ABC News’ Nightline had a report Wednesday evening about school shootings in which two things stood out for me. The first was that 75% of school shooters were victims of bullying and that the shooter they interviewed was removed from reality when it was happening, having been desensitized to the shooting violence by the video games he had been playing.
Over and over, we hear of shooters having been tormented by the bullies at school or taunted and abused by the general student body. And, yet, despite all the attention this point receives and the supposed actions that school officials take, little is done to address the most important cause of the shootings- bullying. There is a “zero-tolerance” policy in most schools against weapons, anything that could be construed as a weapon, thinking about weapons, writing about the subject, drawing pictures, even kindergarteners holding their fingers in a gun position. ANd, yet, little if anything is done to the bullies who provoke this.
I was bullied and abused in junior high school and live with the after affects to this day. Had I had access to a gun in 1971 when this abuse was at its peak, it would have been quite easy for me to have committed one of these atrocities. The teachers and administrators at my school blamed me for the bullying. The coaches at the school encouraged the jocks to bully me, saying it would make me a man. The Assistant Principal told me that I should fight back, and then paddled me for fighting back. My redneck stepfather ridiculed and criticized me daily for not fighting back. And, no one, NO ONE, made any attempt to help me or the dozens of other kids, all nonconformists, who were bullied, beaten, and tormented on a daily basis in my school.
Until we stop, as a society, glorifying the bully and the snob, this will continue. As long as we view the shooters as monsters, instead of as victims pushed over the edge by other kids who find it amusing to taunt or bully them, it will continue.
I don’t condone school shootings and I feel great sympathy for the shooting victims. But, I wonder if any of the jerks who bullied Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who beat them and taunted them every day, ever think about the cul[pability THEY have in the Columbine massacre?
Somewhere out there, right this minute, is a boy who has been taunted, bullied, beaten, and humiliated by the other kids at school, whose plight has been ignored by the teachers, the coaches, and the administrators, whose parents are just as indifferent or just as cruel, and who sees either the deaths of others or his own death as they only way out. I grieve for that boy for I know what he is feeling.
Recent Comments