Advice for the next high school assassins

In My Humble Opinion
1

What advice would you give to a high school kid who is sad and mad and has a gun? I didn’t have a happy high school life but I never had a gun. At the risk of being condescending my advice to a prospective teenage gunperson would be:

Think of yourself. See that the people you kill will be killing you right back. In a way that’s what will happen. You don’t deserve it. Those people may have hurt you already but if you put a bullet in them you can be sure they’ll still be doing it in your 50th year of prison. Before you pull the trigger you have free will. Afterwards you are just a statistic.

Make bullies nervous every time they see you near the dairy section in the supermarket instead. Like, what’s that new margarine flavour called? See if a neighbourhood gang has a discount rate for a bit of frightening. Use the Internet as your toy - as I did in the Obscure Claims to Fame thread. Don’t listen to you mind if it tells you to do things that you know aren’t good for your body or other people’s. Atrophying from lack of light is not good for your body. Sometimes I think that minds and bodies aren’t meant to be attached to one another. The mind operates from a lawless realm. It’s full of desires, strange energies and impulses. It doesn’t understand that if it gets what it wants sometimes the body is going to suffer. In this case, it’s never going to see the sun or the moon again and it’s going to be raped every Tuesday and be in solitary confinement the rest of the time. It’s going to get real sick. For like, 80 years.

So, whether you think that’s pathetic or not has anyone got any other advice to offer?

2

I had similar issues in high school, and I never had a gun.

The only thing I can say is: beg or plead with your parents to put you in an alternative or private school (not that you’d fare too much better there, but it’s got to be an improvement) or consider home-schooling.

I remember when I was in (public) high school I begged my parents daily to enroll me in a private school. I even offered to pay for it myself. However, my parents felt it was their civic and patriotic duty to keep me enrolled in public school, and I eventually just sort-of gave up and went through each day on auto-pilot, doing my best to emotionally isolate myself from the goings-on around me. My parents wondered why each report card was a collection of D’s and C’s.

3

Shoot yourself instead of fifteen others.

Yes, that sounds harsh. I do feel for kids that are being picked on at school. And I do realise that children can be very, very mean. I think every reasonable effort should be made to stop bullies from mentally wrecking their victims.

But nothing, I repeat, nothing is bad enough that it provides an adequate excuse for walking down a school cafetaria whilst shooting fellow students at random.

4

*Sarcasm Alert Sarcasm Alert, very poor tates ahead

Guys you need more armarment, get yourselves some smoke grenades, gas masks, tear gas and a couple more guns. you don’t just go in blazing, you scare the hell out of them with the smoke and tear gas then open up on them, you’ll get more of em.

[/Sarcasm]

now after the bad taste of the above Eddie will offer some real advice.

All through HS Eddie was picked on cause he was silent and didnt have many friends. Thinking back Eddie feels that some might have thought that HE was capable of doing such stuff such as bring guns to school etc. Eddie wasn’t, Eddie never cared what the asnine people around him thought. That’s Eddie’s advice, don’t give a shit what those other people think/say, wait, Eddie did and now 10-11 years later Eddie has 3 cars 3 motorcycles, a big house and a nice yard. Eddie has also found out that most of those idiots are now in Jail, drug addicts, or have too many kids cause they are stupid. Eddie now has the last laugh and didn’t have to do a thing!

5

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Coldfire *
**

Shoot yourself instead of fifteen others.**

That’s what happened to a girl in my high school class
. She and her twin had been picked on relentlessly for years-6 or 7.

So she killed herself, (she was 16) leaving a journal that made some of the reasons abundantly clear.

The reaction from the group of, of 10 or so people who made her life hell?

“Oh, she did it because she was pregnant. She was a whore.”

Yuppers! No regret, no remorse (at least none visible).

From the teachers? “We did everything we could.”

True. If you ** ignore ** the situation, or avoid it, any steps you take are ‘everything you could do’.

