I was asked by a teacher if I was planning a shooting

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stratozyck
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03 Oct 2022, 10:47 pm

I am 39 now and this is something that still bothers me to this day. This was after Columbine, and they sent a teacher who used to teach at my middle school because they thought she knew me better. She asked me if I ever thought about doing violence or hurting anyone at school.

I was a weird kid - believe me I see it now with the benefit of hindsight. Inside, I am still as weird but I've learned to act more normal in front of others because you need to do that to get money. I admit - I was also a kid who did not like authority. But you know what? I am an adult that doesn't like authority.

I think they targeted me for that because I used to skip school a lot because I hated being there, and I was a weird kid that didn't dress normally and people made fun of a little. I would literally just run as fast as I could away during breaks between classes. I got away most of the time, but sometimes they sent the police after me.

What gets me now is that we know that they weren't autistic loner kids. The dude that instigated it was actually a somewhat popular sociopath. Of course, there were others that the media did highlight were autistic.

It hurt a lot because I don't have any violence towards others in me. However, I was/am weird so I think people think weird = potential killer.



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04 Oct 2022, 1:51 am

Our traits often get misinterpreted by those in authority as threats. It is a really serious problem. That a number of mass school shooters have been diagnosed as autistic is not helping things.

There are efforts to train cops in recognizing autistic traits and supply autistics with autism ID cards, bracelets, etc.


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04 Oct 2022, 5:53 am

Those who have power will target those who are different and don't.

For a brief time in history the USA was different because power was limited. Now that it is being aggregated, we can learn from those (such as people in Asia) how to mask and avoid those with the power to hurt us.



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04 Oct 2022, 7:14 am

Wow, I'm so glad I didn't grow up in the US. That's all they think about is guns.

In the UK no school kid would be accused of planning a school shooting, and especially not "weird" kids.

I remember when I was about 15 they found a knife in one of the girls bathrooms. The principal and the teachers rounded up the female trouble-makers, which meant the ones who were from disadvantaged families and who often bullied other kids and showed a lot of anger and insecurity. I didn't get suspected at all, not by the staff or the kids, even though I showed some verbal aggressive behaviour when I was frustrated when my friends kept falling out with me.
It turned out it was one of the trouble-makers from a disadvantaged family who'd had the knife and left it in the bathroom. She was expelled. She had a lot of friends though, in fact most of her friends were the trouble-maker sort too.

I don't think anyone would even dream of accusing the shy wimpy kid in the special ed group.


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04 Oct 2022, 7:28 am

I'm sorry that happened to you.

I'd guess after Columbine happened there were a lot of people panicking and wondering how best to stop it happening anywhere else. I'm not in the US but I remember seeing and hearing it discussed and there was a lot of talk about societal isolation and reaching out to people that seemed to be 'outsiders'. Sounds like you might have been the target of a particularly clumsy way of doing this.

I think when atrocities are performed by children it particularly affects societies because it's hard to blame a child.

I remember after the Dunblane massacre, Thomas Hamilton was simply declared 'evil'. That was easy. It happened because an evil person did it. With kids you can't do that, so after Columbine you had people casting around for a substitute bogeyman - video games, drugs, Marilyn Manson.

Maybe in the scramble to come up with practical ways to prevent a repeat (apart from the obvious one, growing up and realising a modern society doesn't need to arm itself) some people made some decisions that did more harm than good.


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04 Oct 2022, 7:54 am

No.....most people in the United States DON'T constantly think about guns....

They're like everybody else. They look after themselves and their families. And some of them also think abstractly about the future.



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04 Oct 2022, 7:58 am

Quote:
No.....most people in the United States DON'T constantly think about guns....


They do. It's always about guns over there. I heard that there's a school shooting every month but I'm not sure how true that is. Also Americans seem to associate shy people with murderers. Over here people associate aggressive or psychopath people with murderers.


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04 Oct 2022, 8:13 am

I know quite a few people.....and I've known them for quite a few years.

I've never had a conversation about guns with them. They have other things on their minds. Americans talk about mortgages, how to decorate their homes, boring stuff like that....but not guns, usually, unless you hang out with people who believe life is like a Charles Bronson movie.

Before I came to the UK for the first time, I had stereotypical notions about Brits. When I got to the UK, I realized that they are ALL wrong.

I hope you could take a holiday in New York City sometime.



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04 Oct 2022, 8:21 am

Yes, a lot of people have stereotypes about Brits.

Well there seems to be so much gun talk on WP among American members.

I don't plan on coming to America because the plane ride is too long.


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kraftiekortie
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04 Oct 2022, 8:28 am

There's so much "gun talk"----because there's so much that is happening as a result of the availability of guns.

Some people believe in the "right to bear arms." They believe if the government restricts gun ownership, that the government is intruding upon their private lives. Most of these people believe in being really careful with guns, and are responsible gun owners.

However, too many guns are winding up in the hands of the wrong people.

I believe, strongly, in strict controls on who is able to own guns. And I don't see why a private citizen has to have military-style weapons.

I've never owned a gun in my life----and I don't know anybody who does own a gun. One time, some guy who wanted to be thought of as a "tough guy" showed me a gun. He was very surreptitious about it, very whispery. He only told people he "trusted" about the existence of the gun. Many people take guns very seriously in the United States.



