People got together to stop a school shooting before it happened | Hacker News Reader

People got together to stop a school shooting before it happened

nytimes.com

69 pointswhack117 comments

>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.

For kids, justice isn't the answer. Parenting is.

Kids understand justice from a very early age. It's one of the things they need out of parenting. But things that go on at school are not entirely within the remit of the parents, because the school is in loco parentis.

>Kids understand justice from a very early age. It's one of the things they need out of parenting.

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.

Yeah but you’re not going to convince the shit parents of these shit children to change. If you think otherwise, you haven’t met enough.

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?

You don’t need surveillance if you have relationships and trust. Bullying is intractable because traditional schooling is essentially and structurally exactly that: the bullying of kids by adults. It’s only logical that it results in the bullying of kids by kids.

Make teachers (and parents) people of trust, not only of arbitrary authority, and you create options to address bullying between kids as well.

> Surveillance isn’t the answer, justice is.

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

You missed the part that says "viewed and listened to hours of video from the bus". The evidence is already available. The problem is that no one was bothering to look at it to check the kids were OK.

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.

violence happens in other places. i think it is typical child behaviour, just in a place where it’s not hard to find a gun.

There are plenty of countries where gun ownership is just as common as America.

No there isn't. America has 120 guns per 100 people.

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.

Guns per capita isn't a good measure because some people own a lot of guns. Gun owning households is a better way to test how many kids potentially have access to a gun - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_of_households_with_gun... - America is still top at 42%, but the next country is at 37% and there are several above 20%.

What kind of guns though? Handguns? Autos? Hunting rifles?

This is a generation removed, at this point, but my younger sister and I went to the same small private, "good" Christian high school, and when Columbine happened we both looked at each other, and were like, "yeah, makes sense". Bullying was so endemic at our school that we could identify kids in each class around the both of us whom, had they had arrived with a gun and opened fire, we'd have been shocked, of course, but in no way surprised. Teachers (verbally) ridiculed and bullied students, and turned blind eyes to "high status" students bullying (including violently) odd, or even just poor, kids.

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.

> “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.

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.

Being harassed non-stop and only doing a gesture and getting suspended by a gesture when you get much worse is so unfair. Like "let's see if we can create school shooters" level of unfair.

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.

it doesn’t help, that’s for sure. it breeds violent power & revenge fantasies, at minimum.

>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.

>because the teachers and administrators are dumb

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.

This is the classic hero complex in action.

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.

Considering how fked up the world is these days, I was expecting much worse than this. I was expecting imprisonment or psychiatric medication. I was really surprized (in a good way) they didn't even expel him from school.

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.

Pretty normal in USA. It isn’t the environment or the other students it’s just the person that is being bullied that doesn’t belong.

The school system is designed to remove and punish the families like that.

>> This article makes it sound like the only one who was punished was the victim of the bullying

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.

When I was a kid, I quickly learned that most school administrators are lazy monsters. You only get in trouble if you make them do their jobs. You could literally get your ass beat by a crowd of feral children and then get suspended for being attacked and doing nothing in return.

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.

> 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?

I don't know the line of reasoning behind it.

The kid was not a bullying victim in that movie. In that movie, there is suspicion of him being radicalized online. But even that is never shown.

Not to mention the fact that they let this go on for long enough to compile hours of video footage (meaning that they had a way to verify that it was indeed happening) and only for anything when the victim got desperate enough to fight back.

The bully was suspended at first and then we he returned to school warned again to stop bullying. Is that not enough? The article explained that the bullying stopped and the bullies apologized.

What more do you want?

Spoler warning, but in the netflix show the kid is suspected of being a bullying victim but he turns out to be a bully. But interestingly the show hints at an online community believing him to be an innocent victim.

The simple fact of the matter is, everyone breaks with sufficient exposure to unending abuse. In the literature, this is rightfully called by its real name, torture. Everyone breaks with sufficient exposure, they may break by dissassociation, or they may break psychotically, but its semi-lucid psychosis seeking annihilation (capable of planning). This has been known since at least the 1950s, and ignored through willful blindness of the people in positions of responsibility and accountability.

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.

So, no action necessary if bullying victims have no access to guns or are just “taking it?” Kind of a bizarre view. Almost as bizarre as viewing gun regulation unthinkable, but I am not gonna talk about that.

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.

School shooters being bullying victims striking back is a myth. It is a made up explanation that has little to do with who school shooters are and why they do what they do.

Hint: they are more likely to be bullies themselves, as their aggression is raising prior the attack.

There's plenty of evidence that show a good chunk of school shooters are or were bullied :

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35058114/

I used to read awful lot about them in a period of my life.

> 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.

Elliot Rodger was also given a copy of “The Present” by his parents in response to his emotional distress, so i think it’s fair to look at his home as a place of emotional neglect, possibly bullying.

edit: The Secret, not The Present

I dont know what you mean by "The present" here. They allowed him to homeschool and isolate himself, so they were enablers, I would agree with that. He does not report being bullied by them in his manifesto.