I agree that they should not shoot people in their schools, but the situation these kids are in are a lot like prison. You have to go, and once you get there, many of the guards don’t care about much beyond punching the clock. So all the nasty elements can run free and do pretty much what they want, short of permanent physical scarring on their victims.

ahem

Sorry…was having a high school flashback. This is just my .02 on why I feel that teachers and administration share responsibility in these situations.

6

My advice to anyone thinking of killing some classmates is do it on your own time, . Killing people has turned into a Jerry Springer episode, I mean whatever happened to the self-satisfaction of knowing you off’d somebody, instead of trying to making your self look tough to everybody.

Always remember that when the day is over, nobody really cares how "bad" you are, except the cops.
7

Look beyond tomorrow.

Yes, tomorrow, the jocks and the cool kids will point their fingers, laugh, call you names, and perform their usual unpleasantries. And you will continue to suffer the indignities they dish out. Not a nice thought.

Sure, tomorrow, it would be easy to grab a gun from somewhere and go crazy. Sounds like it could be a good way to get back at those who torment you. Might even be fun, and you might even be able to do a really cool dance of death like in the late-night gangster movies on TV. If not, at least you and your story will make the front pages and the TV news across the nation. Then they’ll know. They’ll all know. What a way to be remembered!

But if you do take that gun to school, what comes after tomorrow? Well, a lot of people who (though you may not know it) love and care for you will miss you. You might cause some people to be missed permanently by their loved ones. Yes, even those jocks and cool kids have parents and siblings and other relatives and friends–who, by the way, have done nothing to you. Why torment them and make them suffer? That’s not your style; you’re better than that.

Besides, bars and institutional gray walls are not nice things to be in the middle of. Lawyers are paid to be nice to you, but the cops and guards aren’t. Still, you’ll no doubt have plenty of new friends in the big house. Maybe not the kind you want, though.

But let’s suppose tomorrow, and the day after that and the day after that and so on, you just continue on as you have been. Yes, it will be hard to ignore, and no, you can’t say or do anything to make the pain stop. But what will eventually happen?

You’ll go to college. Probably make very good grades. Maybe go on to graduate studies, or be offered an extremely well-paying position somewhere. Nice offices, lots of respect, you know the story.

What are the former jocks and cool kids doing? Probably not much. Maybe college, but little to no hope as to doing as well as you. Certainly not likely to land the kind of position that you will when they graduate. If they graduate.

It’s a sad fact of life that people like you really only come into their own after high school. If you can make it through high school, you’ll be a world-beater. Guaranteed.

So put the gun away. And look beyond tomorrow.

8

Advice to kids?

Wow. That’s a tough one. I remember all too well being the new kid in 6th grade. The taunting, the teasing, the name-calling. So many of them and only one of me. I used to fall asleep at night with my ears ringing with those voices calling my name and so many other horrible names. If I had access to a gun, I am sure I would have considered using it. The rage I had was all-consuming. My parents told me to just bear it. That was it. I withdrew into my studies and quit all activities that would put me out there where I would be a target.

7th and 8th grade were even worse. As I was becoming sexually mature and wanting to make friends with girls, the tauntings by so many of the kids got even more intense as they sought to build themselves up by tearing me down.And what girls was ever going to talk to a kid who was the object of such venom? The picture got bleaker and bleaker.

Teachers didn’t know or didn’t want to know about it. I remember so well one day. The kid behind me was talking in a normal voice, calling me every name you could think of. The other kids either joined in or stood by laughing. Finally he spat on me. Again and again. I stood up to leave to wash it off and the teacher stopped ME! I showed her what had happened and she did nothing! NOTHING!

I am only surprised that these shootings happen so rarely. Honestly.

The only advice I would give a child in a position like I was in is that there is a magic moment down the road. Graduation. At that magic moment the tormentors will fall away. You will exit the darkness of the school and enter a world where you have choices. And in time the eternity of school will shrink to the handful of years that it really was. You can move to a place where people did not grow up hearing you called the lowest, most disgusting names. You can find friends and even love.

Bear it. I have no better advice than what my parents told me. Sad, isn’t it? Use your mind to withdraw, to rise above, to endure. Don’t give in to the desire to destroy. Find help if you can. And know that you are not alone.

