Why are kids shooting their friends coast to coast?

Great Debates
1

I know, I know the ol “guns in school” debate…Well I was watching the Learning Channel the other day and they profiled a 15 year old boy [White, middle class, average student] in Phoenix Arizona who brought a gun he bought at a yard sale to school and shot two of the kids that picked on him incessantly. They both survived.

The following year in the same school a similar incident happened at the SAME school. The two shooters were aquaintences.

All this AFTER Columbine! All the children who kill, or attempt to kill another have at one time or another seen other children on TV causing fatal violence in school. Kids from good families, kids from not-so-good families, as well as kids you’d suspect it of and from kids you would never in a million years think could do anything like that.

There appears to be a hint of contiguity between some of the children, but not much. There is a diverse pool of kids commiting these crimes. It is very hard to narrow down a suspected group, and give it a name. For instance with the Columbine travesty there was a common nick name going around called the ‘trench coat’ mafia, or what ever they were saying.

[For those of you who don’t know about Columbine, do a Google search on it and you will see what happened at one of the American High Schools. Basically, children killing children.]

OK I need to get to the point…Why is it if children see all the pain and suffering on TV, and know that is it VERY wrong to kill your peers, do they still commit these horrible crimes? Even if they don’t see it on TV, and they think it is semi-OK to kill each other, what is going on here? Can someone shed some light on this? I have read most of the Threads on this and I stil can not fathom what could be going through a kids mind to think this is OK behavior. [I am not talking about children at large… I understand most children think this is not OK. BUt what about the ones that actually pull the trigger?] Has cognitive process changed that much, or is it that it has not changed at all. And Primal instincts are reigning??

Sorry for all the miss spellings, but its late and I am terribly Jet lagged…

2

In other news, 99.9998% of American school children did not shoot their classmates last year.

3

And, apparently, the ones that are shooting people, aren’t shooting their friends.

4

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Phlosphr *
**

Sorry to go off subject a bit, but can anyone give me a link to an article about this incident? I was living in Phoenix when I was fifteen, and I’m curious if this happened at the school I went to. Ironically, I was picked on enough by certain kids in Phoenix I might have gunned 'em down if I had the chance.

5

Phlosphr, I’m wondering, when was the last time you attended a public school?

I know from my experience in school, I’m a high school junior now, how a kid could be driven to kill classmates. Just 2 years ago I wanted to kill half of them. The thing to me is that most of what I remember the shooters saying they wanted to kill were ‘jocks’. This is exactly the way it was for me too.

Now, I know it’s wrong to kill. Hell, I have a hard time even hurting someone at all. But that doesn’t stop the thought of, “If this asshole is dead, he can no longer hurt me.” Even if that thought leads to the prelude of life in prison. That’s probably not thought about, or it’s considered worth it. Maybe the thought, “The fucker will feel MY pain…”

I don’t know though…

6

Exactly.

Children(and teens) can be unbelievably cruel to those they consider weaker than themselves. I knew some heinous bastards when I was in High School(nearly 20 years ago). Some of them are now in prison. Had I access to firearm, I may well have used it to protect myself.

7

The things that appear in the biggest news stories are not always typical. In fact, the murder rate has gone down in the U.S. for the past eight years straight. The murder rate among teenagers has also gone down during the same period. The amount of violence in schools has gone down in the same period. Trying to find some major trend in the Columbine incident is very tricky. I won’t swear that it doesn’t show something interesting about current American society, but it’s clearly not indicative of any increased murder rate, not even among teens, and not of murders at school either.

8

I’m a big believer in the “bad parenting” theory.

Not so long ago, anyone could go to Sears and buy a gun. No waiting, no forms to fill out. They didn’t shoot their classmates. Buying a gun today is not so easy.

IANACP (child psychologist), but I think shootings among teens is due to lack of discipline. POSSIBLY due IN PART to the “guns are evil” hysteria. If a kid has never seen one and has been told his entire life that they are bad, does that make him want to avoid them?

9

1kBR Kid really they actually did shoot their classmates. Moreso in fact.

10

Bravo. I’m a junior as well. People, or “kids”, know that “killing is wrong” and that “guns are bad”… I’m wondering, did anyone else watch that 20/20 about the not-very-hidden dummy guns and the kids they placed in rooms with them? Kids that were between the ages of 15 and 18? Almost all of them, with the exception of the girls and one guy they actually showed named Connor, tried to take one of the guns with them. There had been two planted together, in a paper bag. Most of them tried to load the guns with the dummy/blank bullets. One kid had even lost a friend, very recently, to a shooting… he was one of the ones that was messing around with the guns. He even pointed it at a friend of his that was in the room.

