In March 1937, 295 students and teachers died
in a natural gas explosion in a Texas school
When students in school die, the community, the state and the country search for and find ways to keep their kids safe--except when the kids are killed with guns.
In 1937 a Texas school exploded, killing 295 teachers and students. Odorless natural gas was blamed for the tragedy. No one in the school could smell the leaking gas before the entire school disappeared in a huge explosion.
Almost immediately, grieving parents clamored for an answer to keep kids safe in the future. Politicians went to gas producers and demanded they make natural gas leaks detectable. The answer was gas odorants: compounds make gas smell so bad that the slightest leak would be detectable by anyone. These sulfur and nitrogen-based compounds smell so bad that most people can detect them at concentrations of less than one part per million. Sensitive folks can detect odorants at the parts per billion level.
Problem solved in less than a year, not only for Texas, but for the entire nation.
Today, 80 years later, Texas kids are killed and wounded in schools and churches and politicians from the same state that solved a huge crisis in the 1930s will do nothing in 2018.
Politics, working together through government, can only solve a problem that we as a people want to solve. In the 1930s, the government and the people wanted to solve the problem that led to kids being killed in a natural gas explosion.
In the case of guns, millions of people think their right to own dozens of guns, including guns designed for war, trumps the right of kids in school to live until graduation. Their guns are more important than the right of teachers to simply teach, not die as a human shield for their students.
Texas during Jim Crow would not grant basic human rights to its non-white citizens, but could fight to protect kids in school. But today the Lt. Governor of Texas is saying doors, not guns, caused the death and wounding of twenty kids and teachers.
America will never be great, it won't even be good, until gun rights are sane again.
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