High School male with AS stabs classmate.

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Yes, it does justify a lethal defense and I hope that becomes law.

This is true. There is the kind of bully who only does this once in a great while and I'm not worried about that. Then there are the persistent ones who go after the kid singly or in gangs. The persistent ones know how to hide the bullying and how to get the teachers on their side. They not only get the teachers to look the other way, they get them to actively participate. They form a persistent culture within the school of people who decide which ones will form that permanent underclass, and then they put the members of that underclass under constant threat of death. They degrade the lives of their victims while also getting the system to blame their victims for what the bullies do. This does go as far as saying, at least to themselves, that anyone who dies of this treatment deserves to die. They already think of us as meat and as people who don't deserve to live, and the continuing degradation and torture is worse than death.

There is such a thing as being too understanding about things like this. I personally don't care if you decide to hunt down your rapist and fillet him. If my brother decides to forcibly rape a woman or a man, that brother can just as well be shot, mounted, stuffed, and displayed in his victim's front yard.

You're promoting a system that punishes people for defending themselves. The bully gets a right under that system that we in our oh-so-elegant and high and mighty morality don't allow ourselves, and that is to put our lives in mortal peril for his personal gain. Then we deny ourselves the means to fight back to defend ourselves even when it is justified. I do not believe that killing a bully is unjust because the bully places people in mortal peril, as does the rapist. Even one time that the bully decides to bounce some kid's head off the walls and floors because he thinks it's funny, that child is at risk of accidental death, or accidental death on purpose. The bully has brought in superior force, even if he is alone, which he often isn't, and has decided to use that superior force against someone who is physically defenseless. He has deadly force on his side. His intent is potentially deadly and he does intend to kill his victim by degrees, which I contend is worse than having one's own brains blown out of the back of his head.

The "jocks" who are from families that are wealthy and influential can go around grabbing individuals and beating them and pretty much get away with murder. If someone does die the school may well try to help them hide it. It will be an "accident" or a "suicide." If it is a group of "geeks" who decide to do this because they have been bullied so much, the school administrators will penalize them harshly, expel as many as they can, and break it up exactly the way that they claim that they can't when the jocks do it. I have to tell you, I would rather that my school lost every game or didn't even have an athletic program if that is what it took to make the jocks get in line and be students instead of little terrors.

I'm telling you, in my senior year of high school, I had a creature in the office who was called a principal who bent over backwards to make sure that others got away with beating me. They were constantly starting fights with me, blocking my way in the halls and other stuff to get me to fight, and that so-called principal said that he would expel me if I got in another fight. I still wish that at that moment I had jumped across the desk and let that so-called school official have it with every ounce of strength I had, because even after facing adult penalties and being treated like dirt for that deed, I would still be more free right now than I am as the kind of person that I am, having been forced to swallow that poison and not spit it out. I can't believe that someone who was forcibly raped has no clue just how bad it gets, how degrading it gets.

No, Immortal, you would not be wrong to kill your rapist.

I will second that. If a bully kills another child he is not likely to be punished. It's either an accident or a suicide. The bully kills by degrees, indeed like a psychic vampire. I realized a long time ago that they are like this kind of bottom feeder, that they beat someone to make them hurt and they get a charge out of it, just like sucking life energy. You might want to argue that they don't "actually" suck energy, but the equation works the same if the bully gets an emotional high and feels better about himself while forcing energy out of the victim and degrading the victim's life.

I think that the reason that the legal system does not want this kind of retaliation to go unpunished is because it lives by what some call "bloodsucking", which is pretty much the same thing. They suck money and energy out of people for their benefit. The money goes into their all to capacious bank accounts. The energy goes towards entrenching the power of the lawyers, into creating the belief that the lawyers should get all that money and power. School authorities are often like that also.

Humans are often so very sickening. They will tease an animal until that animal attacks them, then they will say that the animal has to be put down as a "vicious animal." They will do exactly the same thing to their own children. I don't feel like I'm part of that race.

Just thinking about tolerating bullies and brutes. There's only so far that tolerance goes and then large amounts of vital resources, energy, and thought become devoted to defending those bullies and brutes against people who quite rightly want them out of their misery. The bullies cause pain and misery and I'm supposed to expend energy preventing others from hurting them.

I have already been punished for saying "No more!" When I stopped incidents of bullying or resisted bullying against me they turned on me and they turned large numbers of people against me. People who work to stop bullies from bullying do get hurt. In some places they still get killed.

