>Finally, one winter morning on the school bus, he turned on his tormentors. Curling his fingers in the shape of a pistol, he said, “I hope you all die.”
> Mike Carinci, the school resource officer — a member of the sheriff’s office who worked in the school — viewed and listened to hours of video from the bus, seeing the level of abuse directed daily at the student. “Just horrible things, like nonstop,” he said. Mr. Carinci summoned the students and told them that the bullying had to end. The superintendent told them that they could be suspended or expelled.
> The school traced the “hit list” rumor to a girl who admitted making it up. This quieted the community.
This article makes it sound like the only one who was punished was the victim of the bullying for his emotional outburst and everyone who picked on him got away unscathed. This seems similar to the recent Netflix miniseries Adolescence. Both the series and the discussion around it focused on the main character rather than the bullying that caused him to kill.
Exactly. They don’t even question how all this bullying went on for so long without any adults noticing or doing anything about it. For "horrible things, like nonstop" to be going on without anyone noticing or doing anything about it is absurd levels of negligence by the parents, teachers, and administrators. It should never have reached this point.
Bus drivers have to focus on driving safely. Expecting them to maintain bully free interactions among 20+ kids is absurd. Pay for an adult monitor on the bus.
Kids will find ways to harass each other: between classes, lunch times, recess, etc. Schools can probably do more, but I doubt they can fix bullying alone. And certainly not with the resources they're given today.
You know how women often don’t report sexual harassment and assault? It’s because if they do report it, they will suffer further victimization and their chances at any just outcome are too low.
Same thing with bullying in schools. Kids don’t report it because if they do so, they will be opening themselves up to further victimization, and the people they report it to will not take sufficient action to stop it.
All schools need to do is make it safe to report bullying, prioritizing the victim’s safety. Then with a report they don’t need blanket surveillance, they can just do targeted surveillance to verify the reports. Once verified, they should take immediate action to put a permanent stop to it.
I agree with the problem you identify. I was both a bully, and a bullied person at times during my school days. For me the bullying of me brought on the bullying by me, I feel.
I don't see any practical answers in your comment. Recognising schools should "makes it safe to report bullying" is one thing. How though? It seems entirely intractable - you seem to suggest blanket surveillance of all children everywhere?
The article does describe some of the subject's tormentors eventually apologizing to him, possibly more out of reflection and genuine remorse as opposed to being told to "Tell him you're sorry."
There should be consequences for bad behavior all around, but if one of the consequences is that a bully increases their level of compassion and self-regulation, it could allow the system to skip the punishment phase of creating consequences and still serve the goals of justice.
Also, while suspension for the subject sounds like a punitive and one-sided approach, he dreaded going to school and the suspension provided a mechanism to create an approach that would thoughtfully allow him and his tormentors to develop better behaviors.
Seriously. This whole article reads like people congratulating themselves for pathologizing this kid's behavior, while not actually doing much about the obvious cause of that condition. They say the kid was suspended, for making a hand gesture in response to bullying. Why weren't the bullies suspended, especially when the pattern of abuse became clear? Perhaps twice as long to send a clear message and let the victim reacclimate to the school when they're not getting bullied. Ultimately it seems like the school administration is still mainly concerned about things that might cause some problem for them, and so is quite content to let such situations fester until the victim reacts in a way for which they too can pile on.
For a while I was nodding along, being able to picture what occurred and understand how the adults dealt with it.
Then I realized these people were ~16 years old. Maybe it was an outlier? I looked up what the typical age of school shooters in the US is: also 16-17 years old. If a lot of these are bullying victims, something is seriously wrong.
Looking back at my own time in school, people had grown out of this sort of bullying years earlier. Teachers would treat you like young adults by 16. If you engaged in this sort of extreme bullying at that age, you wouldn't get summoned to the headmaster's office to get a slap on the wrist - you'd face real consequences and might even find yourself dealing with police if not in juvenile court.
Are these kids just not growing up because they're still being treated like 9 year olds when they're almost adults?
I'd understand the occasional outlier, since even the occasional developmentally stunted "adult" engages in bullying, but it really shouldn't be a common theme. It is likely most adults still engaging in this behavior simply never were given reason to grow up before their behavioral patterns crystallized, much like the protagonists in our story at hand.
