I Was Held At Gunpoint By A Bullied Kid
Mar. 16th, 2018 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2GAseMT
Since this is a thing now, I guess I’ll tell my story of what happened to me in fifth grade. I haven’t seen the original thing, but I’m seeing a lot of people responding to it– apparently someone is attempting to argue that the cure for school shooters is for the other kids to be nicer to the shooters so that they don’t come to that point. Which is just ignoring literally all of the reasons why most school shootings occur, but also is putting a ridiculous onus on the heads of vulnerable children.
I’ll start off by linking to a thread about the Columbine shooters. The narrative is that they were bullied kids, but that’s false; they were trying to emulate Timothy McVeigh. They were explicitly trying to be domestic terrorists. This wasn’t revenge, this was chaos.
And it struck me, reading that thread, that I do have a relevant experience. I was, along with the rest of my fifth grade class, held at gunpoint by a disturbed boy who was the victim of severe bullying. So here’s the story, and here’s what happened. (I told it in a response to that thread, but here it is in more detail.)
The year was 1989 or 1990. It was a rural school district, one of the rural US’s innumerable “central” schools– you know what that means, right? It means in the 40s or so, the area’s one-room schoolhouses consolidated. This one served two townships in an area that was a mixture of creeping suburbs from a smallish city to the south, and family dairy farms falling on hard times. To this day it’s a reliably red district, and sparsely populated, though most of the farms are subdivisions now. It’s still an overwhelmingly white area, and there aren’t many college-educated people.
There were 31 of us in the class, and 20 of those kids were boys with a history of discipline problems. The teacher had been moved up from 2nd grade, and none of her coping strategies adapted well to these much older children. You can treat with a dozen rowdy 7-year-olds; 20 hostile 11-year-olds are going to be much harder to handle. And so she couldn’t really keep us under control.
She definitely didn’t do much to protect us weaker kids from the bullies. My earliest memories of sexual harassment are from that time period. I didn’t even really understand it, but I was one of the more physically developed girls in the class. That was when everyone decided I was fat and ugly and made fun of my boobs. I was pretty badly bullied, and withdrew into books and oversized sweatshirts.
Jared was nice enough to me, but he was a bit of an outcast, and the “bad” boys picked on him a lot. He was big, he wasn’t stupid per se, but he wasn’t witty, and he was from a poor family without many prospects. From things he said, it was clear there was alcoholism and other problems in his home life, and he often came to school in dirty clothes or without adequate supplies. I learned the word “welfare” sometime that year, but I thought it was just a mean thing to call someone; he was a “welfare kid”, and so were many of the other bullied kids. I had no idea what it meant. (My father had a state job. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t on food assistance.)
He asked me to go to a dance with him and I said no, not because I disliked him or anything, but because I suspected the “bad” boys had put him up to asking me for pretend, so that they could laugh at me when I said yes. He didn’t seem all that bothered, though I worried his feelings might be hurt.
I don’t remember what month it was, how long into the year we were, how long all of this had been going on. Most of that year is a blur of misery for me– and probably for a lot of the other kids.
But one day Jared came in with a duffel bag, bigger than his usual school bag and after a little while (I don’t remember how long, but in 5th grade we stayed in one classroom all day and just had one teacher), he went back and got the duffel bag and pulled a gun out of it, and told us all, “Put your heads down, or there’s gonna be some shooting.”
I didn’t, I froze. It was a pistol; I knew a bit about guns but I didn’t know what kind it was. (I believe it was a semi-automatic .22, but I don’t know for sure.) The boy in front of me climbed under his desk. We didn’t know what to do. The bullies, I noticed, put their heads down; one was my particular tormenter as well and I have a very vivid memory of how white he went, how his freckles stood out on his face.
Jared walked up and down the aisles between the desks. The teacher stood at the front of the room and held her hands out in front of herself, and pleaded with him in a shaking voice. I didn’t like her, I don’t remember what she said, but she certainly reasoned with him that he didn’t want to do this and it was likely to go badly.
Again. It was 1990. There might have been a phone in the room but I doubt it. I don’t know whether the teacher managed to contact outside help, or not. No one else came into the room. We all sat motionless. I don’t know how long it was. For some reason I remember the lights being off. There were windows, so it wasn’t dark. I eventually realized I was disobeying him, and put my head down so he wouldn’t get angry. I wasn’t scared, but I was definitely dissociated; none of it seemed real.
Eventually Jared relented. He gave the pistol to the teacher. She called for help, I think she paged the office on the loudspeaker. Other teachers and the principal came, and Jared went away. I remember the principal, a busty woman from West Virginia (her accent was very exotic to us), carrying his incongruously large duffel bag, which was completely stuffed full of ammunition, it turned out.
The upshot. Well.
I don’t remember if we were sent home. I know we came back the next day. I don’t remember if we had a substitute. We might not have!
Jared and his family had to go to Family Court.
Our class stayed the way it was. I kept getting bullied. Those same kids tormented me until I changed schools four years later.
Jared was back in our class a week or two later.
