I found this news tidbit interesting:

My theory: BB gun.

When I was in high school, a guy at my high school shot a cheerleader with a BB gun.

I’m not kidding.  That sounds crazy.  Like, if that happened today, couldn’t you see the swat team coming in with their shields and whatnot?  And it being on CNN?  And then Gus Van Sant making a movie loosely based on it?

Nope.  Not in the early 90s.  The scenario was as such: my friend’s brother and a few other classmates lived next to the staging area for the Homecoming parade.  One decided to shoot one of the cheerleaders (a girl universally decried by students as superlatively annoying) in the ear with a bb gun while they were waiting for their float to get going.  They succeeded and said cheerleader thought she was stung by a bee.  I don’t think anything really happened to her other than she had a bloody ear.   She still rode in the parade and everything. I actually don’t think much happened to the perps, either.  Maybe a few days suspension.

When said students were seniors, my friend’s brother was one of the editors of the school paper.  For their graduation issues, he wrote a hilarious recap of the infamous incident, which was published without much dissent.  The cheerleader was even quoted in the article.

I think about this now, and it seems absolutely insane.  Not only that it was a relatively-minor incident, but that it was epically and ironically documented in the school paper.  I’m experiencing cognitive dissonance, because the article was especially funny (writer is now a very successful professional journalist), the writer was somewhat legendary at our school (got Local H to play my high school in ‘94), the cheerleader in question was notoriously lame, and it just wasn’t that big of a deal at the time.  I still don’t think it was a big deal.  But if that happened today, that would be such a Big Deal.  Huge.  Possibly national news, if it was a slow day, definitely local news.  Can’t you see this being an overly-dramatic segment on Dateline?  With eyewitness accounts somberly relayed to a concerned-looking Ann Curry?  This wasn’t even local news in DES MOINES.  Like, “Eh.  Kids these days.  What’s a Homecoming parade without snipers?”   But I feel bad about fondly reminiscing on it.  I seriously sent a high school friend (the article writer’s brother) a Facebook message about it, and he responded like 98%  of people who remember the incident, including me, would have: “Hilarious.”

I guess times have changed.