West Paducah

So the first one was on October the 1st, 1997, an 11th grader at Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi, killed his mother, then went to school where he killed two people and wounded seven others.

Two months later, two months of the day later actually, on December the 1st, 1997, a freshman at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, opened fire at a prayer group meeting before school, killing three people and wounding six.

We've covered this one in the past, and we'll be covering this again a little bit later in this show.

On March the 24th, 1998, two students at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, our old buddy Dave Grossman's hometown... pulled a fire alarm and opened fire on classmates and teachers as they fled the school, killing five people and wounding ten others.

And so going back, the other thing about this is, like I said, there are these other school shootings that gain media attention that involve these relatively affluent, predominantly white, middle and upper class schools during this stretch, going back from 1997 to 1999.

So there are these commonalities, and people talk about these kinds of influences, like what Andy read.

However, there were two major factors that made the events of April the 20th, 1999 different from earlier school shootings in places like Pearl, Mississippi, West Paducah, Kentucky, Jonesboro, Arkansas, or Springfield, Oregon.

The first was the disproportionately high body count.

Was there ever another Lone Oak Baptist of any variation that required us to draw distinction in the firstness? No.

Not in Paducah.

Not in Paducah.

There is other Lone Oak Baptist churches.

Okay.

What's up? Let me tell you about the job we did on Bobo Road.

Bobo Road.

Where about is that? West Paducah.