He socialized basically exclusively online before going to the college.

Curious! Can you share evidence to back up the claim that they are more likely to be bullies themselves?

I had period where I obsessively read too much about those cases. That was pattern I have seen. The first media usually contained such speculation, the later reports did not really confirmed it. What those contained were stories of other kids being attacked by them or afraid of them.

"just trust me, bro" is an inadequate source or citation

Show me three whose lives show them being bullying victims striking back. Go to read a biography of pretty much any popular one and you find raising levels of aggression toward people around. I have yet to see a ONE that would be a bullying victim lashing back.

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.

> Why not accept all kinds of violence everywhere then? It’s impossible to prevent it so just let go of trying at all.

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.

As someone who was the victim of a lot of bullying myself, this article is a very mixed bag for me.

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.

The article does cover the bullies:

  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.

Ragging (esp. in STEM places; often violent; no slapping, et cetera, was not even considered violent) was a pathetic menace where I live. It is still not eradicated, but has shrunk to something so little that it is not a norm anymore or a right passage for seniors. How did it shrink? When seniors started getting expelled – no quarters given if ragging was proven.

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.

Is this sort of thing as common in US colleges as it is portrayed in movies?

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.

Why would a bully care if they are suspended or expelled.

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.

In fact, a child can get fired. They can get kicked off of sports teams, …. But yes, it is a difficult problem. I liked a lot of what I read in the article.

  First, they identified the problem students.
  Second, they tried something.

It's also very different to be warned that you "could get suspended or expelled" and actually have it happen. A warning isn't a punishment, but a communication that a punishment might occur, assuming that the one giving the warning actually follows through with observing whether behavior changes and is willing to actually carry out the punishment in the case that it doesn't. Kids are just as aware of this as adults and can make judgments about how likely this is when they receive warnings.

Yes, the literal hours of video of footage of abuse that by the own claims of the authorities could have culminated in a violent response were "punished" with a single verbal warning. As the parent commenter says, they didn't get punished.

I completely agree.

“It cannot be stopped camp” clearly has different priorities or is of the opinion that “weak deserves to be bullied.”

Similar perspective from me, I really don’t understand why people in authority are allergic to making the correct decision and punishing bullies or even worse punishing the victim.

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.

As someone who also was bullied heavily as a kid, my best explanation is that a lot of the adults who are in the posittions of authority were probably never the ones being bullied as kids (and some of them maybe were themselves the bullies). A large number of kids aren't directly involved in the bullying learn to keep their heads down and not get involved. The victims of the bullying will always remember it quite vividly, but those who just saw it happen without the same strong emotions attached to the memories won't recall the specifics of just how frequent or severe it was, but just have a vague recollection of bullying happening sometimes. When they end up seeing something similar happening in front of them again as adults, it wouldn't shock me if the same instincts around not getting involved or thinking about it too hard resurface and make it easier for them to rationalize not intervening.

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.

One of my boys was invited out by some classmates, then beaten up in a back alley. I called the police who visited their homes. They got the message that they'd be in court if they did anything like that again.

End of problem.

If your kid is bullied, call the police. Most school authorities are bully enablers.

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.

> 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)

First. Hand. Experience.

With both options

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Yet we can't stop indoctrinating kids from a young age that guns are a human right, no matter the cost.

It turns out that the only way to stop an indoctrinator is with a bad guy with a gun.

Suspending the bullies and expelling the manipulative and dangerous girl would certainly have helped.

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.

> The team reassessed his threat as moderate, which reduced the monitoring.

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.

Bullying is such a hard problem. The only school system I have seen dealing with it effectively is the Sudbury Valley schools.

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.

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.

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.

They are saying it's a lot more complicated than just stopping bullying.

you have masterfully rendered my less charitable pronouncements, redundent

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.

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?

> 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.

> 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.

If you are willing to kill someone like this you are not sane. I don't know what to tell you.

We're in the age of AI and maximum surveillance state technology, and nobody here thinks we can't train AIs to do deep and continuous social analysis of schoolchildren?

Give me a break.

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.

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.

Then you perform the mental health evaluation before you are allowed to even own a gun in the first place. Along with regular evaluations thereafter to continue to be legally qualified to own a gun.

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.

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.

> 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.

And that's for parents who choose to homeschool. If you start trying to force parents to homeschool their (poorly behaved) children, most of them probably won't (and/or can't) follow through.

Then let the military run the schools and cede power to the educators for discipline. You can't have it both ways.

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.

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.

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?

You think placing younger kids with older, stronger, more hormone/testosterone/violent kids will decrease bullying?

The notion of keeping kids in four year windows in the same school is a bad idea in my opinion.

Evidence shows that violence and other bad behaviour among boys is highly concentrated around the 14 year old mark. Statistically, older boys (16-18) are a lot better behaved and can act as a moderating influence.

schools are too much like prisons, so the same problems show up

An odd phenomenon school shootings are and continue to be with little or no intervention from the government.

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