School shooters are my heroes

Great Debates
201

True…very true

also true.

First I’m glad were never able to achieve your desire.
your mind is obviously somewhat f—ed up if you think
it is ok to just go and randomly kill people…
I could almost understand if it was just ‘taking out’ the
one or two who are bothering you, but not to just shoot
whatever happens to be in range

I personally think this whole school shooting thing is
crazy…Some dumb kids don’t like their school, so they
bring guns and/or bombs to school…and kill randomly.

so what gets accomplished by this:

  • There are a bunch of innocent victims most of
    whom probably didn’t even know the killers
  • The school has a bad name from that point on
  • The town has a bad name

Of corse the media has a feeding frensy every time something
like this happens (if you live in one of the towns where
it’s happened you know about all the satellite trucks and
cameramen that ‘move in’ and stay around for days or even
weeks after). The worst thing about this media hype is that
the next kids will want to out-do it.

From what I’ve seen of this thread, some of the posts
are almost threatning violence…if they were more direct
(i’ll probably get bitched at for saying this)** those users
should be traced and reported to the cops**

202

Wabbit, prior to my being able to defend myself adequately, I got my ass beat several times for making smart assed remarks back to the bullies. I rode my bike to school, so the usual course of action was to wait for me at the bike rack after school and kick my butt.

You got lucky. Not too many kids in my school smarted off at the bullies and got away with it. They either got punched out behind the gym where teachers were not looking, met after school at the bike rack or bounced off of the bathroom walls. The usual way was a challenge to meet the aggressor after school in a specific place. If you did not show up, then it was open season on you whenever they could get you without teachers seeing what was going on.

Not every person handles being bullied in the same way. I know kids who never could fight back in any form. Some of them seem normal today, but a whole lot have obvious problems. Some cope, some do not.

I sometimes suspect that the major weapons violence in school might not be that much from bullies, but from kids having been pushed beyond their limits by bullies. There is a whole different social environment for kids in school, plus these incidents happen during the confusing time of puberty. Not only do the kids have to face bullies, but they get to try to cope with their rapidly changing emotions and bodies.

In my gym class, if you were not sports oriented, you were a fag. Period. Well, I never liked organized sports. Being nearsighted, I often had problems seeing the ball approach. So, you got jeered at by your classmates. Years later, in college, we had to take PE up to age 30. So, still disliking sports, I selected a class that was all exercise. That worked out well.

Now, later in life, I had to make some adjustments because after I learned I could fight, I got into arguments and fights too often and when this was pointed out to me by a friend, realized that I was over compensating for the torture given to me in school. I was making others pay hard for what had been done to me. I had to stop reacting emotionally to perceived challenges and learned to act intellectually. I started walking away from fights when I could.

So, there you have another aspect of school bullying; making others pay for what was done to the victim, usually people who had nothing to do with it. Frequently, this will show up directed at a wife or husband or even children. More often it shows up in interpersonal relationships in business.

We all know the corporate snitch, the company idea thief, the overbearing manager or supervisor, or the ever present idea critic. I figure a whole bunch of nasty, clever lawyers were picked on as kids and now use the law for revenge. Having known and still knowing some alcoholics and drug abusers, I figure a lot of these folk were using booze in the beginning to gain courage, fit in and feel better after being tortured into low self images in school.

The repercussions of school torture are far reaching. Probably much further than most suspect.

203

When I was in school I was never physically picked on, probably because I would fight at the drop of a hat. For example one time a guy about a foot taller than me trys to push in front of me to cut, the only reason I didn’t get in a fight with him is because he backed off. On the other hand am picked on by my entire class when I am. The only reason I never tried to start hitting who ever started them in the class being a teacher was usually there and I had a thing about starting a fight in front of a teacher.

I never even considered killing them though, because whenever I felt angry enough to hurt someone I either attacked them or cried(If I knew a teacher was present I started crying for some reason).

My point is that the shooters and such all are people who bottle up their emotions. They were the ones that the only outlet for their emotions was shooting people. They would have been satisfied probably had someone given them an oulet other than shooting their classmates. They probably would have been bullies had they been bigger or stronger.

204

Asmodian, I think I disagree with you, but then, we don’t have a large selection of kid killers to choose from or to study. Those gang banger kids are a whole different situation altogether.

One kid went nuts when his chick screwed some guy he knew and broke up with him. Sort of, because it seems she remained real friendly with him even after he killed the other kid and went through trial. The key thing here is that instead of beating the guys butt, he chose to shoot him, which leads me to believe that either he was a noncombatant or the other guy a much better fighter. Most combatants will select fists first in school situations.