In my senior year (age 18), a kid jumped on me and tried to beat me up. I pushed him off me and reported it to the school. I got a mandatory suspension for "being in a fight" under the school's zero tolerance policy.
The funny outcome of this is that I realized I should've just beat him back, I would've faced no penalty because he wouldn't have reported it and he would've realized I wasn't a target.
I do feel like SROs (police officers in schools) are much more common today than they were when I was in high school, but I am not sure treating school kids like adults always works out great either.
> but I am not sure treating school kids like adults always works out great either.
This is why there is juvenile courts and juvenile justice. These "kids" are about to be adults. At some point you have to make the transition. Physically and intellectually they are already able to inflict just as much damage as most grown adults. A third grader who decides to go on a killing spree is probably not going to get very far, but a 16 year old is incredibly dangerous.
Whether 16 year old teenagers should be held to higher standards than children who just learned to spell their own name is not a question: doing so is a necessity both for their own development and those they interact with.
> The funny outcome of this is that I realized I should've just beat him back, I would've faced no penalty because he wouldn't have reported it and he would've realized I wasn't a target.
Consider that this is what they actually wanted you to do. They are a school and wanted to teach you to deal with the problems in your life yourself. In other words, they were trying to teach you to be an adult.
> If you engaged in this sort of extreme bullying at that age, you wouldn't get summoned to the headmaster's office to get a slap on the wrist - you'd face real consequences
Clearly you didn’t go to American schools! If you complain, the teachers do nothing (not wanting to get involved or get hurt - teachers being hurt by students isn’t uncommon [1]) and the bullies bully you harder. If you fight back, the school administration gets YOU into trouble only. Ask me how I know.
What are the rules of engagement today when being bullied in school? Apparently shooting bullies is a no-no. You only get to do that as an adult in stand-your-ground states.[1] If attacked, do you get to use an improvised weapon such as a baseball bat?
Great question to ask your school administrators, especially if you're a military brat and grew up around people who have to know when and where to use their lethal force.
The public educators I’ve spoken with are trained that any initiating any physical contact with a student even in self defense is strictly a liability and grounds for dismissal. The only permissible response to an assault from a student is for a teacher to use their elbows to cover their own abdomen (limiting damage to their internal organs) until the attack subsides.
While that instruction is to educators, I can’t imagine that school policy would allow student victims to respond any differently, because the parents of a bully with a broken nose could sue the school.
I also have first-hand experience, albeit a decade-plus in the past now, but that matches how it was at my school. They only got involved when there was violence, and a "zero-tolerance" policy meant they punished you for getting assaulted even if you didn't fight back (fortunately, no one at my school realized you could get someone you didn't like suspended by doing a hit and run and turning yourself in).
I know this "bullying causes shooters" narrative is popular and makes some kind of intuitive sense, but do we have actual data on it? Is there even a correlation? Because my memory of the last few months of shooters is that most of them didn't really experience bullying (though were definitely socially maladjusted).
I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting bullying isn't a problem, regardless of its correlation or lack thereof.
It's ludicrous to read the article and notice how hard they are trying not to blame the victim, as if a child going through bullying and seeing that nobody around them cares to actually do something is somehow in the wrong when they react.
I never seen or heard any school doing any meaningful actions to deter bullying, and I don't mean this about the US system alone. Students are often left to fend off by themselves like animals, only punished when they fight back.
The classic victim-turned-perpretator is symptom of a system that is fundamentally broken.
I don't say this to justify any kind of violence, just that it is understandable and baffling that so little seems to be done to address root causes. Almost as if the children going through this are right on point: nobody really cares.
The last paragraph says it all:
> At one point during his senior year, he even asked to meet her team to thank them. “He thanked us for caring about him,” the sergeant said. “Because he felt like no one ever took the time to really care, and he could tell that we cared. It was really nice to hear.”
I read this a few times now and it hits hard every time.