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04 Oct 2022, 8:46 am

I am different than most NTs. I have figured the cause to be a brain injury when I was around 3 years old. I was attacked by a large bull. It weighted over 1,000 pounds and I weighed less than 20 pounds. It was like being attacked by a dinosaur. I died. At least the dominant left side of my brain died that day. But my non-dominant right side survived and did a brain flip to survive. The qualities of the right side of the brain are dramatically different than the left side.

After the brain flip, life was good. It was only after the age where a child becomes an adult, around age 12 or 13, that my world came to an end and I suffered physical attacks and mental attacks daily at school. This lasted for 3 years between the 5th through 8th grade. In my first year of high school, they figured out that I was a little weird and they sent me to a special class called SPEED READING. Most people learn to read from the start of a paragraph word by word to the end. But in speed reading you read differently from the inside out. The class taught me how to read, even the most difficult subjects. And I went off to college and earned a degree in Physics at UCLA.

The point is that my right side brain was extremely fast at reading and then deleting the words. I just couldn't stay on subject long enough to absorb the information. It taught me how to stay on subject long enough to learn how to read. At the end of eight grade the students voted me the LEAST LIKELY TO SUCCEED. At the end of high school, four year later, they thought I was the CLASS GENIUS. Learning how to read differently gave me that skill.

One of the skills that most NTs learn early in life is to judge people by eye contact. I do not look people directly in their eyes. The average NT can spot this trait within a half a second in a conversation. They use it to just me as evil. They are dead wrong, but that is the way of NTs. I began wearing a special type of one way sunglasses a few years ago to prevent NTs from seeing my eyes. It was profound that strangers would come up to me in the public and begin casual conversations, to me a total stranger. So in my case, since I do not give eye to eye contact, they misjudge me. That is the ways of life.


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kraftiekortie
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04 Oct 2022, 8:48 am

I'm sorry you were asked that question, Stratozyck. I can see how this could be dispiriting. I don't believe it's fair. I feel like that person could have made a more appropriate statement to you---like "I'm sorry you're being bullied, and I know it's not fair to you."

I was bullied, too----rather extensively. Nobody really did anything about it; I had to tough it out.

I am fortunate I was never asked that question. Fortunately, I was in high school 20 years before Columbine.



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04 Oct 2022, 11:03 am

kraftiekortie wrote:
I know quite a few people.....and I've known them for quite a few years.

I've never had a conversation about guns with them. They have other things on their minds. Americans talk about mortgages, how to decorate their homes, boring stuff like that....but not guns, usually, unless you hang out with people who believe life is like a Charles Bronson movie.

Before I came to the UK for the first time, I had stereotypical notions about Brits. When I got to the UK, I realized that they are ALL wrong.

I hope you could take a holiday in New York City sometime.

My dad was an NRA member who went target shooting every week and had a collection of guns at home. Plenty of other people in the neighborhood had them and have them. They are not an obsession they are a part of life.

Wrong Planet for whatever reason is a political space and that is where they are most discussed. After every major mass shooting the media and does saturate the airwaves for awhile with the gun control debate. After a week or so they go on to next topic until the next time.

I believe America’s extraverted culture has a lot to do with it. There is a saying here “you have to watch out for the quiet ones”. Before the mass shooting epidemic, you had your occasional serial killers, people kidnapping people and carving up bodies, pedophiles etc. The neighboors would inevitably end up saying. “He was quiet, kept to himself, nice guy but something a little off about him”. As an adult well before I was diagnosed and autistic was thought of as kind of the same as ret*d I figured out that description fit me and I did shutter every time a mass murderer was described this way.


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04 Oct 2022, 11:23 am

That’s what I’m saying.

People who constantly talk about guns, and little else, generally are extra-vigilant types.

Most people who do target shooting, and have collections of guns, don’t constantly TALK about guns. They have more important things on their minds. They are very conscious about gun safety. They wouldn’t leave loaded guns, ammunition around casually. They would lock them up.



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04 Oct 2022, 12:25 pm

We get a very distorted view of it in the UK because the only time we really hear about it is when it makes the international news and that's usually because someone has been shot who ought not have been. Which is all too regularly it seems.

To a country where no one owns a hand gun anymore it seems like absolute insanity to allow it.

On the 'quiet' killer thing. I think that does exist in the UK too. Our serial killers tend to be quiet, introverted types presumably because they don't want to get caught.

What is worth remembering is that murdering someone with your hands, or a close weapon like a knife or blunt object takes force and sustained effort and you also need to be prepared for any fight they might up. That's really hard to do unless you're absolutely determined to kill a person and probably also requires a certain amount of detachment to what's actually happening.

A gun allows a person to kill who wouldn't have the fortitude to do it otherwise. Do you think any of these school shooter incel types would be able to throttle someone to death? Looking at their contorted face as they struggle to survive. Even if they had the physical strength to do it? I doubt it. You don't need to be a psychopath to be a mass killer if you have a gun. That's the real problem.


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04 Oct 2022, 12:29 pm

Shooting? That's so last decade. I'm planning a tactical nuclear strike. :twisted:

The appropriate way to respond back when OP was asked and edgy jokes on the topic were still acceptable.


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Last edited by funeralxempire on 04 Oct 2022, 2:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.