Mo. Amish react to school shooting

[Note: this story has been modified since its original posting.]

Word-of-mouth let the Amish community in mid-Missouri know of the school shooting Monday in Pennsylvania.

“The way things are going on in this world, you would never wish them back,” said an Amish woman who sells quilts and rugs out of her home in rural Audrain County, north of Columbia.

After shooting 10 girls, five of them fatally, the shooter, a milk truck driver well known in the Nickel Mines, Penn., community, killed himself.

The Audrain County artisan heard the news from an Amish neighbor, who heard the news from a person who lives outside the close-knit community. At first, the woman tried to shield her grandchildren from it, but couldn’t.

“God is taking children because the world is so terrible,” said the woman, who is in her 60s.

The woman spoke with a reporter the day after the tragedy in Lancaster County. The Columbia Missourian has agreed not to identify the Amish people in this story because it goes against their traditions and religious convictions.

“By identifying themselves for something that would be published in the paper, this puts them on too high of a pedestal,” said Joel Hartman, an associate professor emeritus of rural sociology at MU. “This is a cardinal sin of pride.”

The Amish are a conservative Christian group that broke from the Anabaptists in the late 1600s. Today, they live mainly in the United States and Canada in rural areas.

Typically not owning most modern appliances such as televisions, they keep to themselves in large part to follow Jesus’ call to be in the world but not of it.

Hartman, who grew up in Lancaster County and has taught a course on the Amish since 1972, said between 4,000 and 5,000 Amish live in Missouri.

On Tuesday, a retired Amish farmer who was approached outside his home, also in rural Audrain County, and said he had heard about the school shooting from his son-in-law on Monday.

He said that later he went into Clark, the largest town in the area, and was surprised to see the story in the afternoon paper — surprised the news had traveled so quickly. He bought a copy and took it home to his family.

“Well, a lot are things going on in this world, you wouldn’t think the Lord would let it happen,” the farmer, 72, said.

“But there is a reason. There is a lot of evil in the United States.”

While he spoke, three grandchildren who had been playing nearby stopped to listen. Because one boy is in his first year of school, he could make out some of the English words; the other two, who are younger, speak only Pennsylvania German.

Soon, other members of the family came from inside the house and other parts of the farm, full of questions:

“How many are dead now?”

“What did he have against the Amish?”

“What made him do this?

“Was he married? And did he have kids?”

“Why did he make the boys go outside?”

The farmer said the news was a shock for the whole community.

“It will be years before we more or less forget it,” he said.

However, he explained that although it is a sad event for the Amish community in Lancaster County, it does not have the same effect on the community near Clark.

Hartman said the Amish see death as a part of life and the community would grieve together.

“Life has many unfortunate aspects, and their general orientation to these is simply to accept them and move forward,” Hartman said. “There will not be much looking back.”

He said some of the parents of the girls who were killed will probably visit the wife and children of the man who killed them.

“This is the way they are,” Hartman said, “because they know that she and the children are suffering, too, and so they will support them.”