I hope he's well and was able move one with his life. This would be indeed the best achievement of a system that should be like this from day 1.
eventually someone will figure out how to stop adolescent cliques from driving people into mental infirmity, then truly stop a shooting before it even begins to happen. not only that, a large portion of suicides, self harm, and academic disadvantage would be stopped, before it even begins to happen.
this should be just as elementary as storing weapons properly, and modeling responsible usage.
it should be pathetically obvious when an individual is being systematicly ostracised, schcool year after school year.
The adolescent cliques are a result of the artificial age segregation of students. Separating them from siblings or making friends of different ages, was likely a very bad decision, made in the interests of efficiency?
I wish there were more said about the bullies and other student who made up a rumor about him.
Each of these is a story in their own right as often these actions stem from other sources of injustice. I'd love to reqd more about evidence based bully reduction programs.
Even if you snapped your fingers and eliminated bullying from the world, you will still get school shooters, due to the intersection of mental illness rates in the population and gun access.
Are you saying that if we cannot solve the problem entirely that even incremental improvements are not worth employing? I'd like to find a more charitable interpretation.
Bullying happens in other species outside humans even. It is very deep evolutionary behavior. It isn't going away, unfortunately.
However, when we look at places outside the US that have very low rates of school shootings, they generally have stronger gun controls and better mental health care. To me, this is more realistically achievable than rooting out bullying. The vast majority of victims of bullying do not murder people. The vast majority of school shooters (100%, surely) are mentally ill and had access to a gun.
> Bullying happens in other species outside humans even. It is very deep evolutionary behavior.
In animals, male parents often kill weak children. Doesn't really mean we just say "oh well, its in our DNA". Over and over society has managed to successfully surpress biological behaviors to nearly zero.
I hope we can agree its an endeavor worth putting effort into. Right?
> The vast majority of school shooters (100%, surely) are mentally ill and had access to a gun.
1. Having a mental illness does not make a person violent. Step one of better mental health (illness or no illness) is reducing bullying.
2. Saying "100% surely" is not very convincing to me. What percentage of shooters are suspected to be born with a mental illness? (Rather than forming one from environmental factors) what data/sources is that conclusion based on?
> Having a mental illness does not make a person violent. Step one of better mental health (illness or no illness) is reducing bullying.
Why are you saying something this silly in public? Bullying is not the primary cause of mental illness, and mental illness can cause violence. You must be caught up in having an argument, because you wouldn't deny either of these things if you took a moment.
You're just buying into the every school shooter is a victim argument that has been thrown around since Columbine. Those boys were not bullied, they were bullies. It's one of a cluster of vile narratives about youth that have been going around for a decade or two: telling children that 1) if they take a gun to school and start shooting people, that it's the school and the students who got shot who were at fault, and 2) if you kill yourself, you'll get revenge on the people who "made you" kill yourself; they'll be shown to be cruel, and punished.
People who spread that crap hate children imo. They will believe it, and can feel very helpless because growing up is tough.
There are many behaviors that other species do that we don't, even behaviors that we used to do that we've collectively decided are socially unacceptable - rape, cannibalism and infanticide easy come to mind. The longstanding history of such behavior, I would hope, reflects the difficulty of reducing it, and not our stance on whether it should be reduced. Often the most difficult part of change is confronting the fatalistic position that nothing can be done.
The vast majority of lung cancer cases are caused by smoking, still it was a worthwhile effort to reduce asbestos use. Likewise, and generally, we can address issues by targeting a wide array of causal factors. How many of those school shooters do you recokon were also socially outcast or bullied?
As a start there should be common-sense gun control, like, if you get any kind of mental illness or violence on your record you lose your guns. Secondly, if a kid does get access to your gun in any circumstances you should also be charged with manslaughter.
Agree with the second point, but the first point would have an unintended consequence of discouraging people from seeking mental health treatment for fear of losing their guns, thereby exacerbating the problem.
Yep. Bullies are generally looking for a response. Someone who can deal with bullying in a level headed and appropriate manner isn't an interesting or easy target. Someone who "freaks out" is fun and interesting to torment, and their response is more likely to bias authority figures against them and insulate the bully from consequences and even twist the bully into the victim.
