A Gun Sick Society Puts Nickel Mines on the Map

Nickel Mines is a tiny town tucked into the rolling hills of southeastern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The land around it, farmed by the Amish for the last 150 years, is some of the most beautiful and fertile anywhere in the world. The sharp eyed will notice something different about the fieldstone, brick and clapboard farmhouses, barns and milking sheds. There are no TV antennas or satellite dishes and no power lines, no automobiles or hulking John Deere tractors. The Amish, who plow their fields with draft horses and get around in horse-drawn buggies, aren't called the Plain People for nothing.

Nickel Mines is a relative hop, skip and jump from Kiko's House and I know the area well. While housing developments, outlet stores and strip malls have proliferated throughout much of Lancaster County, the broad swath of so-called Pennsylvania Dutch country remains pretty much as it has been for decades.

As characterized by the terrific movie "Witness," the Amish mind their own business despite the stares and intrusions of the outside world. (I often have passed the telephone booth used by Harrison Ford, the Philadelphia detective who knows too much, in the movie and know of the farm where much of it was filmed.)

But on Monday morning, Gun Sick America met the Plain People with a bloody roar.

A sicko by the name of Charles C. Roberts, armed with a powerful 9-millimeter handgun, 12-gauge shotgun, rifle, two knives and a stun gun, parked his pickup truck and walked across a cornfield and into the one-room West Nickel Mine Amish School.

Police say Roberts ordered the 11 girls, ages 6 to 13, to line up facing a blackboard and lashed their legs together with wire and plastic ties. He released the boys and female adults. When state police arrived, Roberts had barricaded the doors with bolts and lumber he had brought in his truck, and after a brief cellphone exchange with his wife and then police, he began shooting, aiming the handgun and shotgun at the children as they stood in front of the room. When the police charged the building, Roberts blew his brains out.

As of this writing, five girls are dead and six wounded. Several are in extremely critical condition.

Police are looking into the possibility that Roberts, a 32-year-old milk truck driver, was harboring an old grudge. Some people who knew him said he was mad at God. I don't give a damn what his motive may have been, but it is important to note that Roberts apparently bought each piece of his arsenal legally. (I happened to blog on Pennsylvania's laughable gun laws just last week.)

Yes, people get killed in gun violence in other countries, but the slaughter at Nickel Mines is uniquely American and the third fatal school shooting in several days. In this instance, the victims happened to be an especially gentle people who are taught to turn the other cheek.

Guns and school shootings. As American as apple pie.

(Photograph by Mike Mergen/Bloomberg News)