People Got Together to Stop a School Shooting Before It Happened
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School Shootings
Bullying Prevention
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A community came together to prevent a potential school shooting by addressing bullying, sparking discussions on the effectiveness of such interventions and the root causes of school violence.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Give me a break.
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?
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.
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.
I don't blame most homeschool parents for not wanting their children indoctrinated by what's been happening the last few years.
At some point, we need to pick a sane path. Today's system is literally the worst of every world to where we have daily school shootings and parents with any money at all opting out.
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.
The notion of keeping kids in four year windows in the same school is a bad idea in my opinion.
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.
> 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.
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.
As I said, parenting is more important so one learns right from wrong and morals for when they are not at home and how to lead proper lives.
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?
Make teachers (and parents) people of trust, not only of arbitrary authority, and you create options to address bullying between kids as well.
When it comes to children we usually call it supervision.
Not that I think all children need to be supervised all the time, but large groups of unsupervised children can create mayhem very quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies
Kids will find ways to harass each other: between classes, lunch times, recess, etc.
This is true, but in most countries it doesn't escalate to mass murder. That's specifically a US thing (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh...). So while you're right, I don't think it's fair to suggest it's hard to stop this problem or to resign to it being typical kids behaviour. The shooting aspect bucks the global norm.
The closest runner-up country, the Falkand Islands, is almost exactly half of that - at 62 guns per 100 people [1]. There's a sharp decline from there.
1 - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-owner...
That said, I've long shared the belief that despite the absurd number of guns in the USA, and how they literally outweigh the population; the average person ought to re-calibrate have more faith in humanity and respect for their access to firearms, because the stats for gun violence are not nearly as high as you'd think if they're that accessible.
I escaped most of it, personally, because I had sharp enough wits and enough self-confidence to turn ridicule back on most people who went after me that way - I even figured out at one point that if I used big words the PE teacher would leave me alone, lol - and was physically big enough not to be a target otherwise. We didn't complain, though, not even to our parents, because that was just the way things were - why would kids think anything should be otherwise, when authority figures saw it and didn't care, like, at all?
What I didn't do, ever, was stand up for anyone else. It was a survival strategy. I remember reading about Columbine that Dylan Klebold waved one kid out from under his gun because, he said, "you were always nice to me". I didn't bully anyone, and even had friendly conversations with some of the kids who were the most consistent targets, but, had they come to school with a gun, I doubt I'd have passed that test. I can't shake the feeling that had one of them committed violence that the school - and maybe even I, myself - would have deserved it.
This shit's been going on a long time.
I wonder if the USA has a lot of school shooters because the teachers and administrators are dumb like this and not because of other reasons. If adults misunderstand situations like this you feel like nobody has your back.
They don't misunderstand. They are incentivized by the system to behave this way. The ones that can't adapt their morals change their line of work. See also: cops.
Understand, the teachers and administrators are not on the same team!
The admin is a political body, who basically gets their job by being voted in (or more exactly, they are hired by the school board, who is explicitly voted in). They will ignore teachers reporting problems because it's not politically expedient to actually deal with those problems.
In almost all towns, the school board serves the local Old Boys club, not the general public. Bob doesn't give a fuck that his kid is a bully, he still has the most pull in the town. He's not going to sit aside when you punish his kid, even if his kid is demonstrably a bully.
The parents of bullies will not pay attention to "your child is literally harming other kids" but you can bet, the second you suspend their child, they will somehow manage a media campaign that an entire mob will rally behind. "oh that's just what kids do" says the mob. They will then say "we need to bring spanking back into schools" and that will increase the size of the mob.
At no point did the admin help the teacher do their damn job.
You claim to be against X, but there is no X around, so you condition or bring someone to the breaking point to make X appealing to them, then you can claim that you were righteous all along. You create a problem and then "solve" it. In reality you did nothing, except wreck someone else's life, for the sake of your own grandiosity.
Based on what I've read, the bullies wanted the school shooting more than the supposed school shooter. Like, they genuinely wanted him to shoot them.
That's standard practice for schools in the US. And I've heard from a relative who is a schoolteacher that during a mediation, the schools make both sides apologize to the other, requiring that the victim apologize to the bully.
Any idea what the idea is behind this?
Bullying isn't just condoned in schools, it is supported. If you try to report it to administrators you are more likely to be punished than the bullies because YOU are the pain point for them.