Outside of corporal punishment, which is a divisive topic, the only thing I can think of are a) not making school compulsory, and b) not tying government money to headcount.
If you have problem kids, expel them immediately and let the parents figure out the education. Which goes back in a way to my initial point - you have to at some point pick who's in charge. We've decided as a society it's the parents, so make public education an easily revokable privilege.
Right now we seem to have chosen the worst of both worlds - forcing kids to spend time with untouchable psychopaths all day every day.
While not common, it used to be a thing to see kids suspended and sometimes kicked out of school for being troublemakers.
There has to be consequences and pushback for kids who cannot help themselves but interrupt class and make trouble inside the hallways and outside the school grounds.
> If you have problem kids, expel them immediately and let the parents figure out the education.
This is a non-starter if homeschooling is also as unregulated as it currently is in the States. Parents who abuse homeschooling to intentionally undereducate their children is a serious and growing problem.
Whether the mass shooting was stopped or not is impossible to say.
What is a fact here is that the "106 people from 59 organizations" spent several weeks to stop or at least significantly decrease the level of bullying against one student. One can only wonder why stopping bullying is that hard and expensive (100 state and federal employees at the minimum cost of $1K/employee/week). And why that "school resource officer" hadn't been doing his job?
And why other adults can't get involved and stop bullying before it reaches the level when government has to get involved? These days adults don't "correct" teenagers anymore like it was done in the past and like say adult dogs do to badly behaving puppies.
We've lost a lot of ability, societally speaking, to maintain order and discipline bad behavior. People are volatile and the youth have very little respect for their elders. Just read testimonials from teachers about the environment in public schools. They're structurally prohibited from addressing problem behavior, from kids not turning in work and being given a million chances to "make it up" or just being given a 50% for not doing ANYTHING and then being "socially promoted", to not being able to remove problem kids from their classrooms, to the gutting of the para role, etc.
And this is just a microcosm of the wider society. Easier to just remove yourself from a situation when anyone could be carrying a gun. We're also living in larger and larger polities and individuals are far more anonymous. That means the grapevine and social shame are night impossible to enact.
But this is the atomized, individualist, omni-competition that we keep being told is great for society and the economy.
> Easier to just remove yourself from a situation when anyone could be carrying a gun.
There are more guns than people in the US. Whole states have open and concealed carry laws. You'd have to live like a hermit.
The solution is blindingly obvious: make gun possession and ownership illegal. Yet we can't stop indoctrinating kids from a young age that guns are a human right, no matter the cost.
All this does is keep people alive. Certainly important and might solve the final "acute" symptom but doesn't address a single other thing in the parent comment. All which is very much true if you are paying attention to the way society has gone just in the past 50 years.
Civil engagement is down across the board. Standards are slipping at best for nearly everything, and societal enforcement of the rules has become more and more nonexistent if not outright punished. And I don't mean policing.
It's like a workplace. If you are dealing with problems in your workplace by telling everyone to go to HR you've already lost. You cannot have mommy and daddy solve everything and remain functional. If society as a whole cannot react daily to maintain order for mundane social interactions and everything needs to escalate to a legal or policing situation you've already lost and the "guns" part is almost irrelevant.
And to your point, a lot of the time people will say it's just a gun county it's hard to disentangle from that. And in a sense, I agree: gun culture is the problem, and identifying it as such and dismantling it needs to be part of the program, not just laws.
Though it's often intended as a defense, I think it's most appropriately interpreted as a policy recommendation.
https://archive.ph/jOh1x
>Finally, one winter morning on the school bus, he turned on his tormentors. Curling his fingers in the shape of a pistol, he said, “I hope you all die.”
> Mike Carinci, the school resource officer — a member of the sheriff’s office who worked in the school — viewed and listened to hours of video from the bus, seeing the level of abuse directed daily at the student. “Just horrible things, like nonstop,” he said. Mr. Carinci summoned the students and told them that the bullying had to end. The superintendent told them that they could be suspended or expelled.
> The school traced the “hit list” rumor to a girl who admitted making it up. This quieted the community.