Several of the others were outcasts and picked on.

You situation is not applicable because you stood up to bullies. There are many kids who cannot.

That seems to be a bone of contention here; that many kids cannot stand up for themselves, which is a form of defense and many cannot physically defend themselves. In school, once a kid is discovered to not fight back, he/she becomes prey. There are very few exceptions.

Today, not all kids carrying weapons in school are the prey, but often the predators, proving to their pals how bad they are. Shootings by kids involving kids that happen after school and off of the school grounds are not notable, but tend to involve bullies encountering other bullies.

Look, you harass a kid day in and day out, something’s going to change. For one thing, the daily unusually high dosage of adrenaline, the frequent constant state of tension, the psychological pressure causes just as much damage to a kid as being shoved into a war zone does to some soldiers. Basically, to these kids, school is a war zone.

Adult repercussions cannot only be psychological, but physical, with the development of ulcers, colitis, heart problems, persistent headaches, over eating, balemia, anorexia, nervous ticks, twitches and jerks, hypochondria, susceptibility to diseases and a weakened immune system.

People have known about all of the above symptoms in adults who work in high stress positions for years, but never have applied them to kids.

As I indicated in a much previous post – excluding the very rare exception to the rule --, for almost all kids, grades 1 through 5 or 6 are just fine. Minimal problems. Easily handled. But, when they get into the multiple teachers, classes, classrooms, environment of grades 6 through 12, where everyone is jammed into a general scramble 6 or 7 times a day, the problems start.

Suddenly, even going to the bathroom is a challenge because they go from seeing one or two kids at a time in the clean toilet, to 15 or 20 crammed in there, smoking, joking, acting up, making bowel jokes, banging of stall doors, being crude, rude and idiots. A whole bunch of kids actually try not to use the school bathrooms or try to use them only during class, when everyone is out of the hallways.

Then the noisy, hardly controlled lunchroom mass, and the like 1200 students massed all over the school grounds prior to the bell ringing for classes to begin, with little supervision.

Heck, even today the bus drivers have little control over the riders, where when I rode the school bus, the drivers were usually male, usually tough and their word was law. Act up and you got in hot water with the principal and your folks were called in. Those drivers thought nothing of stopping the bus, stomping back through the kids, grabbing some obnoxious little snot, dragging him up to the first seat (the punishment seat), slamming his little ass down and making him stay there to keep an eye on him.

If any kid gave him too much trouble, he’d flag a cop down and kick the kid off of the bus or the cop would remove him bodily.

Not any more. Now the terror can start on the bus.

We do need to look very deeply into our current school environments, hire more staff, build more schools, reduce class size, make teachers happy so they do a better job and can make the students feel safer. Instead of the parents blaming the schools for everything, the schools need to start holding the parents responsible for the actions of their little monsters.

We need to put the teeth back in schools.

205

[No, I didn’t read the whole thread before posting. It’s too damn long.]

I think there is always too much assumption as to the innocence of the victims in school schootings. In this thread, there’s too much assumption about their guilt in the field of bullying. In the case of Columbine, most victims were complete strangers to the shooters, therefore bullying, jealousy, or any of the other potential motives are completely unfounded. The way I see it, shooters want to strike out against someone, and because they are sociopathic, they choose random killing over the more logical choice of premeditated murder of a specific person or persons.

  1. Murder is never completely justifiable. However, in some cases, a revenge killer should be shown some empathy. It sucks to be picked on.

  2. Killing strangers is not an effective way to get revenge. The kids that picked on Andy Williams are still in that school, and will probably continue picking on people shortly. That’s not to say they should have been killed, but if revenge was the motive, then why are they still around?

  3. Therefore, none of the recent school shootings qualify as revenge killings, and there should be no defending their actions. Show me a student who is picked on SEVERELY, and takes direct action, and I might be able to defend, but in this case, it is simply a psychopathic act of senseless violence.

JET, I think that you’re thoughts on the situation are not as logical as they should be. I can understand if you were picked on and want revenge, but as I said before, revenge is for the people that wrong you, not the pedestrians you run down on the sidewalk or the kids who happen to be in your vicinity on the day you snap.

206

Trevor doesn’t get it. Anyone who doesn’t is simply increasing the likelihood that it will occur again and again and again. **
[/QUOTE]

Not only doesn’t Trevor get it but comments of that ilk are often “leakage” from a capacity for psychological violence - in other words the real perpetrators of the Columbine tragedy may be chaffing at the bit because human sacrifice is currently being frowned upon.