People often say they'll know torture when they see it, but in practice most people are completely blind and they don't properly or rigorously compare torture with abuse, nor do they know how it works so they don't recognize it.
All it takes is a select set of elements, a set of structures, and a little clustering, and even you can be made to do horrible things, solely as a matter of sufficient exposure.
Those elements are isolation, lack of agency, coercion with perceived or real loss. Structure are trauma loops where you have alternating strict and lenient stages (push pull). Clustering include specific items that dramatically increase suggestibility to induce psychological stress beyond the point of coping for physiological effect. These include psychological blindspots we all have which occur beneath our perception when triggered. There are 6 or 7 in total, most are covered by Robert Cialdini, and when they are used to create an inconsistent internal mental state that's stress you can't perceptually recognize. Coping can be done for some if you know the patterns but there is no coping with distorted reflected appraisal. The pariah effect, which is enforced through social media and other material. The Stasi called this Zersetzung. Its been used and originates with many Communist/Marxist based groups, but recently includes many corporations. Sad times.
If you as a group degrade a human being, destroying their mind to the point where they are no longer sane; that's quite an evil which is not having consequences enforced. When the law defends such destructive and evil behavior by not stopping it; the rule of law no longer exists. Its a rule by law. Violence is what naturally follows.
If you want to prevent violence, you need to reform and correct the deficiencies that have now failed to allow non-violent conflict resolution. Any choice that does not lead to that resolution is a choice for the support of violence, albeit indirect.
These things were commonly known at one point in time, but education of such has been withheld and we see the effect that has had. Shock doctrine being used to push narratives and solutions which are not in fact solutions; towards ever greater control. A lot of which is intolerable taken to a long-standing logical conclusion.
Most people today seek a delusional view of the world, they are willfully blind, and have sought a world where bad things don't happen, and knowledge of such bad things actually happening is the same as acting to do those bad things. Communication of such things is the same as doing those things, or supporting those things. The author's right to depict horrible things to promote a common good being stripped from literature/media citing it induces (when it may not). This line of reasoning is obviously fallacy but they follow the "What they don't perceive, doesn't exist." dogma.
This may work right up until an out-of-context problem arises from chaos and forces extinction, or a collapse.
Evil starts with complacency (sloth) and the induced choice towards willful blindness of the consequences of each persons individual choices.
It's well documented that you don't argue with Evil, it can't be reasoned with, you can only stop it from harming others, and that is a good thing when properly/rigorously identified and action taken.
For example, you won't see any good person defending the Nazi Holocaust. Edit: Simple reasonable, and well known things, and the bot swarm is already busy downvoting it out of view. Goes to show you why people are being induced towards blindness. Evil people simply don't want you to know about these things, and the biggest problem with such people is they don't realize they are evil.
What more do you want?
The school system is designed to remove and punish the families like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Though it's often intended as a defense, I think it's most appropriately interpreted as a policy recommendation.
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.
It turns out that the only way to stop an indoctrinator is with a bad guy with a gun.
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.
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
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
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.
(no, I didn't go to an American school)
With both options
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.
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.
For one, I like the idea of creating some degree of systems of support to try and prevent things like school shootings from happening by stopping them before they get too far.
On the other hand, unless there are more details missing from this article, it really seems like the only person who got any degree of punishment is the student who was being bullied.
You know what stops bullies that doesn't involve shooting them? Ruthless consequences for their actions. Schools love to talk about their 'zero tolerance' policy for bullying, but if there are no consequences outside of a teacher telling the bully to stop, then that is definitely less of a 'zero tolerance' policy and more of a 'mostly tolerated' policy. Zero tolerance means immediate suspensions, expulsions, supporting police reports for physically violent bullying etc.
Yup, cracking the toughest of entrance exams here after toiling for years in school (sometimes after) and going to those colleges and then getting kicked out (often with a piece of paper that ensured you didn't get admission elsewhere either) just because you couldn't resist harassing/abusing/attacking/hurting freshers who had just entered college did the trick. Before that? Threats, warnings, and policy-making just on paper did zilch. It was literally a national move sort of - coming right from the top, forcing states to act.. etc.
My experience of university (not in the US) was that by then students had grown up, and there wasn’t any bullying going on that I saw. Students were treated as adults, violence was dealt with by the police.