This article makes it sound like the only one who was punished was the victim of the bullying for his emotional outburst and everyone who picked on him got away unscathed. This seems similar to the recent Netflix miniseries Adolescence. Both the series and the discussion around it focused on the main character rather than the bullying that caused him to kill.
Exactly. They don’t even question how all this bullying went on for so long without any adults noticing or doing anything about it. For "horrible things, like nonstop" to be going on without anyone noticing or doing anything about it is absurd levels of negligence by the parents, teachers, and administrators. It should never have reached this point.
Bus drivers have to focus on driving safely. Expecting them to maintain bully free interactions among 20+ kids is absurd. Pay for an adult monitor on the bus.
Kids will find ways to harass each other: between classes, lunch times, recess, etc. Schools can probably do more, but I doubt they can fix bullying alone. And certainly not with the resources they're given today.
Surveillance isn’t the answer, justice is.
You know how women often don’t report sexual harassment and assault? It’s because if they do report it, they will suffer further victimization and their chances at any just outcome are too low.
Same thing with bullying in schools. Kids don’t report it because if they do so, they will be opening themselves up to further victimization, and the people they report it to will not take sufficient action to stop it.
All schools need to do is make it safe to report bullying, prioritizing the victim’s safety. Then with a report they don’t need blanket surveillance, they can just do targeted surveillance to verify the reports. Once verified, they should take immediate action to put a permanent stop to it.
I agree with the problem you identify. I was both a bully, and a bullied person at times during my school days. For me the bullying of me brought on the bullying by me, I feel.
I don't see any practical answers in your comment. Recognising schools should "makes it safe to report bullying" is one thing. How though? It seems entirely intractable - you seem to suggest blanket surveillance of all children everywhere?
For kids, justice isn't the answer. Parenting is.
> “We have a responsibility to develop good human beings that are going to be in society,”
They did, at leat say that^ when talking about why they shouldn't just move him to a new school.
But overall I agree. If this is supposed to be the success story, just imagine all the other cases of silencing/boxing-out the socially outcast.
The article does describe some of the subject's tormentors eventually apologizing to him, possibly more out of reflection and genuine remorse as opposed to being told to "Tell him you're sorry."
There should be consequences for bad behavior all around, but if one of the consequences is that a bully increases their level of compassion and self-regulation, it could allow the system to skip the punishment phase of creating consequences and still serve the goals of justice.
Also, while suspension for the subject sounds like a punitive and one-sided approach, he dreaded going to school and the suspension provided a mechanism to create an approach that would thoughtfully allow him and his tormentors to develop better behaviors.
Exactly. If the school kids bully one student enough to become a school shooter, they can do it to another after the first is arrested / transferred.
Seriously. This whole article reads like people congratulating themselves for pathologizing this kid's behavior, while not actually doing much about the obvious cause of that condition. They say the kid was suspended, for making a hand gesture in response to bullying. Why weren't the bullies suspended, especially when the pattern of abuse became clear? Perhaps twice as long to send a clear message and let the victim reacclimate to the school when they're not getting bullied. Ultimately it seems like the school administration is still mainly concerned about things that might cause some problem for them, and so is quite content to let such situations fester until the victim reacts in a way for which they too can pile on.
For a while I was nodding along, being able to picture what occurred and understand how the adults dealt with it.
Then I realized these people were ~16 years old. Maybe it was an outlier? I looked up what the typical age of school shooters in the US is: also 16-17 years old. If a lot of these are bullying victims, something is seriously wrong.
Looking back at my own time in school, people had grown out of this sort of bullying years earlier. Teachers would treat you like young adults by 16. If you engaged in this sort of extreme bullying at that age, you wouldn't get summoned to the headmaster's office to get a slap on the wrist - you'd face real consequences and might even find yourself dealing with police if not in juvenile court.
Are these kids just not growing up because they're still being treated like 9 year olds when they're almost adults?
I'd understand the occasional outlier, since even the occasional developmentally stunted "adult" engages in bullying, but it really shouldn't be a common theme. It is likely most adults still engaging in this behavior simply never were given reason to grow up before their behavioral patterns crystallized, much like the protagonists in our story at hand.
