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))
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, being under 18, derived Citizenship status form my mother, and so I was safe from potential deportations, but like jesus christ wtf.
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 🤷♂️
I’m in the US. Got a text from my son, 12th grade, the other day at 12:09pm that said, “we just had our sixth fight today”
To clarify, he did mean 6th of the day, not the school year. He goes to the worst highschool in the area. Anyone with the capabilities gets their kids in a different school. We do not have those abilities. On the upside, he’s learning how to avoid conflict and enjoying his phlebotomy class. He’ll even be a certified phlebotomist by the end of the year (assuming his teacher can get access to funding for supplies that she’s currently disappearing from her hospital job)!
*I’m donating blood tomorrow at the local bank. Usually donate a few times a year, but scheduled for tomorrow for a specific reason. I have name and phone number of his teacher, and a list of supplies. I’m donating now to give me an excuse to ask for a supply donation from the blood bank. It’s a long shot, but the answer is always no when you don’t ask 🤷♀️
Well to be fair, no formal deportation procedures were ever initiated, so idk if that was actually possible (but had I not been a Citizen, it would’ve shown up in the files if I went through naturalization, so the USCIS Officer could potentially use that to determine “Crimes of Moral Turpitute” or that it indicates bad “Moral Character” and try to delay or deny naturalization, so it really depends on if you roll the dice and get a Obama appointed USCIS officer, or a trump appointed one). But that was during trump term 1 so I already got a bit paranoid. trump term 2 definitely would’ve attempted to use that as an excuse.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Dude, don’t start bring out statistics sticking up for america in the school shooting department. I can’t figure out your reasoning to defend American on this topic.
That’s not the take away you should be getting by any means. Yes, school shootings are more common in the US than the rest of the world, but they are statistically very very rare in the US. The reason why schools in the US react so dramatically for such a rare event is because they are trying to protect themselves from liability and lawsuit, not because they are trying to protect students or help troubled kids.
Well I can, but this is where people will argue what counts as “Europe.” Wikipedia maintains a list specifically titled “List of School Shootings in Europe”.
Using the same metrics as the US number (1999-current) the total number of European school shootings is 88, if not for 2024 the US and Europe would be pretty close between 1999 and 2023 (US 131 vs Europe 84).
For the other statistics the “What is Europe” becomes an even bigger problem and also the way schools are structured in Europe gets fiddly. Europe much more prefers a higher quantity of small schools while the US seems to prefer concentrating more students in less schools. So Europe has ~1.47 million primary education schools and 79k secondary education schools for ~70 million students vs the US with 130k schools for ~50 million students.
So, Europe has 40% more students, ~10x more schools, and ~25% as many school shootings. If we don’t count 2024 then Europe would have 64% as many school shootings as the US. One of the biggest holdups for making the data comparable is adjusting the European number of schools to match US schools or vice versa. If Europe had school distributions similar to the US the EU would have ~182,000 schools (70mil/x=50 mil/130000) and if the US had schools distributed similarly to Europe the US would have ~1.11 million schools (70 mil/1.54 mil=70mil/x).
When the number of schools is adjusted for differences in school structure European students have an annual average chance of a school shooting of 0.00185% (0.00184% not counting 2024) (88 shootings/26 years/182000 adjusted schools) or a 0.03% chance of ever having a school shooting ((1-(1-0.0000185)^12)). The US on the other hand would have an annual average chance of a school shooting 0.01369% (0.00403% not counting 2024) (463 shootings/26 years/130000 actual schools) or about 0.2% chance of ever having a school shooting ((1-(1-0.0001369)^12)).
Before anyone points out that my previous math showed 4% I’ll remind you that that was only using 2024 data, not all 26 years.
So when you actually look and adjust for Europe fundamentally having 10x more schools for 40% more students the incidence of school shootings over the last 26 years haven’t been that different. In the US it is about 7.4x more likely that a school will experience a shooting per year than in Europe, when adjusting the quantity of schools, but the % chance is already so incredibly low it doesn’t really increase the chance that a given student will ever experience a school shooting.
It is worth noting that Europe does have 10x more schools, and so when a school shooting does occur less people are in the school to be exposed to the shooting, but not taking it into account is an apples and oranges comparison.
EDIT: Just to quickly bring it back to my original argument, the difference between Europe and the US isn’t really how often a student will experience a school shooting, but rather the attitudes toward such events. Europe seems to grieve, find justice for those hurt, learn from mistakes, and move on with what works. On the other hand, in the US the parents grieve, someone sues, the school system looks for someone to blame, and the only thing learned is how to avoid a lawsuit.
EDIT 2: Revisited to double check and fix some math and numbers, if I messed something up feel free to let me know.
I think the most security I ever had was the gates being locked between opening and closing times. This was during primary school. Britain sucks but at least it’s not America.
metal detectors and xray scanning of backpacks made me feel like I was going to prison lol
Honestly I believe it’s to train the younger generation to accept a police state and continuous surveillance.
I can’t imagine going to school like that bro.
Like is it scary and you always wonder if some lunatic is going to come and shoot it up or no?
