Kelly School and the deranged shooter.

In my high school days Kelly School would have been two baseball throws from my house. I couldn't hit worth a damn but I could throw long and straight, freakishly able to hit home plate from right field 6 times out of 10. Now I could hit the side of the barn if I was about 10 feet away.

I didn't discover Kellyt until a year after we had lived here for a while because it is tucked down and away over a bluff behind our house. It would have been a lot easier for us to send our daughter to that school but instead she went to Magnolia about a mile away. Magnolia sits next to the JR High and High School so we knew where it was and we assumed that was the closest school.

I got to know Kelly a little bit better when the made it our poling place.

It is a neighborhod that was develped 40 years ago for small dwellings and sold mainly to marines that were retiring from Camp Pendleton about 10 miles away. Later model houses were more upscale. It is a more conservative nitch of a moderate Republican area.

It became the latest footnote of gun violence last week.

We now know what the gunman was saying after he jumped the 4 foot fence as he was on his way to take as many children's lives as he could.

"Kill Obama and kill all the little f***" is what he told the school monitor whose life was saved when the deranged gunman was unable to discharge any bullets because a casing became stuck in the chamber.

Prosecutors say that he had a well planned mission for that day with speed loaders, ammunition and gas cans. If his gun was fully operative more children, the school monitor and the Good Samritans would all have been likely victims. Prosecutors indicate that was only his first stop.

It may be some time before we learn just how unstable he was. By that time Kelly Elementary School will be long forgotten outside of the area. And yet it could have been different it could have become ground zero in heated up campaign to stir hatred of Gays, of the President, of Muslims and Hispanics. A large body count and every person in the US would have remembered its name.

It passes, routines are re-established but troubling questions remain. Did the incitement to hatred and the overblown rhetoric of Limbaugh, Beck, Fox News set this guy off? Will it set the next guy off? The irony is that I suspect that neighborhood is better than average for Fox News and for normal healthy adults it doesn't drive them to homicide. But I wonder if when those that watch the 'angry white man' news they can draw the line between the point A "Professional Angry White Man" and point B "Unstable Man going over the edge of sanity and shooting at their daughters". I wonder if they will ponder that the Hispanic construction workers who stopped the shooting had a reasonable percentage chance of being 'undocumented' and also objects of hate by Fox and the other merchants of hatred on the right.

The distance between those points is so close that now even I could hit with a baseball 10 times out of 10.

Details here:

http://www.10news.com/news/25362135/detail.html