He got what he wanted: no one bullied him anymore. A couple of years later he was in my wood shop class. He was allowed to use the lathe, I wasn’t because I was a girl. He used the lathe to launch things across the classroom. This was not considered a problem. I can’t find him now; he’s not on the Internet. I don’t know what became of him.
What conclusions can we draw from this?
Being bullied, even if it makes kids snap, doesn’t necessarily lead to violence. Jared didn’t want chaos, so he didn’t pursue chaos. Part of it is almost certainly that no major school shootings had really happened yet, so it probably didn’t occur to him.
He never would have been bullied like that (and neither would I) if the parents had let the teachers arrange the classes as they’d seen fit. The 4th and 5th-grade teachers had met up in the summer, and had figured out which of the many discipline-problem children in our tumultous year should never be in a classroom together. But various of the parents, seeing the class assignments, had protested; they didn’t want their precious baby stuck in a class with that bad kid, and so on, and so forth, and the whole careful structure disintegrated.
And so the classes were redistributed. The administration didn’t back up the teachers, didn’t listen to them. We should have had one more section, but we were short on staff and didn’t hire another teacher. So 31 kids, with almost all of the kids who needed disciplinary support, were all crammed in one room, with the least-prepared teacher.
The other bullied kids being nicer to that one kid wouldn’t have prevented it. Only letting the most qualified adults, the teachers, do their jobs as they’d seen fit would have possibly headed the whole thing off. Certainly, from my position near the bottom of the pecking order, there wasn’t a thing I could have done. (I remain almost positive that he’d been put up to asking me out as a joke by one of the bullies. But even if he’d meant it, they would have found a way to mock him for it; I was possibly even lower-status than he was.)
But, crucially, because it genuinely was a case of a bullied kid fighting back, there was no carnage. He was promised that the situation would improve, and so he surrendered. And the situation improved.
He wasn’t a terrorist. He was a bullied kid.
These aren’t bullied kids. These are terrorists.
We should be asking who radicalized them, not demanding that other kids solve adults’ problems for them.
And really we should be listening to teachers, and giving them the supports they need to intervene where they need to. More social services, smaller class sizes, more attention. There are a lot of people in crisis in this economy, and a lot of kids in crisis too. Kids can’t solve this. We need social services, we need food assistance. We need adults who don’t reinforce the same social hierarchies and tacitly encourage bullying. Kids can’t solve this.
And, as I reflected at the end of that thread, I have no idea what happened to that teacher. I wonder what she thought of Columbine? I wonder whether she was traumatized? She was alone, she talked him down alone. I don’t think there was anyone she could call. I lost touch with her, and I don’t know what became of her. She taught us for the rest of the year, and I never liked her, but I respected that she’d stopped Jared.
(Your picture was not posted)
Since this is a thing now, I guess I’ll tell my story of what happened to me in fifth grade. I haven’t seen the original thing, but I’m seeing a lot of people responding to it– apparently someone is attempting to argue that the cure for school shooters is for the other kids to be nicer to the shooters so that they don’t come to that point. Which is just ignoring literally all of the reasons why most school shootings occur, but also is putting a ridiculous onus on the heads of vulnerable children.
I’ll start off by linking to a thread about the Columbine shooters. The narrative is that they were bullied kids, but that’s false; they were trying to emulate Timothy McVeigh. They were explicitly trying to be domestic terrorists. This wasn’t revenge, this was chaos.
And it struck me, reading that thread, that I do have a relevant experience. I was, along with the rest of my fifth grade class, held at gunpoint by a disturbed boy who was the victim of severe bullying. So here’s the story, and here’s what happened. (I told it in a response to that thread, but here it is in more detail.)
The year was 1989 or 1990. It was a rural school district, one of the rural US’s innumerable “central” schools– you know what that means, right? It means in the 40s or so, the area’s one-room schoolhouses consolidated. This one served two townships in an area that was a mixture of creeping suburbs from a smallish city to the south, and family dairy farms falling on hard times. To this day it’s a reliably red district, and sparsely populated, though most of the farms are subdivisions now. It’s still an overwhelmingly white area, and there aren’t many college-educated people.
There were 31 of us in the class, and 20 of those kids were boys with a history of discipline problems. The teacher had been moved up from 2nd grade, and none of her coping strategies adapted well to these much older children. You can treat with a dozen rowdy 7-year-olds; 20 hostile 11-year-olds are going to be much harder to handle. And so she couldn’t really keep us under control.
She definitely didn’t do much to protect us weaker kids from the bullies. My earliest memories of sexual harassment are from that time period. I didn’t even really understand it, but I was one of the more physically developed girls in the class. That was when everyone decided I was fat and ugly and made fun of my boobs. I was pretty badly bullied, and withdrew into books and oversized sweatshirts.
Jared was nice enough to me, but he was a bit of an outcast, and the “bad” boys picked on him a lot. He was big, he wasn’t stupid per se, but he wasn’t witty, and he was from a poor family without many prospects. From things he said, it was clear there was alcoholism and other problems in his home life, and he often came to school in dirty clothes or without adequate supplies. I learned the word “welfare” sometime that year, but I thought it was just a mean thing to call someone; he was a “welfare kid”, and so were many of the other bullied kids. I had no idea what it meant. (My father had a state job. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t on food assistance.)
