Quote of the Day
Today’s topic addresses a pet peeve, which is how every single time some human-shaped monster attacks a school in America, the resulting commentary heavily features the line: “This never happens anywhere else!!” Really? Nowhere else? In no other country, in the entire world.
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But here’s the linguistic game they play. Any time an incident involves a gun, it’s no longer a massacre. It’s a shooting. I insist on pushing back with that one. Of course they can say “it never happens elsewhere” if they make sure that it exclusively refers to only one specific type of massacre.
As for the argument that it makes the killing easier, therefore there will be more killings — that presumes some population of people who are a hair’s trigger away from killing everyone they see, but only stopped by the fact that they don’t have an “easy” way to do it. No, I argue that the important part is the line between “peace” and “killing”, and that once someone crosses that line, the weapon matters little.
Emma Hankins
October 17, 2025
guest post by Emma Hankins – According To Hoyt
She gives several examples, including her childhood in China, which disprove the assertion that “This never happens anywhere else!!” And, more importantly she offers some suggestions to deal with the fact, “Human beings are NOT SANE as a general rule and sometimes insanity leads to serious problems.”
There have been massacres in many countries in the world. Some were committed with guns, some with bombs, some with other deadly weapons. There have also been political assassinations in many countries, again using a variety of tools. Towards the end of the Russian empire, bombs were the stereotypical political assassin’s weapon. And in Holland in the past few decades there have been murders of a major politician as well as a controversial movie maker, shot and stabbed respectively.
Worst school massacre in the US was done with bombs back in the 1920s. Perp was a school board member.