … Who doesn’t have a 9/11 story to tell?
“I know exactly where I was when …”
The first time I heard anyone say that was when my mother told me about the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Over the years I’ve learned everyone has at least one of these stories. … Who doesn’t have a 9/11 story to tell?
I know exactly where I was on April 20, 1999, the day of the Columbine High School shootings.
I was walking down the hall of a dormitory at the University of Northern Colorado, noticing that every television in every room was tuned to the same channel until I reached my friends’ room and saw just what the fuss was about – an unthinkable act of violence.
And that’s exactly why I find it inconceivable that the parents of four Morgan Hill kids find it to be “no big deal” after the youngsters came within a split-second of being shot for running around with replica guns near a school April 26, less than a week after the five-year Columbine anniversary.
I know where I was April 20, 1999, because I spent the first five years of my life growing up in Littleton, Colo. I graduated from a school 20 minutes away in the same school district a little less than a year before. I learned to ride a bike and played with kids that may have been there on that day. I played high school football and baseball games at Columbine High School
And, if my family hadn’t move just 20 minutes north to Arvada, my two younger brothers, one a junior and the other a senior at the time, more than likely would have been in that high school the day two angry students killed 13 of their peers.
In the weeks, months and even years after the Columbine shootings, we heard time and again about the failures in seeing the tell-tale warnings signs and even the last-minute decisions that could have put a stop to such a horrible act.
That’s why I congratulate the Morgan Hill Police Department for the amazing way that they defused the situation in Morgan Hill, where four kids were playing with all-too-realistic guns at Jackson Park. In a situation where any false move could cost lives, officers with fingers on the triggers of their own guns didn’t fire.
It could have gone the other way.
Interim Police Chief Bruce Cumming and Mayor Dennis Kennedy are not blowing the incident out of proportion when they say that officers came within a fraction of a second of shooting. When there’s no orange markings indicating replica guns are not real, there’s no way for police officers to make the distinction between harmless play and the next Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold killing innocent people.
The parents of these children, not to mention other parents whose children play with toy guns, need to make sure they’re properly marked with federally mandated orange markings police use to identify them as replicas. Better yet, go buy them toy guns that never would be associated with a real gun, like Supersoakers and other water pistols.
That way, in five or 10 years, no one around here will be saying, “I know where I was when it happened
here …”
