Questioner

There’s been another school shooting here in America, this time in Tennessee; and, yet again, the conservatives are calling for a crackdown on school violence and tough penalties for these “miscreants.” But, I say that the conservatives are the ones responsible for the violence in the first place.

In every school, bullying is a major problem. It was a horrible problem when I was in junior high during the Vietnam era and it continues to be today. In almost every single one of these school shootings, the shooter was a victim of vicious and continuous bullying and the authorities in the school did little or nothing about it. It was true in my case. I was told that it was my own fault because I wouldn’t fight back. My principal told me that I asked for it. My coach in gym class said that if I wasn’t a sissy, I wouldn’t be bullied. Conservatives scream that when you try to understand that these kids are being bullied and that they snap, you are simply coddling them instead of understanding them; and we all know how much conservatives and “Christians” love punishment. It’s almost a fetish with them.

If I had had access to a gun in the eighth grade years ago, it is quite possible I could have been one of these boys. When the abuse, the beatings, the ridicule, the harrassment is continuous and the victim sees no hope for it ever to end, sometimes desperate and violent thoughts win out over reason.

Until we decide that bullying is not a rite of passage, that jocks and rich kids don’t have a constitutional right to abuse the unpopular and the weak, that coaches and administrators have to get up off their lazy government-employee, no-accountability asses and actually DO soemthing, until someone tells the conservatives to shut up and look at the causes instead of the effects, this problem will continue and it will get worse.