9

Firstly, am I missing something? I feel like it’s very clever but I have no idea what it means. can someone run it through the quip-o-meter?

My advice for the next school assassins is on two very tired and jaded levels. Shooting the football team is only going to elevate them to sainthood and send you to the proverbial pits of hell. It won’t bring equality amongst your peers at all. Remember Columbine? Someone tried to put up crosses in memory of the assassins but they were torn down. So even in death, you won’t be considered on par with those you hate.

I had two friends in highschool. That’s it. I was a total geek, a loser, a ‘weird artistic chick’. I understand the bitterness you feel towards those who have it so easy. Murdering them doesn’t make it easier for anyone. And if you think all of this violence is going to make people rethink how they treat the freaks in school, you’ve got another thing coming.

And on a purely selfish note to all of you teens out there, if you feel at anytime in the future that you’re going to go on a shooting spree, please keep your mouth shut about what music you listen to. It just makes the rest of us look stupid.

jarbaby

10

Well, that didn’t take long

“March 7 — An eighth-grade girl shot a fellow female student today during lunch at a Roman Catholic high school in Williamsport, PA”

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/williamsport010307.html

11

I don’t believe that young people’s lives are any worse today, or that they’re reacting any more savagely than in the past. I won’t bore you with my life’s saga, or that of my dad growing up in the middle of the zoot suit riots, or what my grandfather encountered while hopping freights. But I will say that, from my own perspective, the option to safely self-medicate has been taken away from the outsider kids by the war on drugs. Like all wars, the easiest, not the most strategic, targets get hit first, and so the mellowing properties of marijuana is lacking from our society, leaving only crank and refined sugar to play hell with the already volatile adolescent body chemistry.

12

I have a little advice. Its a pretty cold comfort, but it might help a little:

Dear future mass-killer, there is something that you ought to know. You are probably right about a lot of things. Think the rules and regulations you are subjected to arbitrary and unfair? Yep, you’re correct. High School’s have the some of the strangest, most capricious, unfair rules there are. Think your teachers ought to do something other than whine about how little they are paid, and how ungrateful you little bastards are? Yep, you’re right - lots of them are bad and stupid and burned out. Think your classmates are pointlessly cruel, for no real reason? Yep, they are. Think this is about as bad as it gets for you? Yep, I’d be willing to bet that, unless something goes tragically wrong in your life, high school is pretty much the worst experiance you’ll have to endure.

You aren’t insane. It isn’t just you. You are in looking-glass land. You can rest easy knowing that lots and lots of other people are going through the same thing. It can be endured. I made it, and I was no tougher or smarter than you are. Hope that helps, at least a little bit.

13

Well, I don’t know how many of you who have replied so far actually ARE teenagers, and I’m not going to go into how much worse (if at all) my adolescence is than yours was. What I can tell you, however, is this: When one is teased and tortured every day, it lowers one’s self-esteem, self image, whatever you want to call it. This means that not only is one tortured every day at school, one is also tortured by one’s own thoughts ALL THE TIME. One can never get away from one’s thoughts. If you expect one to listen to your advice, when one is tortured by people for seven hours a day, and by one’s mind for the rest of the time, I think you should think again. FOUR YEARS. Every day for four years. Plus weekends, when you are depressed about having no one to do anything with, and if you go to the mall alone you are teased and laughed at. Plus summers when again, you’re depressed and laughed at if you go to any social gathering alone. “Wait until college, things will be better then.” I don’t think I can wait that long.

Please note that the above does not apply to ME (anymore) but easily could. It did until about a month ago, and I remember how it feels. I really don’t think I could have made it another year and a half.

14

My advice to any would be assassins: don’t do it. Coming into school packing fire power and planning to kill all those who torment you rarely works(them suckers move fast) and even when it does yer pretty much sunk. My suggestion is to breathe deeply, regain self control and find pleasure in private and non-school oriented hobbies. Don’t let your life center around school, don’t be overly dramatic. Trust me here, you’re much less likely to get caught if you off them one by one and no one sees you do it than if you try for them all at once.

