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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. |