“I Don’t Like Mondays” -- The Boomtown Rats
We have the misfortune of inhabiting an era in which Americans value guns more than they do the lives of their children. According to the most recent data collected by the Center for Disease Control at the time of this writing, seven youngers on average, aged nineteen and below, are killed by firearms each day in the United States. Another 40 survive shootings.
Perhaps the most horrific of these shootings are those which occur in our schools. We think of schools as safe havens, places in which children are nurtured and cherished, insulated from the perils of a cruel world. Yet since 2013, the United States averages about one school shooting per year. The vast majority, thankfully, involve no fatalities. But sometimes the butcher’s toll is so high, so heartbreaking as to make sane nation rethink it priorities and options. But the United States is far from sane with respect to firearms.
Remember 14 December 2012? A deranged 20-year-old man entered Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered 20 six- and seven-year-old students as well as six staff members before turning his weapon on himself. The reaction was predictable. Public demands for sensible preventative measures arose -- universal background checks before firearm purchases and a ban on high-capacity magazines, for example. President Barack Obama assigned Vice-President Joe Biden to assemble an interagency gun-violence task force. Congress debates measures it had no intention of enacting.
Sandy Hook Elementary School:
Faces of the Victims
Predictably, the National Rifle Association, joined by the Republican Party and other firearm enthusiasts, responded by accusing those seeking to curb gun violence as being unconcerned for the lives of children. Instead, the organization claimed, those clamoring for background checks, “cooldown” periods following the purchase of handguns, or a prohibition on certain classes of firearms as exploiting the tragedy to undermine the NRA’s historical dubious and unsound interpretation of the Second Amendment. The true culprit, claimed many gun advocates, were violent video games. Others pointed to rap music. Christian gun owners frequently cited a lack of prayer in school as the primary cause of school shootings.
Photograph Taken Outside Sandy Hook Elementary School of a young woman,
later identified as Jillian Soto, seeking information on her sister, a teacher.
It was learned that 27-year-old Vicki Solo was among the slain,
shoot multiple times attempting to shield her students.
Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, presented the organization’s solution to school shootings in a press conference only seven days after the tragic massacre. The key to ending gun violence in schools, he perversely argued, is put more guns in schools. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Presumably, that would be a good guy with quick and certain marksmanship.
One of the most eloquent voices to be heard in this wasteland of ineffective hand-wringing and dishonest deflection was that of author John Scalzi:
Twenty children. Ages six, or seven.
And here maybe you think to yourself, this is it. This is the place and time where thoughts and prayers in fact aren’t enough, where those who only offer their thoughts and prayers recognize that others see them in their inaction, see that the convenient self-absolution of thoughts and prayers, that the magical abnegation thoughts and prayers offer, is no longer sufficient, is no longer proper, is no longer just or moral, or even offers the appearance of morality.
I offer my thoughts and prayers.
And it keeps going.
Actually, shootings within American schools have occurred throughout our entire national history: Long before students neglected their homework to play video games. Long before children were no longer required to recite prayers approved by government employees. Long before the advent of rap music. Indeed, school shootings occurred even in colonial times. But things have changed in the years since. Firearms are no long tools essential to an agrarian nation lacking an army and bordered by hostile powers. Rather, they have become a ubiquitous hammers for a people who view every problem as a nail, who see a monster hiding in every shadow, who think every stranger a likely predator: A people fearful of leaving their home without a device designed to take human life within easy reach, not only willing to shed blood but eagerly hoping for a pretext to kill. And firearms themselves have become increasingly more lethal and easier to obtain. In many states, the legal purchase of deadly firearms is simpler than registering to vote.
Enough of that. Let’s move on the the music. First a little background: The San Diego, California Grover Cleveland Elementary School shootings. (Not to be confused with the Stockton, California Grover Cleveland Elementary School shootings.)
Monday morning, 29 January 1979. Students are queuing at the doors of San Diego’s Grover Cleveland Elementary School waiting for admission when small caliber bullets began slicing through their lines. Panic ensues. Principal Burton Wragg and building supervisor Michael Suchar are killed while pulling children to safety. The shooter wounds eight children and a police officer responding to the emergency.
Memorial to the Sacrifice of Two Men
Slain While Saving the Lives of Children
Directly across the street from the school lived 16-year-old Brenda Spencer shared a hovel of a home her father. To say the young girl’s lifestyle was less than idyllic would be an understatement. Her home was populated with an astonishing number of empty alcohol containers while father and daughter slept on a single mattress deposited on the living room floor. Brenda had a history of misconduct including burglary and, more ominously, shooting out windows of the Grover Cleveland Elementary School with her BB gun. She had expressed a desire to shoot law enforcement officers. Only weeks before the shootings, she had been interviewed by mental health workers who urged she be hospitalized and treated for depression. Her father denied permission for treatment. Instead, he gave Brenda a .22 Long Rifle mounted with telescopic sights and 500 rounds of ammunition for Christmas. Alone in her home that morning, she trained her new rifle on the school yard and opened fire.
Brenda Spencer's Home at the Time of the Shootings:
The 16-Year-Old Fired from the Window in the Center of the Frame
While terrified students and staff huddled on the floors of Grover Cleveland Elementary School, Brenda Spencer barricaded herself within her home. When police negotiators sought to coax her into surrendering, the troubled youth jokingly informed them that her victims had made easy targets. Before giving herself up, Brenda spoke by phone with a reporter. When asked to explain her actions, she simply answered, “I don’t like Mondays.”
The Girl Who Does Not Like Mondays
Immediately Following Conviction
Irish singer/songwriter Bob Geldof was in Atlanta, Georgia when news of the shooting arrived:
I was doing a radio interview ... and there was a telex machine beside me. I read it as it came out. Not liking Mondays as a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was thinking about it on the way back to the hotel and I just said 'Silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload'. I wrote that down. And the journalists interviewing her said, 'Tell me why?' It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it.
I was doing a radio interview ... and there was a telex machine beside me. I read it as it came out. Not liking Mondays as a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was thinking about it on the way back to the hotel and I just said 'Silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload'. I wrote that down. And the journalists interviewing her said, 'Tell me why?' It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it.
“I Don’t Like Mondays” -- The Boomtown Rats
The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody's gonna go to school today
She's going to make them stay at home
And daddy doesn't understand it
He always said she was as good as gold
And he can see no reason
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be sure
Oh, oh, oh tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
I want to shoot
The whole day down
The Telex machine is kept so clean
As it types to a waiting world
And mother feels so shocked
Father's world is rocked
And their thoughts turn to their own little girl
Sweet sixteen ain't that peachy keen
Now, it ain't so neat to admit defeat
They can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need oh, woah
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
I want to shoot
The whole day down
Down, down
Shoot it all down
All the playing stopped in the playground now
She wants to play with her toys a while
And school's out early and soon we'll be learning
And the lesson today is how to die
And then the bullhorn crackles
And the captain tackles
With the problems and the how's and why's
And he can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to die, die
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like, I don't like, I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like, I don't like, (tell me why) I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
I want to shoot, the whole day down, uh, uh, uh
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