Two Shooting Victims Die Of Injuries

Rodger Bluml, the adoptive male parent of this post, died yesterday after succumbing to injuries sustained in the violent encounter he had on November 15 with one of the boys he adopted, Anthony Bluml. Anthony and his mother, Kisha Schaberg, along with two other accomplices, remain jailed in Kansas while they await trial. The prosecuting attorney intends to amend the charges against both of them to include two charges of premeditated murder, rather then one. Rodger Bluml's wife, Melissa Bluml, died of a gunshot wound on November 15. In charging Kisha Schaberg with the same crime as Anthony Bluml, who allegedly pulled the trigger, and setting her bond at twice the amount as Anthony's, Kansas stubbornly refuses to see the devastating results, for everyone involved, of disrupting families. Kansas also sends a very arrogant message to all biological mothers whose children have been adopted by others. Did those who grab children from vulnerable parents and auction them off to the highest bidders ever take the time to warn Rodger and Melissa Bluml of the bond and love that usually exists between natural parents and their children? The Blumls did not have natural children, so there was no way they could have known or understood. Were the Blumls warned that even though Kisha was not as financially secure or as privileged as they were in life, they could expect the children and their mother to remember each other for the rest of their lives? The expectation that a state can step in and decide that children and their parents are no longer allowed to love one another is very dangerous. Could the rage projected at the Blumls have been predicted, and possibly prevented? While this violent crime is very sad, it may be a sign of things to come more often in places where children are treated as commodities by courts and government agencies.

The second update is that seventeen year old Clair Davis, of Colorado, has died. On December 14 she was shot by another student, Karl Pierson, at Arapahoe High School, in a fit of rage that reportedly lasted for about eighty seconds. Pierson followed this up by shooting himself. He apparently had a problem with the librarian at his school, and there was no known connection between him and his victim. There has been a certain amount of debate lately concerning guns and public schools, and a few states have even legalized the carrying of firearms in schools by adult employees of the schools. It would appear that an unaddressed issue in this unintelligently written law change is the loophole created by adult students.....those whose eighteenth birthdays happen to fall before high school graduation and who are, as a result, able to purchase shotguns while they are still in high school. Since teaching and law enforcement are two very different career choices, and since many teachers are not trained soldiers or perfect marksmen, it really seems that schools are better off investing in metal detectors, rather than allowing guns on their premises. While there are expenses involved with the installation of metal detectors, the cost invested would be considerably smaller than a lawsuit, or multiple lawsuits, and the resulting inflation of a school's liability insurance. Most of Kansas public schools were unable to get insurance before school started this year because teachers are allowed to carry guns to school. A teacher with a gun would probably not have been able to save Clair Davis from Karl Pierson's eighty second temper tantrum, but had there been a metal detector in place at Arapahoe High, she might not have been shot.
 

Wrong Place At Wrong Time In Colorado

Clair Davis was in the "wrong place at the wrong time", according to Greyson Robinson, of the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office in Colorado. Yet, the public school she attends is in the same district as her home, and the day she was shot by her fellow student, Karl Halverson Pierson, she was exactly where she was supposed to be....in school. Why would going to school involve the need to worry about escaping a deranged shooter? Why can't her parents correctly assume that their daughter is safe when she is where she is supposed to be during the day....in school?

Karl Halverson Pierson was where he was supposed to be, too. The item that was not where it was supposed to be was the shotgun he took to school with him. Oh; the Molotov cocktails in his backpack didn't belong in school either, but at least Pierson didn't blow anything up. Why do some Americans have so much trouble recognizing who was in the right place or in the wrong place at any time? Clair Davis has every right to be in school, where she was; and she has every right to expect to be in the right place, school, at the right time, without  getting shot. Especially by an adult classmate who had a right to buy a shotgun. Is it really too hard to ask that guns not be brought to school?

The 2013-2014 school began on an awkward note in Kansas because no one seems to know where to draw the line concerning guns and schools. In July of this year, Kansas decided that teachers and other school employees could take concealed weapons with them to work. The insurance company that underwrites policies for about ninety percent of the public schools in Kansas decided against that type of risk. If no one else wants to look at the possibilities of a random adult working inside of a school not being a perfect marksman, or lacking the training to determine when to use deadly force against your children and mine, at least the insurance company does! And well they might; they are deeply vested in the bottom line, not the popularity contest we call "small town atmosphere". Pierson was an adult, as was Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook, in Connecticut last year. Adults with deadly weapons may actually be a bigger problem, from an insurer's standpoint, than children with deadly weapons.

It's a sobering reality when a school, of all places, becomes the "wrong place at the wrong time" to the extent that the school cannot even purchase liability or other types of insurance. We can't protect our children from everything, but don't they deserve to be in school, and in the right place at the right time, safely?