Ohio School Shooter - Moral/Legal Role of the Parents?

Great Debates
61

Excellent point that everybody else is ignoring. Yes whoever his caregivers were should have taken steps to get him the help he needed and stop the bullying. If there is a record of complaints of bullying that went unaddressed, then the school personnel bear a large share of the responsibility. Even without complaints, the teachers and administrators need to watch for problems and deal with them. How many other thousands of kids are leading a life of misery? Why do parents allow administrators to get away with neglecting the serious problem of widespread bullying?

Parents, if you don’t want your kids shot, see to it that bullying isn’t tolerated in their school.

62

Define bullying. Physical, emotional or both? How do you stop the bullying that happens off the school grounds?

63

Nothing. Unfortunately this is such a rare occurrence that I’m going to go out on a limb and say that in the scheme of things this is no big deal, and while it sucks, oh well.

64

I think this is an important point. People often scream about zero-tolerance policies that get kids expelled for drawing pictures of guns (and that kind of stuff is stupid, I’ll grant). When CPS agencies do get involved, people scream about over-zealous agencies, but when they DON’T get involved, or school administrators DON’T take action regarding a student exhibiting troublesome behavior, some of those same people scream about the lack of intervention.

For every shooter in an American school (and again, let’s put it into perspective - as horrific as these acts are, they are a vanishingly small number), there are hundreds of kids posting the same stuff on Facebook or expressing the same ideas in their blogs who are not plotting to shoot up their school.

65

Right. It is far, far, far more likely that your teen is:

Insanity
Schizophrenia
Depression
Overly Active Imagination
Attention Deficit Disorder

Than that he or she is planning to shoot up the school. Shit happens. Get over it.

Sometimes it is common enough that it is worth a conceited effort to try and stop it (serial killers, bullying)
Sometimes it is so uncommon that the events are merely artifacts and have little to no meaning except statistical outliers.

66

And that’s not a straw man.

67

And also, holding parents legally responsible for their kids behavior could cause a moral hazard, e.g.:

Kid: “Can we go to the beach?”
Parent: “No, we don’t go to the beach until August. It’s only June.”
Kid: “If you don’t take me to the beach, I’ll throw spitballs at lunch tomorrow and you’ll go to jail for bad parenting and lose your job.”

68

Most of the “experts” seem to be nothing more than Monday morning quarterbacks at best, drumming up hysteria and fitting in their pet theories after the fact.

69

Haha, I was thinking of this too. It just seems like a bad idea all-around.

70

All of the above. Maybe once we clean up the schools we can worry about off the school grounds. At least out of school, people can choose to stay away from the bullies hang out.

71

This. The only “solution” to this problem is a massive overreaction by government officials and the jailing of parents who couldn’t have done much of anything to stop it anyways. The cure (that wouldn’t actually cure anything) would be worse than the disease.

Also, how far do we take this imputed negligence to the parents? If a kid is caught smoking a joint, should the parents be punished?

The only time I would attempt to apply criminal or civil liability to parents is if they had a specific knowledge that the kid was going to do something like this and sat on their hands.

72

You know, I see something like this, and I think of my sister. The family certainly did take her mental illness seriously, yet she still wound up killing herself.

And I think about how I was bullied in school, and how my parents tried to stop it - from apprehending kids in the act of beating me and marching them into the principal’s office, to trying to get some social worker attention for me, and so many other things. The social worker? She was convinced I was a paranoid schizophrenic because I was so concerned “somebody” was trying to “get me”. All in my head, she kept repeating… until the day I was found beaten unconscious and bloddy in a school hallway with broken ribs. Fancy that - there really WERE people out to “get me”. And my fucking useless “counselor” tried to clean me up, send me home, and bury the whole matter, at one point claiming I “fell” - which leads to the question of why he didn’t get medical help for an injured student.

After that, the school administration started to actually fucking DO something and the beatings stopped - yet I still carried a “dangerous” reputation as a “crazy” kid. Which is one reason I got the hell out of the area once I reached 18, to start over where that wasn’t following me. When visiting the old neighborhood 15 years later I bumped into someone who remembered me, who was polite to my face, but later told the friend I was visiting that she remembered me as “dangerous” and “crazy” and had I disappeared because I committed some crime?

Having been a beaten and bullied kid I have a different perspective than a lot of people, and the truth is these things are ALWAYS more complicated than the media portrays. Parents aren’t all-powerful. Frequently, they don’t have infinite resources, either. All too often authorities are inclined to bury problems rather than try to solve them. Children can be cruel, nasty shits and all too many adults have forgotten just how much shit they did their parents never knew about.

Most people don’t go on murder sprees - but I’m not convinced we can spot the ones who do ahead of time. All the security cameras, lockdowns, zero-tolerance policies, and so forth aren’t going to stop Bad Things from happening.

Frankly, I think a zero-tolerance policy on bullying and teasing would be more effective at preventing these tragedies than expelling children for carrying a butter knife to school, but what the hell would I know? I’ve been informed far too often that my experience “damaged” me, made me “biased” or “emotional” and thus my opinion counts for jack and shit.

73

Yes, people are in denial over bullying because it is tough to deal with. I hope you saw Sandwich’s #6 post and my #61. Nobody should live such a life and the killing will go on until we get serious about protecting the bullied.

74

Actually, the local press has been following up on the story and most of this appears to have been irrelevant.

I fully agree that we, (society, families, schools, etc.), need to do a better job to stop bullying. However, there is no indication that this shooter was actually suffering from bullying.