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))
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.
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, being under 18, derived Citizenship status form my mother, and so I was safe from potential deportations, but like jesus christ wtf.
Fuck that school admin. ACAB.
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 🤷♂️
I’m in the US. Got a text from my son, 12th grade, the other day at 12:09pm that said, “we just had our sixth fight today”
To clarify, he did mean 6th of the day, not the school year. He goes to the worst highschool in the area. Anyone with the capabilities gets their kids in a different school. We do not have those abilities. On the upside, he’s learning how to avoid conflict and enjoying his phlebotomy class. He’ll even be a certified phlebotomist by the end of the year (assuming his teacher can get access to funding for supplies that she’s currently disappearing from her hospital job)!
*I’m donating blood tomorrow at the local bank. Usually donate a few times a year, but scheduled for tomorrow for a specific reason. I have name and phone number of his teacher, and a list of supplies. I’m donating now to give me an excuse to ask for a supply donation from the blood bank. It’s a long shot, but the answer is always no when you don’t ask 🤷♀️
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.
Well to be fair, no formal deportation procedures were ever initiated, so idk if that was actually possible (but had I not been a Citizen, it would’ve shown up in the files if I went through naturalization, so the USCIS Officer could potentially use that to determine “Crimes of Moral Turpitute” or that it indicates bad “Moral Character” and try to delay or deny naturalization, so it really depends on if you roll the dice and get a Obama appointed USCIS officer, or a trump appointed one). But that was during trump term 1 so I already got a bit paranoid. trump term 2 definitely would’ve attempted to use that as an excuse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of this is overblown really. A few things:
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.
Dude, don’t start bring out statistics sticking up for america in the school shooting department. I can’t figure out your reasoning to defend American on this topic.
You don’t seem to have read my post…
I read it. You’re saying generally, “it’s not as bad as it looks.”
That’s not the take away you should be getting by any means. Yes, school shootings are more common in the US than the rest of the world, but they are statistically very very rare in the US. The reason why schools in the US react so dramatically for such a rare event is because they are trying to protect themselves from liability and lawsuit, not because they are trying to protect students or help troubled kids.
Oh cool.
Can you give us the statistics for school shootings in Europe so I can compare?
Well I can, but this is where people will argue what counts as “Europe.” Wikipedia maintains a list specifically titled “List of School Shootings in Europe”.
Using the same metrics as the US number (1999-current) the total number of European school shootings is 88, if not for 2024 the US and Europe would be pretty close between 1999 and 2023 (US 131 vs Europe 84).
For the other statistics the “What is Europe” becomes an even bigger problem and also the way schools are structured in Europe gets fiddly. Europe much more prefers a higher quantity of small schools while the US seems to prefer concentrating more students in less schools. So Europe has ~1.47 million primary education schools and 79k secondary education schools for ~70 million students vs the US with 130k schools for ~50 million students.
So, Europe has 40% more students, ~10x more schools, and ~25% as many school shootings. If we don’t count 2024 then Europe would have 64% as many school shootings as the US. One of the biggest holdups for making the data comparable is adjusting the European number of schools to match US schools or vice versa. If Europe had school distributions similar to the US the EU would have ~182,000 schools (70mil/x=50 mil/130000) and if the US had schools distributed similarly to Europe the US would have ~1.11 million schools (70 mil/1.54 mil=70mil/x).
When the number of schools is adjusted for differences in school structure European students have an annual average chance of a school shooting of 0.00185% (0.00184% not counting 2024) (88 shootings/26 years/182000 adjusted schools) or a 0.03% chance of ever having a school shooting ((1-(1-0.0000185)^12)). The US on the other hand would have an annual average chance of a school shooting 0.01369% (0.00403% not counting 2024) (463 shootings/26 years/130000 actual schools) or about 0.2% chance of ever having a school shooting ((1-(1-0.0001369)^12)).
Before anyone points out that my previous math showed 4% I’ll remind you that that was only using 2024 data, not all 26 years.
So when you actually look and adjust for Europe fundamentally having 10x more schools for 40% more students the incidence of school shootings over the last 26 years haven’t been that different. In the US it is about 7.4x more likely that a school will experience a shooting per year than in Europe, when adjusting the quantity of schools, but the % chance is already so incredibly low it doesn’t really increase the chance that a given student will ever experience a school shooting.
It is worth noting that Europe does have 10x more schools, and so when a school shooting does occur less people are in the school to be exposed to the shooting, but not taking it into account is an apples and oranges comparison.
EDIT: Just to quickly bring it back to my original argument, the difference between Europe and the US isn’t really how often a student will experience a school shooting, but rather the attitudes toward such events. Europe seems to grieve, find justice for those hurt, learn from mistakes, and move on with what works. On the other hand, in the US the parents grieve, someone sues, the school system looks for someone to blame, and the only thing learned is how to avoid a lawsuit.
EDIT 2: Revisited to double check and fix some math and numbers, if I messed something up feel free to let me know.
I think the most security I ever had was the gates being locked between opening and closing times. This was during primary school. Britain sucks but at least it’s not America.