15

It’s a creative revenge idea I thought of. I call it my no-one will eat margarine in this town again item. The concept of creative revenge - whether it works or is only a game for the terminally ill - probably needs to be discussed in another thread. But, nevertheless, it seems to me that margarine belongs to a small group of supermarket products that can be bought, taken home and modified, returned to the shelf and still look like new. I not talking about adding arsenic at all - just extra taste from any body fluids you may have at hand. Fearing not I become my enemy in the instant that I speak.

StevenCT said: The only advice I would give a child in a position like I was in is that there is a magic moment down the road. Graduation. At that magic moment the tormentors will fall away. You will exit the darkness of the school and enter a world where you have choices. And in time the eternity of school will shrink to the handful of years that it really was.

When reading that I found myself thinking what a curious thing it is that within a day of leaving high school students who bully must somehow put a stop to their behaviour. Is that right? I mean, they’re not likely to get a job in a bank over the summer and be found 6 months later bullying their workmates and customers. Even though wages depend on civility I still find it a little strange that personalities can change overnight.

16

You know what’s weird about all this? After all the school shootings, they have the media coverage. Over and over. For days. And do they talk to the kids? About what should be done? Rationally? They might send their cameras to the school when it re-opens to get the teary eyes and the hugs and the memorials and everything, but do they really, seriously sit down and talk to the kids? NOT the popular ones, not particularly the “victim” type, but everyone in general. I think what would be beneficial would be to put together a panel of kids from all kinds of backgrounds, and discuss serious issues like these. In the media. They have all these adults, chiefs of police, city comissioners, principals, psychologists, child behavior experts and so on, but do they ever talk to these young adults LIKE young adults? Or are they just going for the reaction shots, the tears and so on? Kids know what’s up. Kid’s will talk. Some, anyway. I know I’m not the only decently intelligent teenager. Talk to us. That’s kind of what I was hoping for in my now ancient “ask the teenager” thread.

17

Back in my day, if you were a crazed loner student who felt the need to make a statement by committing a serious felony, you went with arson not homicide. All you kids nowadays ought to think about it; you still get to show the world and go to prison, but all the other kids will think you’re a cool badass rather than a fucked up loser. But if you’re one of those people who really really really has to shoot someone to make their point, then suicide’s the way to go for you.

18

I fail to see how this is “creative.” It’s not even remotely intelligent. How does this get to the tormentors and not to just any schmoe around town?

Random, undirected, uncontrolled revenge is indistinguishable from random predatory violence.

19

As the mother of one of those kids who might just be the next school assassin (if she’s not the next school suicide) I find this thread fascinating, and I’m responding if only to bump it.

There are so many great minds on this board, and for once there is a thread worthy of their input.

Let’s be serious here people, how do we make the world a place that young people want to participate in? I don’t have the answer, but I would most certainly like to hear people’s opinions.

20

reprise, why do you think your kid might do this? Has he/she been bullied? Have you considered suing the school and the bullies if possible? If the school wants to meet with you, consult a lawyer and have him/her present or tape-record the meeting.

“How do we make the world a place that young people want to participate in?” IMHO, we should do what has to be done and pay what has to be paid to make our schools the best in the world to prepare young people for adult life and prevent their harrassment in the process. And sports should be greatly de-emphasized (right, that could happen).

It is harsh. Would you care to revise this in light of the fact that, as Alatariel pointed out, SOME ALREADY DO? They just usually don’t make headlines.

This is from an article titled Clique…Clique…Bang! by Dan Savage (of the column Savage Love). It was on page 18 of the May 14, 1999 issue of the Chicago READER. I wish I could quote the whole thing. And for the record, what he says about his HS experience also applies to mine.

Savage also quotes the alleged suicide note of Eric Harris, printed only in the Rocky Mountain News. Although police later said it was not authentic, the News said they got it from a police source. The note may not be authentic, but the feelings definitely are.

From this AP article about the re-opening of Columbine: http://www.apbnews.com/newscenter/breakingnews/1999/08/17/columbine0817_01.html

Trevor doesn’t get it. How many people do?