Jeez, I hope nothing like this happens in Iraq :

A National Guard F-16 fighter plane mistakenly fired off 25 rounds of ammunition at the Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School in South New Jersey on Wednesday night.

The pilot was meant to fire the rounds some 3 1/2 miles away at a military target range, Lt. Col. Roberta Niedt of the New Jersey Department of Military and Veterans Affairs told reporters in the Jersey shore township’s police headquarters.

No one was injured as school was out and a lone custodian was inside the building when the bullets hit.

Damage was minimal as the non-exploding, 20 millimeter bullets left only puncture marks in the school’s roof and the asphalt outside the building.

Oh wait….this already happens in Iraq :

The U.S. military is fighting perhaps the most accurate air war in history, with most of the 8,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles loosed on Iraq blasting their intended targets.

But “precision” weapons also miss. Human and mechanical errors send 10 percent or more astray, Pentagon and civilian experts say – a disastrous percentage for civilians living near the intended targets.

“No weapons system is foolproof,” said Lt. Cmdr. Charles Owens, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Qatar. “We’ll always have one or two that go off target.”

Some of the dozens of Iraqi civilians killed and wounded may have fallen victim to American precision weapons that, for reasons of mechanical failure or human error, struck homes, markets or city streets rather than military targets.

“Statistically, several hundred of those have missed to some degree,” said Rob Hewson, editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons.
. . .
“If you’re going to use cruise missiles, you’re going to have ones coming down where they’re not supposed to,” said David Isby, a private missiles and munitions consultant in Washington, D.C. “This isn’t a scandal for long-range operations. It’s to be expected.”

And that’s an article from a year and a half ago. If you look at our 10% failure rate, the prospect of 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians doesn’t seem so implausible, does it? Now that we’re hitting American schools too, maybe it would be a good time to shed new light on that virtually-ignored statistic from last week. Y’know, it’s hard to win the Iraqis’ hearts and minds when you’re blowing up their children’s arms and legs (the ones lucky enough to survive, that is).