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.
>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.
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.
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 alread...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
24 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 46.1 ms ] threadthis 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.
> 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.
What more do you want?
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 alread...
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.
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.
I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting bullying isn't a problem, regardless of its correlation or lack thereof.
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.
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.
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.
End of problem.
If your kid is bullied, call the police. Most school authorities are bully enablers.
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.
Hint: they are more likely to be bullies themselves, as their aggression is raising prior the attack.
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.
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.