God help their children.

Jorolat

207

And how must I forgive those whom have harmed me Lord?
Forgive them as you would want me to forgive you for your faults which have caused harm.

208

Here’s the flaw in your argument: I never did anything to the bullies that picked on me. If I had emulated Andy Williams, the victims would not have done anything to me, either. See the logic? Undeserved violence is matched by undeserved violence. Quid pro quo.

Andersen: Oh man, please don’t bring the concept of divine forgiveness into this debate. Forgiveness is equivalent to saying, “It’s okay that you did this to me, because I deserved it.”

J.E.T.

209

Why is self-esteem for losers?

You still don’t get it, do you, JET? If you use the tactics of a bully, you become a bully. You become what you hate. Since you hate bullies, this requires you to hate yourself. If you hate yourself, you will be more miserable and thus more vulnerable to taunting and teasing. It’s a vicious cycle.

Or maybe, deep down, in spite of your protestations, you actually admire them. We tend to admire those who are stronger than we and wish we could be more like them.

Whatever the reason, it’s your hell and you are part of the reason you are in it. They may have started it, but you continue it. You have to break the cycle and it isn’t easy and it takes time, perhaps years. Not really knowing you, I can’t tell you exactly what you need to do, but I’m sure someone knows you well enough to help you. Trust them. Listen to them.

Be well.

210

A belated comment on the Columbine innocent victims, which seems to have caused some doubt or confusion.

Anyone ever hear of agoraphobia? It’s not a fear of heights, but is a fear of crowds, and, when you narrow it down even more selectively, it turns into a fear or hatred of people. A lot of depressives who suffer from anxiety affective disorders also suffer agoraphobia and tend to become more reclusive than normal.

A major amount of depressives were tortured in school. Their depressions started in school, but probably went unrecognized and untreated until much later in adult life when they could no longer control the symptoms.

In the extreme condition of agoraphobia, the part where the victim dislikes people, it is not unlikely that if he or she decides to kill his or her tormentors, then anyone who stood by, doing nothing becomes a target, for in the person’s eyes, they are virtually as bad as the target people. They are resented because they can handle bullies, can defend themselves, and are so superior that they will not get involved to stop the victim from being bullied.

It is known that if the bullies get much negative response from bystanders, they leave the victim alone.

So, when the shooting started, the kids were attacking their tormenters, though it is quite possible that some few were shot just because the kids lost control once they began shooting.

Most agoraphobiacs will simply be suspicious of and avoid most people, tending to have only few close friends and few close relationships, but combine that with enough torture pressure to push them over the edge, where killing becomes the only option, and it is doubtful that they will be very selective.

Banning guns will not solve the problem. When I was in school, no kid carried a gun, but they carried knives. I carried, and still do, a pocket knife. If you want to kill someone, guns make it so much more easier, but if you are determined to do so, you’ll find some way. Especially today, with assorted net sites giving out all sorts of information on how to kill people with home made items.

211

Word of advice: Trying to read any meaning into my sig is an exercise of futility. It’s nothing more than a collection of odd statements.

Anything that does not kill me makes me stronger. Which suggests the corollary: I am stronger than anything I kill. Be it physical killing or the psychological kind. Sometimes you have to harness the demons and subvert them to do your will, though what you do with them might not be what society agrees is “nice.”

In other words, you have to do SOMETHING with the pain. Letting it dominate the rest of your life may be considered failure – harnessing it to do your dirty work, be it writing a great novel or becoming a mass murderer, is considered victory. Both are laudable actions in my world.

BREAKING NEWS: Looks like San Diego is making a bid to become the school-shooting capital of the country. An 18-year-old student in El Cajon, which is in the same school district as Santee, went on a spree with a shotgun yesterday. Six people were injured (including the shooter), none seriously. Nobody was killed.

Authorities are praising as a hero a police officer who just happened to be on the school grounds when the shooting broke out, and interrupted the shooter during his rampage. The shooter was shot in the jaw and remains hospitalized. All other victims have been treated and released. The policeman was not injured. Story is at http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/03/23/school.shooting.01/index.html .

Unlike Andy Williams & the Columbine kids, the El Cajon shooter was described as an “outcast” but NOT bullied. In the words of one student, “This is a kid who didn’t get picked on very often because most of the kids were afraid of him.”

