[gavanwoolery]

Sorry to hear it - I was also bullied, even though I was stronger than my bullies I was not allowed to fight back (by my parents demand) so I was an easy target. I actually felt sorry for one bully though because I'm pretty sure his parents abused him.

[aaronem]

Wow. I'm sorry to hear your parents abused you in that fashion -- getting your ass kicked has got to be bad enough already, without such foolishness as being required, by your own parents, to just curl up and take it; mine, for all their other faults, at least had sense enough to grant me the right to defend myself if I could. (My schools mostly didn't, but that's a different matter, and one in which my parents took my side, as well.)

[gavanwoolery]

Yeah, in retrospect it was for my own safety - if I got on a bully's bad side who knows what could have happened. A few years before me a kid brought a gun to the school (this was prior to Columbine), and there were also gang associations at this time, for which reason bandannas of any color were not allowed). (I went to school in Napa, which you would think would be the safest town in the world but it had one or two gang shootings and bordered the high-crime city of Vallejo, not to mention one of the most famous serial killers spent at least a little time there (the Zodiac killer) ).

[aaronem]

It still seems like an ideal way to inculcate learned helplessness, though. (And I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that getting beat up at his hands suggests you're already pretty well "on a bully's bad side.")

I grew up in Mississippi. Firearms were pretty ubiquitous; especially as I got into high school, a lot of kids I went to school with were already experienced hunters -- you could always tell the first day of hunting season by the way your classes were suddenly half empty -- and it wasn't all that uncommon for someone old enough to drive to school to have a rifle or a shotgun locked in his trunk. In spite of what might seem like a fertile environment for such enormities, no bully ever shot anyone.

But, to someone who's familiar with the history of school shootings, this should not come as a surprise. Perhaps the first instance of the modern spate was Luke Woodham's rampage in 1997, a case near and dear to my interest in the matter both for having happened while I was in high school and for having happened in my own home state. Woodham's "manifesto", as excerpted by Wikipedia, reads as follows:

> I am not insane, I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. ... All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will. ... It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can't pry your eyes open, if I can't do it through pacifism, if I can't show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet.

This is, again, the first instance of a pattern all but ubiquitous among the type: it's not bullies who kill, but rather their victims, who believe their actions to be their last resort in self-defense. Bullies have no reason to kill; they do what they do because it suits them, for whatever reason, to inflict pain, and you can't do that to a corpse. Their victims, on the other hand, can reach a point where killing seems the only option available, not just to defend themselves from those specific people who beat them, but in a larger sense to reclaim their agency and their power of self-determination, and that's the wellspring from which this sort of violence flows.

[gavanwoolery]

In some cases it is desperation, but often (I suspect) it is the dangerous mixture of being bullied and having psychological or socially-incurred disorders. Of course, it is never these things that are blamed, it is gun laws, or video games, or movies, or music...

[aaronem]

I'd argue that such disorders, where present, contribute in that they make it more likely that any given bullied kid will reach that rare pitch of desperation which finds its expression in a shooting spree.