The most stubborn bullies in reality will often only reliably respond because they will starve to death, face violence, or have necessities taken away. I.e. a Nazi can't do nazi shit at work or they will get fired and starve.
A child cant get fired. Their parents must provide no matter what, and it is neglect if they don't and abuse if they use violence. End result is a bully knows the worst can happen is they lose luxuries and get a vacation from school, but always be taken care of. So really any punishment you can mete out is a nothingburger.
A difficult problem to solve indeed.
From my own personal experience being bullied. I went to teachers and the principal to speak up that I was being bullied, the teachers themselves witnessed it many times and acknowledged it was happening but the bully suffered no consequences other than being told to stop. My parents were awesome and got involved but even after that the school refused to do anything because the bully was “sorry”. Finally my parents told me they had my back and would support me if I wanted fight back but either way they were taking me out of that school at the end of the year. Punched the guy right in the face the next time after repeatedly telling him I would if he didn’t stop. I was immediately physically escorted to the principal’s office and my parents had to pick me up. The only reason I didn’t get expelled is because the bully didn’t want to admit I got the better of him so the school saw no fault. Never got bullied again by that kid. My story isn’t to say resorting to violence is the right thing to do but instead why did it even have to get to that point to begin with? So many members of authority could have issued consequences for behavior they witnessed but chose not to.
For those of us who identify with the victims, this is almost unfathomable, but over the years I've been able to recognize that quite a lot of people don't actually identify in the victim in this situation. The idea that this might be the case didn't ever occur to me for years because of how much my insecurity and anxiety as an adult are related to my experiences of being bullied as a kid, so it made it hard to realize that this core emotional experience that's impossible for me to separate from my conception of what it's like to be a kid just doesn't exist for most people.
“It cannot be stopped camp” clearly has different priorities or is of the opinion that “weak deserves to be bullied.”
End of problem.
If your kid is bullied, call the police. Most school authorities are bully enablers.
I grew up at a time where school principals had monopoly on violence at schools. I think it’s an improvement that we don’t accept school staff to beat kids anymore. But, whose brilliant idea was to accept that students will just bully each other and nothing can be done? I see many comments on this thread that just accept it. Why not accept all kinds of violence everywhere then? It’s impossible to prevent it so just let go of trying at all.
Society has rules. Every institution has an authority figure. There are virtually no spaces without rules or an authority. Enforcement usually happens at varying degrees, from warnings to punishments. Back in the day beatings were warnings, punishments were suspensions and expulsions. We don’t want beatings, and if we are not resourced enough to rehabilitate, we have to aggressively suspend and expel.
It really isn’t rocket science. We don’t owe bullies anything.
Hint: they are more likely to be bullies themselves, as their aggression is raising prior the attack.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35058114/
> 76% posted disturbing content of guns and threatening messages.
This is them provably being bullies as judged by their own social media accounts.
> 60% reported being bullied in-person or online
This is them claiming to be bullied at some point in their life. Elliot Roger claimed to be rejected by women while what happened was that he self isolated entirely for whole his life. This was similar to other guys - a person with track record of violence or threats feeling bullied by other people basically existing.
Compare the two claims, really.
edit: The Secret, not The Present
He socialized basically exclusively online before going to the college.
Really, show me some that were primary bullying victims string back.
Adam Lanza and Elliot Rogers had both mental health issues and family that allowed them to isolate themselves. Adam Lanza mom was reported to be afraid of him before the end and basically in abusive relationship with him (where he was the abusers) before being killed. In case of Nikolas Jacob Cruz, you see volatile boy threatening and attacking others including a girl that school assigned to tutor him. She stopped because he was bullying her. He WAS ostracized and lonely as a results ... but that is the kids avoiding the bully who mistreats them rather then him anything else. He had host of mental health problems for sure too.
I guess you are writing that as some unreasonable position reduction ad absurdum?
But people breaking down from not reaching some zero level goal is a problem. It is some sort of shooting the messenger. Black and white etc.
I wonder what sort of monitoring. If it was purely just checking in with him, or more than that? I feel like constantly being watched or having my devices watched as a kid would have made me more paranoid as an adult. Less able to trust the world.
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.
I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting bullying isn't a problem, regardless of its correlation or lack thereof.
There they have a Judicial Committee, composed of both students and staff, and deal with issues through a process similar to courts in democratic society.
Interesting enough, both students and staff can be brought up for bad behavior, which is probably what makes the process respected enough to work.
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