© Ken Shockey/Antrim-Allison MuseumEnoch Brown and his students are memorialized at this Antrim Township site in Franklin County.
School shootings are gruesome and, unfortunately, are nothing new to America. The
Enoch Brown school massacre predates the invention of the original Colt revolver by 70 years. But as far as mass-murder goes, no school attack comes close to the Bath School disaster of 1927.
Everything started when Andrew Kehoe, a Michigan school board treasurer,
killed his wife and blew up his farm with dynamite, which detonated simultaneously with explosives he planted at the nearby Bath Consolidated School.
The crazy Andrew Kehoe looks like a man without problems.
As rescue workers arrived on the scene, Kehoe pulled up in a truck filled with even more explosives and blew himself up, killing the rescuers as well. In total,
58 people were injured and 45 killed - as many fatal victims as Columbine and Virginia Tech combined. He had just killed 1/6th of the population of Bath Township, a tiny village of 300 resident in Michigan.
House of Kehoe before and after the dynamite blast.
Bath school building after the bombing.
But subsequent investigations showed that the massacre could have been a lot worse, as additional charges had been planted in the school.
Explosives recovered from under the school, which Kehoe also planned to detonate.
Apparently, Kehoe was upset about high taxes, losing his town clerk
election, and, oh yeah, he was f**king nuts.
So who are the real nut jobs?