He asked me to go to a dance with him and I said no, not because I disliked him or anything, but because I suspected the “bad” boys had put him up to asking me for pretend, so that they could laugh at me when I said yes. He didn’t seem all that bothered, though I worried his feelings might be hurt.
I don’t remember what month it was, how long into the year we were, how long all of this had been going on. Most of that year is a blur of misery for me– and probably for a lot of the other kids.
But one day Jared came in with a duffel bag, bigger than his usual school bag and after a little while (I don’t remember how long, but in 5th grade we stayed in one classroom all day and just had one teacher), he went back and got the duffel bag and pulled a gun out of it, and told us all, “Put your heads down, or there’s gonna be some shooting.”
I didn’t, I froze. It was a pistol; I knew a bit about guns but I didn’t know what kind it was. (I believe it was a semi-automatic .22, but I don’t know for sure.) The boy in front of me climbed under his desk. We didn’t know what to do. The bullies, I noticed, put their heads down; one was my particular tormenter as well and I have a very vivid memory of how white he went, how his freckles stood out on his face.
Jared walked up and down the aisles between the desks. The teacher stood at the front of the room and held her hands out in front of herself, and pleaded with him in a shaking voice. I didn’t like her, I don’t remember what she said, but she certainly reasoned with him that he didn’t want to do this and it was likely to go badly.
Again. It was 1990. There might have been a phone in the room but I doubt it. I don’t know whether the teacher managed to contact outside help, or not. No one else came into the room. We all sat motionless. I don’t know how long it was. For some reason I remember the lights being off. There were windows, so it wasn’t dark. I eventually realized I was disobeying him, and put my head down so he wouldn’t get angry. I wasn’t scared, but I was definitely dissociated; none of it seemed real.
Eventually Jared relented. He gave the pistol to the teacher. She called for help, I think she paged the office on the loudspeaker. Other teachers and the principal came, and Jared went away. I remember the principal, a busty woman from West Virginia (her accent was very exotic to us), carrying his incongruously large duffel bag, which was completely stuffed full of ammunition, it turned out.
The upshot. Well.
I don’t remember if we were sent home. I know we came back the next day. I don’t remember if we had a substitute. We might not have!
Jared and his family had to go to Family Court.
Our class stayed the way it was. I kept getting bullied. Those same kids tormented me until I changed schools four years later.
Jared was back in our class a week or two later.
He got what he wanted: no one bullied him anymore. A couple of years later he was in my wood shop class. He was allowed to use the lathe, I wasn’t because I was a girl. He used the lathe to launch things across the classroom. This was not considered a problem. I can’t find him now; he’s not on the Internet. I don’t know what became of him.
What conclusions can we draw from this?
Being bullied, even if it makes kids snap, doesn’t necessarily lead to violence. Jared didn’t want chaos, so he didn’t pursue chaos. Part of it is almost certainly that no major school shootings had really happened yet, so it probably didn’t occur to him.
He never would have been bullied like that (and neither would I) if the parents had let the teachers arrange the classes as they’d seen fit. The 4th and 5th-grade teachers had met up in the summer, and had figured out which of the many discipline-problem children in our tumultous year should never be in a classroom together. But various of the parents, seeing the class assignments, had protested; they didn’t want their precious baby stuck in a class with that bad kid, and so on, and so forth, and the whole careful structure disintegrated.
And so the classes were redistributed. The administration didn’t back up the teachers, didn’t listen to them. We should have had one more section, but we were short on staff and didn’t hire another teacher. So 31 kids, with almost all of the kids who needed disciplinary support, were all crammed in one room, with the least-prepared teacher.
The other bullied kids being nicer to that one kid wouldn’t have prevented it. Only letting the most qualified adults, the teachers, do their jobs as they’d seen fit would have possibly headed the whole thing off. Certainly, from my position near the bottom of the pecking order, there wasn’t a thing I could have done. (I remain almost positive that he’d been put up to asking me out as a joke by one of the bullies. But even if he’d meant it, they would have found a way to mock him for it; I was possibly even lower-status than he was.)
But, crucially, because it genuinely was a case of a bullied kid fighting back, there was no carnage. He was promised that the situation would improve, and so he surrendered. And the situation improved.
He wasn’t a terrorist. He was a bullied kid.
These aren’t bullied kids. These are terrorists.
We should be asking who radicalized them, not demanding that other kids solve adults’ problems for them.
And really we should be listening to teachers, and giving them the supports they need to intervene where they need to. More social services, smaller class sizes, more attention. There are a lot of people in crisis in this economy, and a lot of kids in crisis too. Kids can’t solve this. We need social services, we need food assistance. We need adults who don’t reinforce the same social hierarchies and tacitly encourage bullying. Kids can’t solve this.
And, as I reflected at the end of that thread, I have no idea what happened to that teacher. I wonder what she thought of Columbine? I wonder whether she was traumatized? She was alone, she talked him down alone. I don’t think there was anyone she could call. I lost touch with her, and I don’t know what became of her. She taught us for the rest of the year, and I never liked her, but I respected that she’d stopped Jared.
(Your picture was not posted)