There is absolutely no reason to protect bullies.

"They want to cure us, well I say we are the cure!" I always sorta liked Magneto, he was never as blind as Xavier seemed to be and seemed to understand our mutant cause.

They want you to believe that it is because he has this fixation, maybe because of some organic illness that has nothing to do with the bullying. I think that the bullying caused this fixation. I think that school authorities and others know this and don't want us to believe it.

One of the things that always tore at me, when I was a child, was the way that they would act like I just did something "out of the blue". They would actually know that a bully did something to make me scream, then tell the principal and my mother that I simply screamed to get attention. You try being seven years old and not screaming when someone shoots a paper clip at your ear from close range and makes you bleed. Then try being the one who has to go through the headgame of a confrontation with the principal, then being punished severely.

Fixation? Everyone has a right to self defense. The system that a person is trapped within works hard to prevent him from exercising that right, using force, deception, playing headgames, doing everything but its job according to state and federal law. You think that a person should just sit still and take it?

Maybe but my 4 year old nephew is fixated on weapons. He weaponizes any thing he puts his hands on. Builds guns out of Lego,etc.

Personally, I don' t care if it was "right" or "wrong." I think he qualifies as legally insane. I think his killing was subconscious, and that branding us as "dangerous" is conformistly evil and redundant. I guess that's the way the media is. :p

Yeah I saw this on the local news the other day...this whole thing makes me really sad for a lot of reasons. First of all it shouldn't matter whether the kid has Asperger's or not...killing isn't justifiable regardless. The point is being the better person. I know what it's like to be bullied, but negating a horrible action with one that is more horrible takes away any power you had and opens up a whole new set of problems.

I hate how the media chooses to include labels whenever something like this happens, in this case Asperger's. All that does is cause people who read the article or watch the news to associate Asperger's with murder, crime, whatever. That's all people remember...they don't think of all the similar crimes that aren't associated in any way with Asperger's or other similar labels. No wonder our reputation isn't always fair.

Bottom line: Is bullying hurtful? Absolutely. Is it okay to stand up for yourself? Of course...within reason. Like anything else bullying is temporary, and responding in a way so permanent only caused him more harm. He lost himself all empathy for his situation, and in addition attached AS as another label on a crime.

And as for the bully getting what he deserved? He was a dumb kid...he didn't deserve to die.

The number of you who confuse "standing up for one's self" with "murder" is disturbing and disappointing. It only goes to show that just because you have AS doesn't mean you know what you're talking about. You're letting your own personal crap make your thinking subjective, irrational and faulty, which demonstrates an impairment of your reasoning abilities, if not outright mental illness. You people need therapy and semester in logic.

The kid's accountable for his actions, AS or no AS, bullied or not. He's made things worse for himself and those of us with AS, not better. Nothing has been made better by this.

Should'nt the person that pushed the kid into those actions be accountable as well? Or is what he did to provoke the kid OK?
What i'm upset about is the media is putting a negative and false fear about people with AS. But I think the kid was just defending himself.

Pearlstreet, what is it going to take to get people to identify bullying as an aberration, as indicative of mental illness, and associate it with killing and mayhem?

I don't by that Asperger's shouldn't be used. To me thats like saying Schizoprenia shouldn't be used as a defense because most people with schizophrenia (in fact a very mass majority) aren't violent. It doesn't matter if most people with it are violent or not it is a legal defense. I think the same thing should hold true with asperger's if it can be proven asperger's directly related to crime, at least insofar as diminished capacity and leniency at sentencing come into play. The juvenile justice system in America is supposed to be about rehabilitation, if he asperger's played any role in this that probably means we should at least try to rehabilitate him.

While I disagree with saying bullies should feel free to kill their attackers, I also disagree that it doesn't matter in terms of the case. After all if an abused wife kills her husband most people out there would say she deserves some leiency. Yet she could have gotten away at any time, a bullied high school student has no real recourse, especcially not if others know about the bullying and don't care. While it is wrong for them to kill to say it shouldn't matter is totally wrong.

If the kid with aspergers had killed himself instead of the bully, nothing would have been done to the bully. He would have gotten away with it. He would just move on to his next victim without a second thought.

What this kid did was not right. He could have simply alerted one of the school administrators or counselors. That's what I did when I had problems with other students, not that I really had that many. I agree with you 100% on that he was accountable for what he did.

I am more concerned that people will judge the entire AS community by his actions, and I fear a backlash.

Tim