I get the impression that this kid more closely fit the bullying mentality as opposed to the bullied. If that’s true, it would be a case of somebody trying to emulate his betters…and failing miserably. :slight_smile:

“His betters”, in this case, being the downtrodden underclass, people like myself and Andy and Eric & Dylan and Kip Kinkel, the true heroes of this world.

Some days it’s good to be alive. :smiley:

J.E.T.

212

In response to the latest shooter, the outcast, I figure it is more of a copycat revenge motive not at all related to being bullied.

You have here a kid who was already twisted enough so that other kids were afraid of him and he had graduated. Technically, he is no longer a kid. This incident sounds more or less like a nasty, twisted b-----d, out for revenge and to make a name for himself.

I mean, look at the weapon, a shotgun. How can you miss killing someone with a weapon that fires scatter shot? Anyone ever using a shotgun knows that for something as big as a human, you have to be within so many yards or you just injure them! The fact that he did not kill anyone leads me to suspect he is out to make a name for himself, because after plea bargaining, he will probably be accused of second degree attempted murder, serve around 5 years, and get out with the status of jail time under his belt and a reputation.

Either that or her is just nasty and stupid and a copycat.

He does not fit into the basic image of the thread.

We had kids in my school who we just knew were destined for the big house after graduation and were so mean that even the usual bullies left them alone.

213

Yeah, now that I think about it, I believe you’re right. Not surprising, considering how much attention the Santee shooting is getting. It still makes him a loser.

**
Well, a shotgun isn’t a particularly lethal weapon at long range. He might not have used guns very often, unlike Kip Kinkel or those crackshot kids at Jonesboro. Again, it makes him a loser.

Sometimes I don’t know what makes me feel better – kids who succeed and make a name for themselves, or kids who have no business trying to immortalize themselves, who try anyway, and fail miserably. I laugh at the latter and cheer for the former.

Oh who am I kidding. It’s the former, definitely.

J.E.T.

214

I wonder how many of the people who “went postal” also were the victims of bullies?

215

SpyderA48 wrote:

I have used a shotgun, and I can tell you that this simply isn’t true. The normal “defense” load used when you intend to use a shotgun on a human being (i.e. if an intruder breaks into your home) is a Number 00 Buckshot load. Number 00 Buckshot consists of 9-12 pellets, each 0.33 inches in diameter. Getting hit by any one of those pellets is like getting hit by a .33 caliber bullet. It is indeed sufficient to kill. Even if your target is at a long enough range that the pattern has spread out so far that only one of those pellets hits him.

However, if the shooter were using a smaller shot-size load, say a Number 4 Shot load (don’t confuse #4 shot with #4 buckshot – buckshot pellets are much larger than shot pellets), then you’re right. He would have to be within a few yards of his targets to have a good chance of killing them. What size shot load was the shooter using?

216

*Jim Tormentor, high school wrestler, graduates and upon his parents urging he enrolls in a community college. They buy him a Camaro on his 18th birthday and life should be swell. But his college experience isn’t great because he parties too much and college professors hate his arrogant attitude. They were once nerds too.

A few semesters later, Jim is suspended from college by the administration due to a 1.5 GPA. His parents scream at him and threaten to take his Camaro away. In a fit of rage he yells, “screw you assholes, you aren’t any better than me!” crashes on a friend’s couch and gets a job at a Fortune 500 company… McDonalds. Thank god he did too, because his ditzy girlfriend gets pregnant a month later. They were too high and horny to remember condoms. Her parents want them to get married, and she’s pretty hot so he agrees.

Ten years and two children later he’s learned to keep his arrogance mostly to himself and he’s now Assistant Manager at Radio Shack. Unfortunatly, he’s reached the pinacle of his career for you see – Jim’s a prick, and nobody will ever promote him. So he falls for a lot of multi-level marketing schemes like Amway and Quixtar and ends up in debt up to his ears, losing his Camaro in the process.

Meanwhile, his ditzy wife is finally convinced by her friends to leave him on account of the physical and verbal abuse. She gets a divorce, takes half of his meager paycheck for the next ten years, vows to see a counselor and frees herself of her attraction to the bad-boy image, eventually meeting a lawyer down the road who’s looking for a trophy wife, she settles down, boinks his brains out and raises a happy family.

But during that time, alcoholism begins taking it’s toll on him and the life he lives is dominated by misery and suffering until one fateful night when he crashes his Ford pickup into someone’s livingroom. To make matters worse, his license was previously suspended because of previous DUI’s and a small record of assaults. This time, the judge locks him up for five years.

