Gum in my hair. Riding the 407-numbered school bus home from Parkway Middle School made me the target of a number of indignities; one of them was bullies spitting gum in my hair. These boys sat immediately behind me and tormented me on the miles long ride to the bus stop. On most days, they simply poked me or slapped my head repeatedly. On one day, I could hear them plotting, “When the bus stops, let’s jump on the Chinaman.” and did precisely that. I remember telling our bus driver, as tears streamed down my cheeks, that I wanted a different seat.
As I walked away from that bus with a wad of gum in my hair, I approached a friend’s house. I didn’t endure the indignity of untangling the gum from my hair; I asked my friend’s mom to simply cut it away. Did I ever believe that they threatened my life? No. Did I believe that I risked serious injury? Not really.
However, they aimed not for death nor even injury; they wanted humiliation. Monica Lewinsky has an incredible TED talk. In that talk she mentions that research determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger. Tyler Clementi was literally humiliated to death.
Did I want the bullying to stop? Absolutely.
And the bullying continues
Thankfully, these boys skipped school more often than they attended, and most days passed uneventfully. On the days they bullied me, they outnumbered me. I developed a sense of learned helplessness; on that bus ride, I was simply prey and powerless to stop it. On many days, my sister, who had just gotten a car, picked me up from school. Other days I walked the two and a half miles home from school.
However, harming these boys never crossed my mind; I simply wanted them to stop. I won’t pretend that it couldn’t ever have been me. Many variables may have pushed me over that edge. First, while they certainly humiliated me, I didn’t feel I was in genuine physical danger. Second, I withstood the persistence and degree of bullying; their abuse fell within my tolerance. Third, it was scoped to a time and location where I could’ve called out for help if absolutely necessary.
Lastly, I never got access to an easy and convenient way to make them stop… like a firearm.
Yet another school shooting
On September 6th, a 14-year-old student killed four people in Georgia, two teachers and two students, in yet another school shooting. The shooter was bullied; circa 1980, under similar circumstances, I might’ve done the same thing. Despite knowing about the bullying, the shooter’s father, demonstrating colossally poor judgment, bought his troubled son an AR-15 style rifle for his birthday.
This marked the 45th school shooting this year. It’s September; we average five school shootings each month. Can you memorize the details of five new school shootings every month? Let’s ignore the names of the victims and shooter. Let’s ignore the name of the school. Can we remember just the sequence of states targeted by these shootings and their dates?
In November of 2021, a different high school shooting occurs in Oxford High School in Michigan. This particular shooting claims three lives and injures eight others. However, those are physical injuries; imagine the trauma of listening to a shooter traversing the halls of your school, actively looking for targets. I remember this shooting for a number of reasons. First, this occurred close to where loved ones live; it literally struck close to home. Second, for the first time, the courts similarly convicted the parents for giving their troubled son access to a gun. Finally, another shooter opened fire killing three less than two years later at Michigan State University. Some students from Oxford High School in 2021 graduated and now attended MSU; they lived through this trauma twice.
Honestly, I’m too exhausted to feel the anger. We should remember every victim; every single one. However, my memory is neither perfect nor infinite. I only hope that each victim left an emptiness in someone’s life so that they may pick up the torch.
Schools are the ‘halfling’ in the joke
There’s a joke among gamers that they call The Halfling-Dragon principle:
If you find yourself in the company of a halfling and an ill-tempered dragon, remember that you do not have to outrun the dragon; you simply have to outrun the halfling.
Or in other words, there’s no need to neutralize the threat (or even avoid it), simply give them an easier target. Someone else, in your team, can die instead of you.
Let’s examine JD Vance’s, the Republican vice-presidential candidate’s response to the Georgia high school shooting. He asserted two things. First, he stated that school shootings are simply a fact of life. Second, he claimed that “our schools are soft targets”. I’ll work backwards and reason through the “soft target” assessment first.
Basically, schools are the figurative ‘halflings’ in the above equation. However, if we followed Vance’s suggestion and fortify the schools and “you are a psycho, and you want to make headlines” (his words), wouldn’t the shooter simply pick a more accessible target? Therefore, they would instead end up shooting malls, churches, synagogues, mosques, movie theaters, hospitals, dance halls, and public streets. Except that they’re already doing that.
Vance recommends making schools tougher targets and henceforth making everything else a more appealing target for a mass shooting. Genius. Does this honestly sound like fixing the problem to you?
The ‘fact of life’ assertion
Vance argues that school shootings are a fact of life, much like gravity; we can’t hope to defy the laws of physics. This assertion strikes me as a bit ironic coming from the “Make America Great Again” vice-presidential candidate. I pushed back on that moniker, challenging people to respond with a time when America was uniformly great for all its citizens. However, MAGA people somehow believe that you can magically turn the clock back to a time they find more acceptable. They can figuratively close Pandora’s Box or put the genie back in the bottle.
In that case, I’ll allow you to weave your bit of MAGA magic and turn the clock back to April 19th, 1999. The Columbine High School shooting occurred on the day that immediately followed. While it wasn’t the literal first school shooting, it was the one that started the avalanche. School shootings weren’t a ‘fact of life’ before that. Do you want to genuinely “Make America Great Again”? Turn the clock back to that time.
I find it profoundly ironic that among the many elements that MAGA people want to revert, the absence of school shootings is astonishingly not on that list. Do you want to build some credibility? Fix that!