The family, (that is, the grandparents with whom the kids lived), are reported to have been very involved with all the kids in the family, providing opportunites for counselling as well as personal support. The shooter was attending a special school that specializes in kids with behavior problems; (he attended Chardon elementary and middle schools when younger, but he was at Chardon High as a transfer point from home to his actual high school); none of the kids who were shot had any real connection with the shooter. The bullying that had originally been claimed was something that went on, intermittently, several years ago in middle school and had stopped years ago.
Interestingly, the Prosecutor went on public record almost immediately after the shooter was interviewed, talking about the boy being “troubled.” (In other words, the prosecutor is handing the Defense a psych plea, which would seem to indicate that the shooter’s problems run much deeper than a reaction to bullying.)

Certainly, we should not minimize or tolerate bullying, but just as in the Colombine shootings, initial reports of bullying appear to have been exaggerated or even invented.

75

Yes, I’ve read the entire thread. Comments like “why did the parents allow bullying? Why didn’t they stop it?” doesn’t help at all. My parents DID try, but they were just two people of modest means. They were going up against entire school administrations that preferred to blame the victim(s) rather than put a stop to the mess. Should my parents have moved to another school district? Maybe - except with my mom in and out of hospitals a lot due to heart disease and all the problems that caused moving was often just not feasible. And why should the bullied have to move? Do we tell burglary victims they should have lived elsewhere if they didn’t want to be robbed? Should they have gotten professional help for me? Well they TRIED but the bitch totally misdiagnosed the situation.

I think all too often folks want a simple solution to the problem and just one or two people to carry the blame. The reality is that when something like this happens - be it bullying that results in a suicide or some BS that results in a school shooting - it’s not as simple as it appears and there are multiple parties that carry some blame, although at the same time every single one of those parties might have been doing their best. Some of those wanting to hang it all on the parents or some type of music or game are likely guilty of dropping the ball themselves on occasion, which is why they’re so invested with finding something or someone else to blame, anyone but themselves.

76

Of course it won’t. Having been a teenager myself, I know that we all seem like sociopaths, and then all teens would be locked up in mental health institutions.

77

Kids don’t always tell their parents if they’re being bullied. Same goes for if they’re feeling depressed. I know, because I hid both of those things from my parents in middle and high school. I thought they wouldn’t do anything to help, and they would probably just blame me. If they knew anyway, they didn’t say or do anything about it.

I doubt this kind of thinking by kids has entirely disappeared in the time since I was in middle school and high school. I’m quite sure there are still parents in denial about their kid not fitting in socially or being depressed.

78

Say a kid is depressed and/or being bullied, and the parents find out about it.

What are we going to require them to do to not be legally responsible if their kid goes on a shooting rampage?

Get counseling for the kid? What kind of counseling, and how much? Who’s going to pay for that, if the parents can’t? What if the kid doesn’t want to go to counseling? Are we going to say that any kid who is depressed or being bullied is a threat to themselves or others, and therefore can be forced into counseling or medication? That would make kids more likely to tell their parents if they’re feeling depressed or being bullied at school.

Should they have to transfer their kid to another school? Move to another school district? Send their kid to a private school? That could get really expensive, especially if the first change of schools doesn’t fix the problem.

Do they have to homeschool their kid? What if they’re not qualified to do so, or can’t afford to lose one income?

Do they have to get rid of any guns they own? There’s a rights issue here- you’re taking away the right to bear arms from someone who has not committed a crime, unless you’re going to make having a depressed kid or a kid who is bullied a crime.

Parents “not tolerating” their kids having sex, using alcohol or drugs, or driving recklessly has worked so well to fix those problems. How are parents going to keep their kids from bullying other kids? I only have personal experience of being bullied, not of being a bully, but I suspect bullies don’t always tell their parents what they’re doing to other kids. Teachers or other school personnel aren’t always going to see bullying happening, especially if it happens outside of school (such as online).

It’s a little easier to make bullying a crime than it is to make being depressed or being bullied a crime, but that’s not without problems. Some bullying takes the form of verbal abuse or social exclusion, rather than actual physical violence. There are some rights issues and some practical issues with making those things crimes, especially social exclusion.

79

What is the downside?

80

Not everything in the world can be prevented or prepared for beyond a certain point. There will always be angry and vengeful people and unless you take away all weapons, people will occasionally die like this. We live in a world where people obsess unrealistically about removing all possibility that anything bad can happen to us, or to the people we care for, as if this will ever be possible, or indeed whether it would be worthwhile if it was possible.

On another note, whining about bullying is pathetic. Speaking as someone who was bullied throughout their school years, I know that it isn’t pleasant and it doesn’t make you feel good about yourself. However that is true of many things in life, and you are likely to meet people very often who try to undermine you, albeit in more subtle ways.

The willingness to resort to moral arguments and the ‘this isn’t fair, people don’t deserve it’ mentality is just a form of weakness. The answer is to make yourself physically and mentally strong. This isn’t easy, but it shouldn’t have to be easy for one to do it. We as individuals and as societies become weaker when we pander to these silly Christian/post-Christian moral values which promote weakness and meekness, subservience to those above us, and equality. People are not equal and this is essentially obvious, no matter how much people like to pretend it isn’t; there are weak people and strong people and weakness should not be promoted as difference but as inferiority.

In a sense, weak children need to get picked on to either strengthen them for the realities of the world, or weed them out. Suicides and behaviour that land you in prison and away from society are two such example of being weeded out, and this is coming from someone who attempted suicide during their teenage years and knows how weak and miserable that feeling of hopelessness and despair is, but if you can’t get through it, fix your life, become strong and proud of yourself then I don’t think there is a place in this world for you, nor that people should mollycoddle your weakness and blame the power of those you cower from. If people had an accurate sense of their real self worth, and the power which the body and mind can attain, they wouldn’t feel the need to equalise things with guns, nor kill themselves to escape the system.

The parents are guilty of raising weak children, and unfortunately there is no punishment for that.