Those forty-year old guys you see at 7-11 with dirty fingernails buying 12-packs of Pabst once had Camaro’s too.*

Suffering begets suffering.

You don’t have to believe in the K- word (Karma) to understand that people get what’s coming to them in the end.

If people like J.E.T. want to sit around and imagine revenge on the thousands of innocent, also suffering people around them, then so be it. Even if he doesn’t act on it, it will follow him around just like his enemies, drawing bad situations and bad people to him until the day he dies.

My high school life wasn’t all that spectacular either. I had never won a single fight outside of Street Fighter II, girls wouldn’t go out with me and I felt like the biggest loser in the world. But I finally realized that this tormenting was transitory. So I studyed computer programming on my own, surrounded myself with good people and only a few years later made $50k a year while most of my peers were still in college.

I just turned 22 last October.

217

Gee, I almost sympathize with JET. Almost. I was extremely unpopular in elementary school. Even the girls and a teacher gang up and beat on me daily, never mind about the roving gang of boys. Never got into a one-on-one fight in the neighborhood; it was more like 15-20 on one. I managed to barely defend myself. I still think to this day that I was a reason these punks start using guns more often; they couldn’t beat up someone while the odds were 15 to 1.

Mom wondered why I don’t go out to play. That’s because I have to deal with these same classmates who fought me or sneak-attacked me in school, and these neighborhood thugs looking for an excuse to gang-up on someone. The school staff seemed helpless by this onslaught of verbal and physical attacks I suffered, and, unfortunately, was compelled to inflict in return. I was thinking of creative methods of committing acts of mass destruction and or suicide just about every day.

Fortunately, some of my bullies got suspended, and some got killed over bad drug deals or by overdosing. The teacher who be me up got herself fired (who cares where she is?) I kept my grades up and managed to enroll into a specialized high school, where the bullying was much less (the infamous gang formed there tended to attack other schools).

I came to realize that people have their own things to worry about. They don’t care, or if they do, they are totally repulsed, to the fact that I feel miserable from what I went through. And you know what? I am repulsed of the fact that I feel miserable and suffer from chronic depression. I am repulsed that these feelings as well as my severe social anxiety prevent me from achieving as much as I can achieve, and make me feel worthless. I don’t like to feel this miserable any more. I don’t want to be depressed anymore. I want to feel worthwhile. I want to change my outlook in life. I want to appreciate the help I receive, instead of snapping back at those giving advice. I want to walk tall and proud I walk outside, instead of cowering in front of those that do so, not out of haughtiness, but of positive pride. I want that pride for myself as well. I want to talk in confidence in front of groups or individually, knowing I have something important to say. Yes, things are a bit down sometimes, and circumstances seem never to be in my favor, but it is ultimately my reactions and adaptations to the environment I find myself, and the interactions I have with it, that makes me or breaks me. I want to confront obstacles as problems to be solved, not as invincible opponents. If I cannot help but feel miserable, even to a positive situation, then I must find help from outside in changing how I feel. Hopefully, as I settle down, I can reverse the damage that was done to me, and confront the damage I may have caused to others by my reactions. I don’t have to control other people to feel better, but at minimum I have to control myself.

Hey, you still live, JET. There is still time to fix things right. Has wallowing in your misery helping you to make things right? I don’t think so. I ought to know. It didn’t work for me.

218

So, how does this work? Many people seem to be saying that it’s as easy as going to the corner grocery store and buying that box on the top shelf marked “Happiness”. I can’t get past that.

It’s not like I don’t try to be happy. I’ve even managed long periods of self-satisfaction, through work and socialization. Thing is, just as I start to think, hey life ain’t that bad after all…CRASH!!! Down comes an asteroid on my head.

Maybe it’s just better to be miserable. It’s not so bad at the bottom. Lots of strange things grow down here. Lots of things that normal people never get to see.

J.E.T.

219

JET, it is not the ‘grocery store’ where you find happiness, It is the journey there.

220

Have you ever considered writing for a living? You have a way with words, and seem to be intelligent. I would have e-mailed this to you rather than hijack your thread, but your e-mail is private. [/end hijack]

About happiness, I usually try to grab it when I find it, like walking outside in the winter when the sun is shining on the snow, or playing with my dogs and cats; sometimes just little things. I don’t know very many intelligent people who are happy all of the time. Do you have pets? They help.

It could be that this period in your life is particularly unhappy, but don’t give up. All of us go through difficult times (some more difficult than others) but hopefully things will improve.