I’ve sat in classrooms and just thought, “That person doesn’t deserve to live. He doesn’t deserve to breathe, and he doesn’t deserve the right to make other peoples’ lives hell, just because he can.” This comes mostly into play, again, with jocks. They’re obnoxious and feed off of each others’ bullshit, generally thinking each other to be very amusing. My Chem class last year was a prime example. They picked on the special-ed kid, which is, needeless to say, extremely f***ed up. No one ever stands up to them, either. Especially the guys. I’ve had dreams (and this is bad) where I’ve hit the guy who did it most… and I was angry at myself for it, but then I’d go to school, and they’d be doing it again, and I wouldn’t feel so bad. The teacher never did anything (and this is bad, too) - why? - because he was the head football coach, and those varsity seniors were his most prized possession.

Public schools are a very rough environment for anybody out of “the norm”… even if they have friends. Being around the masses of stupidity is enough to drive anyone up a wall.

The preps at my old high school (I just moved from Southern Cali) even put up a banner saying how sorry they were for the Santee High School (in San Diego) shooting. I couldn’t empathize- I posted a letter on it telling them to stop blaming the shooters and to start changing how they treat those that are “at risk”… how they treat everybody.

Parents can’t be responsible for these things, either. Can kids go home and say, “Mommy, Brad was picking on me again. He’s really hurting my feelings. His friend J.R. was doing it too. And so is Mark. And Scott. Can you call their mommies and make it better?”

That doesn’t happen. Parents don’t hear about the atrocities - kids keep them inside. After a certain level of BS, they snap. Anyone could.

So it goes.

11

I didn’t see the show, but I’m bothered by a couple of things here. I would prefer to see the facts from a relaible source. At least one law was broken here. I believe that it is not legal for a 15 year person to purchase a gun under any circumstances. And someone selling a gun at a yard sale?

12

IMHO, yes. My parents have never owned guns, and I had only very rarely seen guns (I’ve still never seen a gun in the US - I’ve seen a few in Europe, though, despite their talk of gun control) until I went to Israel, and I absolutely would never ever ever own a gun. I wouldn’t even touch one. Except accidentally, like the time I bumped into an Israeli soldier with a rifle slung across his back. Anyway, reverse psychology only goes so far. I hated a lot of people in junior high and the first couple years of high school, but it never occurred to me that shooting them would be an appropriate response. I don’t want to offend anyone, but it really does worry me when people here on the SDMB say that they would have done it if they had had a gun. You don’t mean it, guys, do you? Being bullied is one thing…ending someone’s life, that’s in a very different category, my friends.

13

In fairness, these are very often not cases of kids simply “being bullied”. The things that I saw and personally experienced from the “in crowd” at my High School would have warranted serious jail time for them, if we had all been adults. All while the teachers looked on.

Shooting someone for this is an irrational and extreme response, but let’s not try to make the experience of truly being tortured by a peer group in schools seem light.

Until we have a zero-tolerance policy for “in crowd” bullies in High Schools which includes jail time and a criminal record for violent assaults that is not expunged at 18, the underclass, the outcasts, the ugly, the social misfits, will continue to be subjected to ridicule, tormenting, terrorism, destruction of their property, beatings, torture, and (the most positive of the scenarios :rolleyes: ) ostracism.

14

There is nothing illegal (in many states including Arizona) or unusual about selling a gun at a yard sale. It is illegal to sell one to someone under 18 without their parent’s permission.

15

Anthracite, I fully agree with you that there should be zero tolerance for bullies. It’s never okay to prey on one’s classmates. I guess I was lucky in that I never did see anything that would have been an arrestable offense had the kids been adult. (It was pretty horrible in junior high, but by the time I was in high school, most everyone was above that kind of behavior. There were very very few fights at my high school, too. Is this really so unusual?) But I cannot defend anyone who would get back at their tormentors by killing them. I know there are some terrible things going on in high schools, and kids can be incredibly cruel to each other, but murder is never a defensible solution. I am aghast that people can even claim to empathize with these killers.

God help me, I’m planning on being a high school teacher.

16

Anyone else see the thread title and think of a really really large cannon? Just me? ok.