In my senior year (age 18), a kid jumped on me and tried to beat me up. I pushed him off me and reported it to the school. I got a mandatory suspension for "being in a fight" under the school's zero tolerance policy.
The funny outcome of this is that I realized I should've just beat him back, I would've faced no penalty because he wouldn't have reported it and he would've realized I wasn't a target.
I do feel like SROs (police officers in schools) are much more common today than they were when I was in high school, but I am not sure treating school kids like adults always works out great either.
> but I am not sure treating school kids like adults always works out great either.
This is why there is juvenile courts and juvenile justice. These "kids" are about to be adults. At some point you have to make the transition. Physically and intellectually they are already able to inflict just as much damage as most grown adults. A third grader who decides to go on a killing spree is probably not going to get very far, but a 16 year old is incredibly dangerous.
Whether 16 year old teenagers should be held to higher standards than children who just learned to spell their own name is not a question: doing so is a necessity both for their own development and those they interact with.
> The funny outcome of this is that I realized I should've just beat him back, I would've faced no penalty because he wouldn't have reported it and he would've realized I wasn't a target.
Consider that this is what they actually wanted you to do. They are a school and wanted to teach you to deal with the problems in your life yourself. In other words, they were trying to teach you to be an adult.
Adults don't resolve conflicts by beating each other up. If this was your school's lesson, I'm sorry.
> If you engaged in this sort of extreme bullying at that age, you wouldn't get summoned to the headmaster's office to get a slap on the wrist - you'd face real consequences
Clearly you didn’t go to American schools! If you complain, the teachers do nothing (not wanting to get involved or get hurt - teachers being hurt by students isn’t uncommon [1]) and the bullies bully you harder. If you fight back, the school administration gets YOU into trouble only. Ask me how I know.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=teacher+beaten+by+student
What are the rules of engagement today when being bullied in school? Apparently shooting bullies is a no-no. You only get to do that as an adult in stand-your-ground states.[1] If attacked, do you get to use an improvised weapon such as a baseball bat?
Great question to ask your school administrators, especially if you're a military brat and grew up around people who have to know when and where to use their lethal force.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law
The public educators I’ve spoken with are trained that any initiating any physical contact with a student even in self defense is strictly a liability and grounds for dismissal. The only permissible response to an assault from a student is for a teacher to use their elbows to cover their own abdomen (limiting damage to their internal organs) until the attack subsides.
While that instruction is to educators, I can’t imagine that school policy would allow student victims to respond any differently, because the parents of a bully with a broken nose could sue the school.
How do you know?
(no, I didn't go to an American school)
I also have first-hand experience, albeit a decade-plus in the past now, but that matches how it was at my school. They only got involved when there was violence, and a "zero-tolerance" policy meant they punished you for getting assaulted even if you didn't fight back (fortunately, no one at my school realized you could get someone you didn't like suspended by doing a hit and run and turning yourself in).
First. Hand. Experience.
With both options
I know this "bullying causes shooters" narrative is popular and makes some kind of intuitive sense, but do we have actual data on it? Is there even a correlation? Because my memory of the last few months of shooters is that most of them didn't really experience bullying (though were definitely socially maladjusted).
I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting bullying isn't a problem, regardless of its correlation or lack thereof.
It's ludicrous to read the article and notice how hard they are trying not to blame the victim, as if a child going through bullying and seeing that nobody around them cares to actually do something is somehow in the wrong when they react.
I never seen or heard any school doing any meaningful actions to deter bullying, and I don't mean this about the US system alone. Students are often left to fend off by themselves like animals, only punished when they fight back.
The classic victim-turned-perpretator is symptom of a system that is fundamentally broken.
I don't say this to justify any kind of violence, just that it is understandable and baffling that so little seems to be done to address root causes. Almost as if the children going through this are right on point: nobody really cares.
The last paragraph says it all:
> At one point during his senior year, he even asked to meet her team to thank them. “He thanked us for caring about him,” the sergeant said. “Because he felt like no one ever took the time to really care, and he could tell that we cared. It was really nice to hear.”
I read this a few times now and it hits hard every time.
