The School Massacre Anniversary Everyone Forgot

This past weekend was a special anniversary. It marked the anniversary of the first school massacre in American history.

There were no touching op-eds calling for gun control to remember those slain. There were no vigils with burning candles, weeping people, and speeches about making sure such an atrocity never happened again.

None of that.

But July 26th was the anniversary of the Enoch Brown massacre.

What? You don’t remember the Enoch Brown massacre? That’s fine. You probably wouldn’t. It never made it on TV. CNN didn’t dedicate wall-to-wall coverage of it. The Washington Post didn’t profile the killers. It didn’t make any of the coverage you would have seen. A teacher and 10 students were slaughtered, and the cable news machine said nothing.

In the media’s defense, though, that’s because it happened in 1764.

During Pontiac’s War, four Delaware American Indians entered the Pennsylvania schoolhouse of schoolmaster Enoch Brown and killed him and almost all of his students. One survived, injured and scalped.

Many of the issues from that war are long gone and not worth bringing back up. Since then, the American colonies became the United States of America. We’ve fought all of our own wars since then, including more than a few with American Indians.

We’ve also seen school massacres; far too many to be comfortable with.

Some gun control advocates claim that part of the problem is that the guns we have today are far too deadly, that we need to restrict those weapons to prevent shootings like Parkland and Uvalde.

However, Enoch Brown and his charges were killed with flintlocks and clubs.

Because this was an act of war, even if it was what we’d consider a war crime today, I’m not going to ascribe evil intent to these killers. It was war, and it was war as they understood it. It was brutal, but so was tribal warfare in general, so I’m not getting into that.

But what I will say is that the four American Indians who carried out this attack–and they were believed to have been found, tried, and executed–didn’t need an AR-15 to slaughter so many people.

All they needed was a disarmed target and the will to kill.

Enoch Brown didn’t seem to have had a gun. In truth, even if he had, based on the technology of the time, he couldn’t have done a whole lot. Yet even then, all he could do was beg for the lives of his students, which fell on deaf ears.

Brown and his students were slaughtered.

They were all buried together in a common grave. Today, a monument stands there, and a park named after Brown surrounds it.

But most of us don’t know about the massacre.

We think of modern mass murders, and understandably so, and we debate whether or not laws could have stopped those horrific incidents from happening, but we also forget that murder has been around since the dawn of man. Get enough people together enough times, remove weapons from the group for whatever reason, and someone will decide to kill everyone there without a care in the world.

You’re never going to stop that by restricting the weapons.

If flintlocks and clubs could kill 11 people in a school, why would anyone think banning AR-15s would stop mass murders?

You’d think after 261 years, we might have figured that out.

Editor’s Note: Self-defense is a human right, and our right to keep and bear arms long predates the Constitution. 

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