Phlosphr, the problem is that they don’t make the connection that killing=wrong. That’s why they kill. You can’t attempt to understand them if you try to relate to child killers based upon your view of the world.

Kyla good luck on going into teaching.

17

From all I’ve seen, stuff like school shootings are pretty much the mid-teens version of the four-year-old’s temper tantrum. They can’t get their way, so their going to whine and yell and break stuff with some odd idea that people will take notice and finally give them what they want; Failing that, they’ll make sure that if they can’t get what they want, nobody else can either. They havn’t grown up past that.

Four-year-olds just can’t pick up a weapon and use it well.

Bullying and bad parenting seem like over-simplified causes. They’re very common, MUCH moreso than school violence. To me, it seems most school shooters and the like just don’t have the patience and temperment to deal with problems in their life in a mature way, so they resort to just shooting the place up. Again, back to the young kid temper tantrum comparison.

18

I do agree with you, up to the point of unless the person’s life is in clear and immediate danger of being ended. Which in that case it’s not murder anymore but self-defense, so it’s then a moot point.

19

I’m inclined to believe PD has a point in this. A lot of people are bullied, teased, excluded from the “cool crowd” and otherwise subjected to the full variety of torments people heap upon one another. Most of them, however, don’t pick up guns and blow away random classmates. After each school shooting, I wished futilely that a cop or someone would grab the front of the little bastard’s shirt and ask,“Do you think this makes your problems go away, asshole? Was this really worth throwing your entire life away? Do you think prison is really going to be better than high school?”

20

I have not checked this thread for about 36 hours, I am quite interested with most of the responses. There are a couple key points that people posting here kept getting back to one was that fact that there is a definite class system at most of the public schools here in the USA, and I am sure with some private schools as well.

Preps and Jocks are the primary examples. Jocks being the precursor for adult egotistical energy takers, and the preps who become everything from junkies, to wall street annuities brokers…I have been out of highschool for over 10 years and I too remember the preps and the jocks, but there were also, computer geeks [it is not exactly geeky anymore to have a computer :)] and gear heads, different cliques of many different peoples. However, when I was in high school, when a ‘school shooting’ was on the news somewhere in the country, it was HUGE NATIONAL news and it was usually followed by a couple teachers saying something in class along the lines of " You kids take note of whats happening in L.A or Chicago etc…etc…" As if it was localized to those huge cities. Now it is happening in quiet little towns across the nation.

Also if you remember watching the news around the time of that San Diego shooting, for about three weeks after that there was a rash of other shooting around the country. Some of the shooters liked the publicity, while others hated it. Some of the young adults actually smiled to the camera when they were being led into the court room. Smalll sheepish smiles as if they didn’t fully understand what was happening. Case in point the 13 year old from Florida who walked up to his teacher and shot him point blank in the head.[caught on film as well] He did not understand a damn thing that was happening to him, until a court representitive outlined it for him and spelled it out. He was going to be treated as an adult and sentenced appropriately. The kid nearly broke down and fell apart, when he finally understood what was happening. But before, when they first brought him in he was still conditioned to smile at the cameras, and he did just that when they were first shoved in his face…

The underlying point to the whole matter in my humble opinion is that the kids in this day and age are not being listened to as they should be. However, just finding this out myself for the first time, kids have to be given some degree of power while still retaining their stance as the LEARNER. It seems children in this day and age want everything faster and faster. I should note not all children/teens are like this. I do understand that, and some of the people who posted for this thread are in fact in highschool. I commend you folks for writing honestly, it is a good trait to have for the future. I hope you embrace that fact.

My children will be in high school one day as well, and I hope they do not have to put up with a peer shooting up the halls or anything of the sort.

Real quick, it is unfortunate that kids can buy guns, and yes they can be bought at yard sales, and yes kids can buy them. This board is meant to ‘FIGHT IGNORANCE RIGHT!’ well those of you who think it is not easy to buy a gun…WAKE UP, it is. Granted in Arizona and other places in the southwest, it is a lot easier to buy a gun than it is in New England. Being born and raised in New England, I know how hard ‘they’ are on gun laws. I did live in Arizona for 5 years as well, and they are two polar opposites when it comes to gun laws.

All in all we are not killing each other for a meal here, and we are certainly not defending our territory by shooting our peers. Whats going on is just plain ignorance and hopfully it will stop sooner than later…