I hope he's well and was able move one with his life. This would be indeed the best achievement of a system that should be like this from day 1.
eventually someone will figure out how to stop adolescent cliques from driving people into mental infirmity, then truly stop a shooting before it even begins to happen. not only that, a large portion of suicides, self harm, and academic disadvantage would be stopped, before it even begins to happen.
this should be just as elementary as storing weapons properly, and modeling responsible usage.
it should be pathetically obvious when an individual is being systematicly ostracised, schcool year after school year.
The adolescent cliques are a result of the artificial age segregation of students. Separating them from siblings or making friends of different ages, was likely a very bad decision, made in the interests of efficiency?
I wish there were more said about the bullies and other student who made up a rumor about him.
Each of these is a story in their own right as often these actions stem from other sources of injustice. I'd love to reqd more about evidence based bully reduction programs.
schools are too much like prisons, so the same problems show up
Even if you snapped your fingers and eliminated bullying from the world, you will still get school shooters, due to the intersection of mental illness rates in the population and gun access.
Are you saying that if we cannot solve the problem entirely that even incremental improvements are not worth employing? I'd like to find a more charitable interpretation.
Bullying happens in other species outside humans even. It is very deep evolutionary behavior. It isn't going away, unfortunately.
However, when we look at places outside the US that have very low rates of school shootings, they generally have stronger gun controls and better mental health care. To me, this is more realistically achievable than rooting out bullying. The vast majority of victims of bullying do not murder people. The vast majority of school shooters (100%, surely) are mentally ill and had access to a gun.
> Bullying happens in other species outside humans even. It is very deep evolutionary behavior.
In animals, male parents often kill weak children. Doesn't really mean we just say "oh well, its in our DNA". Over and over society has managed to successfully surpress biological behaviors to nearly zero.
I hope we can agree its an endeavor worth putting effort into. Right?
> The vast majority of school shooters (100%, surely) are mentally ill and had access to a gun.
1. Having a mental illness does not make a person violent. Step one of better mental health (illness or no illness) is reducing bullying.
2. Saying "100% surely" is not very convincing to me. What percentage of shooters are suspected to be born with a mental illness? (Rather than forming one from environmental factors) what data/sources is that conclusion based on?
If you are willing to kill someone like this you are not sane. I don't know what to tell you.
> Having a mental illness does not make a person violent. Step one of better mental health (illness or no illness) is reducing bullying.
Why are you saying something this silly in public? Bullying is not the primary cause of mental illness, and mental illness can cause violence. You must be caught up in having an argument, because you wouldn't deny either of these things if you took a moment.
You're just buying into the every school shooter is a victim argument that has been thrown around since Columbine. Those boys were not bullied, they were bullies. It's one of a cluster of vile narratives about youth that have been going around for a decade or two: telling children that 1) if they take a gun to school and start shooting people, that it's the school and the students who got shot who were at fault, and 2) if you kill yourself, you'll get revenge on the people who "made you" kill yourself; they'll be shown to be cruel, and punished.
People who spread that crap hate children imo. They will believe it, and can feel very helpless because growing up is tough.
> Those boys were not bullied, they were bullies.
That is a very unnuanced take on the thing if you read more about the incident and the background of it besides Cullen's book.
There are many behaviors that other species do that we don't, even behaviors that we used to do that we've collectively decided are socially unacceptable - rape, cannibalism and infanticide easy come to mind. The longstanding history of such behavior, I would hope, reflects the difficulty of reducing it, and not our stance on whether it should be reduced. Often the most difficult part of change is confronting the fatalistic position that nothing can be done.
The vast majority of lung cancer cases are caused by smoking, still it was a worthwhile effort to reduce asbestos use. Likewise, and generally, we can address issues by targeting a wide array of causal factors. How many of those school shooters do you recokon were also socially outcast or bullied?
They are saying it's a lot more complicated than just stopping bullying.
you have masterfully rendered my less charitable pronouncements, redundent
As a start there should be common-sense gun control, like, if you get any kind of mental illness or violence on your record you lose your guns. Secondly, if a kid does get access to your gun in any circumstances you should also be charged with manslaughter.
