The latest senseless school shooting in Pennsylvania in what is invariably described as “a rash of school shootings,” as if calamine lotion were the solution, reminded me of another rash of school shootings, back in the late 1980s. This was long before Columbine, the mother of all school shootings that made us forget previous guns-and-playground episodes. In 1989 Patrick Edward Purdy, one of a rash of three-named-drifters-cum-mass-murderers, went to a shoolyard in Stockton, CA and opened fire on the kids playing there. Five died, and 29 more were injured.

Speculation at the time centered around the race of the victims, many of whom were Cambodian immigrants. Rumors did not fly as quickly in the days before the internet but I remember people saying Purdy was a vet, or had lost his job to some Asian. (Even in this instant media age, disinformation is the norm. Last week, one day after a drifter killed and molested some girls at a school in Colorado, a father told me he had heard the man found the kids on MySpace — completely false but an instant urban legend!)

Purdy was neither a vet nor disgruntled former employee; he was a moron with drug and alcohol problems and a car trunk full of automatic weapons. (He had inscribed the words “Hezbollah” and “freedom” on his rifle, while his jacket read “Death to the Great Satin,” presumably one of the Five Satins.) But he had also attended that school as a child and lord knows how that experience got twisted in his brain. Many of the schoolyard shooters had bad experiences at school; the Columbine killers seemed to put an exclamation mark on the new trend of kids who don’t wait twenty years to let their wounds fester.

Look for lots of Op-Eds and everything from permissive parenting to video games to be blamed again. School security will be increased, again, and the NRA will go into its default defensive posture before it goes back to handing out guns at roadside stands in North Carolina. President Bush has even threatened to get involved, though given his track record in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans you may want to tell your kids to duck.

The heartbreaking aspect of the Pennsylvania shootings, of course, is that those girls were Amish. It was a one-room schoolhouse, the kind Tom and Becky held hands in. Most amazingly, the Amish community has taken up money for the families of the victims — as well as the family of the man who did the killing. What Jesus had on tap is still stronger than dirt.