Today, many of us will pause to remember the five Amish girls
who were murdered a year ago at a one-room schoolhouse in Nickel
Mines, Pa. Television crews will return to the community and
dutifully record Amish children walking to their new one-room
school, which looks a lot like the one torn down days after the
attack. But the new building has a steel door that locks from
the inside. And that makes all the difference. School shootings
are etched onto our collective psyche, each name signifying
another moment of unspeakable horror. Littleton, Colo.
Jonesboro, Ark. Springfield, Ore. And most recently, of course,
Virginia Tech. But Nickel Mines was different because of its
victims. For nearly a century, the Amish have symbolized simple
rural living and the security that came with it. When Charles
Carl Roberts took those Amish girls' lives, he took away this
feeling. The new Amish school represents our effort to reclaim
it, to return to an era before such mass murder. But the steel
door reminds us that we can't.