Agree with the second point, but the first point would have an unintended consequence of discouraging people from seeking mental health treatment for fear of losing their guns, thereby exacerbating the problem.
While fine to try and make that argument, what percentage of shooters were not bullied?
I suspect mental health issues are a big glowing neon sign that says "bully me".
Yep. Bullies are generally looking for a response. Someone who can deal with bullying in a level headed and appropriate manner isn't an interesting or easy target. Someone who "freaks out" is fun and interesting to torment, and their response is more likely to bias authority figures against them and insulate the bully from consequences and even twist the bully into the victim.
Outside of corporal punishment, which is a divisive topic, the only thing I can think of are a) not making school compulsory, and b) not tying government money to headcount.
If you have problem kids, expel them immediately and let the parents figure out the education. Which goes back in a way to my initial point - you have to at some point pick who's in charge. We've decided as a society it's the parents, so make public education an easily revokable privilege.
Right now we seem to have chosen the worst of both worlds - forcing kids to spend time with untouchable psychopaths all day every day.
While not common, it used to be a thing to see kids suspended and sometimes kicked out of school for being troublemakers.
There has to be consequences and pushback for kids who cannot help themselves but interrupt class and make trouble inside the hallways and outside the school grounds.
> If you have problem kids, expel them immediately and let the parents figure out the education.
This is a non-starter if homeschooling is also as unregulated as it currently is in the States. Parents who abuse homeschooling to intentionally undereducate their children is a serious and growing problem.
Whether the mass shooting was stopped or not is impossible to say.
What is a fact here is that the "106 people from 59 organizations" spent several weeks to stop or at least significantly decrease the level of bullying against one student. One can only wonder why stopping bullying is that hard and expensive (100 state and federal employees at the minimum cost of $1K/employee/week). And why that "school resource officer" hadn't been doing his job?
And why other adults can't get involved and stop bullying before it reaches the level when government has to get involved? These days adults don't "correct" teenagers anymore like it was done in the past and like say adult dogs do to badly behaving puppies.
We've lost a lot of ability, societally speaking, to maintain order and discipline bad behavior. People are volatile and the youth have very little respect for their elders. Just read testimonials from teachers about the environment in public schools. They're structurally prohibited from addressing problem behavior, from kids not turning in work and being given a million chances to "make it up" or just being given a 50% for not doing ANYTHING and then being "socially promoted", to not being able to remove problem kids from their classrooms, to the gutting of the para role, etc.
And this is just a microcosm of the wider society. Easier to just remove yourself from a situation when anyone could be carrying a gun. We're also living in larger and larger polities and individuals are far more anonymous. That means the grapevine and social shame are night impossible to enact.
But this is the atomized, individualist, omni-competition that we keep being told is great for society and the economy.
> Easier to just remove yourself from a situation when anyone could be carrying a gun.
There are more guns than people in the US. Whole states have open and concealed carry laws. You'd have to live like a hermit.
The solution is blindingly obvious: make gun possession and ownership illegal. Yet we can't stop indoctrinating kids from a young age that guns are a human right, no matter the cost.
All this does is keep people alive. Certainly important and might solve the final "acute" symptom but doesn't address a single other thing in the parent comment. All which is very much true if you are paying attention to the way society has gone just in the past 50 years.
Civil engagement is down across the board. Standards are slipping at best for nearly everything, and societal enforcement of the rules has become more and more nonexistent if not outright punished. And I don't mean policing.
It's like a workplace. If you are dealing with problems in your workplace by telling everyone to go to HR you've already lost. You cannot have mommy and daddy solve everything and remain functional. If society as a whole cannot react daily to maintain order for mundane social interactions and everything needs to escalate to a legal or policing situation you've already lost and the "guns" part is almost irrelevant.
And to your point, a lot of the time people will say it's just a gun county it's hard to disentangle from that. And in a sense, I agree: gun culture is the problem, and identifying it as such and dismantling it needs to be part of the program, not just laws.
Though it's often intended as a defense, I think it's most appropriately interpreted as a policy recommendation.
Suspending the bullies and expelling the manipulative and dangerous girl would certainly have helped.
An odd phenomenon school shootings are and continue to be with little or no intervention from the government.