A lot of this is overblown really. A few things:
- The vast majority of school kids in the US will never deal with an active shooter situation.
- 43% of school shooters in the US are themselves active students
- Only 20% of school shooting perpetrators had no affiliation to the school, meaning that ~37% of shooters were former students, teachers, or parents.
- From 1999 - 2023 there were a total of 131 school shootings, but in 2024 alone there were a reported 332 school shootings.
- These are some terrible numbers, but statistically it’s a rare thing. There are approximately 130,000 K-12 schools in the US and ~75 million students per year. If we assume all schools have the same chance of having a school shooting (they don’t) they would have a 0.2% chance that your school will have a shooting that year or 4% chance that in your k-12 years that you would be at a school shooting.
When people talk about school security in the US they often don’t consider how litigious and risk adverse the US is. You don’t lock doors, build fences, and hire security guards to protect from such a small risk chance, if they actually cared there would be a greater emphasis on mental health. No, they do these things to minimize risk, lower insurance rates, and ward off lawsuits.
The defense writes itself,
“Hey, you can’t sue us for your child’s trauma, we did everything we reasonably could to ensure that a shooter couldn’t get into the school. We built a fence, we locked the doors, we made the kids wear clear plastic book bags, we used a metal detector, we hired a guard, we expelled kids who made threats, and we called the police on people who aren’t allowed to be here. If a kid then sneaks a 3D printed plastic gun on site and traumatizes the students it’s not the school systems fault.”
The US is crazy litigious, especially if a government entity is involved and someone might get a pay day. In my area a high school girl and some similarly aged boys ran away from school while at recess to a forest a mile or two off site. The girl then said she was sexually assaulted by the two boys, called her mom and was picked up and taken to the hospital directly (never came back to the school). The school had reported the girl missing, but only found out about the sexual assault after the mother filed a police report and the police reached out. The school cooperated with the police and reached out to the girl and her mother asking if she was ok or there was anything they could do, but the mother refused to answer their (the schools) phone calls or cooperate with the police. A year later the mother sued the school, the school system, the municipal government, and the police each for several million dollars for allowing her daughter to run away from school and for not protecting her from sexual assault in an offsite location. This lawsuit went on for over a year before the judge dismissed the case.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I mean, I also worry about getting beat up by bullies… 🤷♂️ (its whatever, at least dying form gunshot wound is a cooler way to die than getting kicked in the face, luckily for me, neither happened (although the bullying definitely did happen, just not as violent as I imagine it could be))
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
I’m sorry you have to go through that bro.
What I learnt about bullies is once you smack them in the face most of them will think twice before bullying you again.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Well that I did. I defended myself against a bully who started a fight with me, then the school admin sided with the bully and call the cops on me. Luckily my mother naturalized as a US Citizen so I was safe from potential deportations, but like jesus christ wtf.
Fuck that school admin. ACAB.
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
It’s sad that the school did that and sided with the bully, but at least you stood your ground.
It’s shocking that teachers over there seem so quick to call the cops which is sure to escalate any situation. We had fights in school in the UK and never had cops called. Maybe that’s changed now with knives and stuff, but 🤷♂️
obsidianfoxxy7870@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
The fact that you can even be considered for deportation over that is so dumb. That’s a child, like not an adult with adult capacity.
obsidianfoxxy7870@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Yea schools will always side with the bully or just look at the one incident in isolation not as a pattern of abuse.
Also the school system just doesn’t work, like one time I reported a kid for talking about bringing a gun to school and it got turned around to ME threatening to bring a gun to school. Then that was a whole feasco that me and my parents had to deal with.
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Bullying is often in the form of low-level violence combined with verbal and other forms of harassment committed repeatedly by folks who enjoy it.
There is little hope of beating it at the same level of intensity and for reasons of culture and not prosecuting thousands of kids adults avoid dealing with low intensity harm between kids even when over time it is intolerable. Beating up the bully requires one to be capable of such when the bully may be larger and physically imposing and part of a group then not getting treated as the guilty party afterward for being the one who actually caused real harm as if the harm of years of harassment aren’t real.
Its great your solution worked for you but for lots it would mean bully and friends get to beat you without consequence and you get in trouble reinforcing the game.
Its quite frankly on average a bs solution. The actual one is to pay attention to who is a pos and kick the 1% worst pos to shit schools so 99% can learn in peace.
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Perhaps I should have highlighted that it’s not a viable option for everybody.
I would say that your solution is also pretty shitty. As bad as bullies are many of them are doing because either they’re getting bullied / hit at home and so they act out in this way or have other issues.
I don’t think sticking them all together is the solution, we should be trying to understand why someone is doing that and see if we can make positive changes. When I say we I mean the education system.
Wolf@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
I was small for my age up until 10th grade. Bullies would look at how small I was and decide I was an easy target, so they would start in on me. One thing you have to realize is that bullies aren’t bullies because they are tough and good at fighting, they pick on the smallest, ‘weakest’ kids they can find- so being a great fighter isn’t nearly as important as being willing to fight back in the first place. The point isn’t to beat them up, it’s to make them think twice about picking on you. If there is a chance they will get hurt, even if they end up winning the fight, they will always just move on to the next victim who wont fight back.
Between 5th grade and 10th grade I got into 1 fight every year. A kid who didn’t know me would try to bully me, and I would defend myself. I never lost a fight, not because I was a badass or anything, but the teachers would break up the fights before it progressed too far. I would always get in trouble with the school, but never with my parents who taught me it was ok to defend myself (but not start fights). When word got around that about the fight, I wouldn’t get picked on the rest of the school year. When the next year rolled around it was either a new student, or I was the new student. Someone who didn’t know me basically who would try to bully me.
You just have to ask yourself- would you rather accept the bullying and allow it to continue, or risk getting beat up by fighting back and getting in trouble- but putting a stop to it.