senordesol said:
An Indiana mother who sent her gay son to school with a stun gun after administrators apparently didn't do enough to stop the bullying against him said she would do it again -- even though the teen now faces expulsion.
"I do not promote violence -- not at all -- but what is a parent to do when she has done everything that she felt she was supposed to do ... at the school?" the mother, Chelisa Grimes, told CNN's Don Lemon on Sunday. "I did feel like there was nothing else left for me to do, but protect my child."...
...After six other students surrounded him at school on April 16, calling him names and threatening to beat him up, Young pulled the stun gun from his backpack. He raised it in the air, setting off an electric charge, and sending the group scurrying, Young said.
Unlike a Taser, which fire barbs attached to long wires at a target, a stun gun has to be near or pressed against a person to shock them.
It's hard for me to feel anything but sympathy for this kid.
It's truly heartbreaking when you seek protection through 'proper channels', but are forced to take matters into your own hands.
...what? The kid's
mom gave him the stungun, with only the claim that "administrators...didn't do enough to stop the bullying." I'm willing to guess that there are stops you can take before "Arm your child," because that shit will get him (predictably) arrested.
lacktheknack said:
Why not?
This is a civilian short-range non-Taser stun gun. It's basically a powerful portable Van-de-Graf generator, something that we played with one physics class with teacher's consent. The shocks hurt, but are NOWHERE NEAR deadly, unless you have a barely-functioning heart and get hit in the upper-torso all while Lady Luck frowns a frown of death. It's as safe as self-defense measures GET. When you have six people blocking you into a corner and threatening to pummel you into oblivion, it's all well and good to talk semantics, options, and how the school SHOULD be intervening, and how people SHOULDN'T bully others... as you get pummeled into oblivion. Good luck reaching a phone to call police (who won't come and attend a schoolyard standoff anyhow).
Right...here's the thing: a stungun isn't that simple. If it were, it'd be a useless piece of crap. Even disregarding the potential consequences for someone who has even a minor heart condition (not all that uncommon), I can't even begin to count the ways this could go wrong.
Shock someone and...what's supposed to happen? If the stungun works properly, it'll cause uncontrolled muscle spasms. I sure hope the victim doesn't, say, fall over. Because hitting your head on the way down will probably be a lot more lethal than that little stungun. Or maybe you'll bite your tongue when your jaw seizes up. Because you're a
child and not the intended target of a stungun.
lacktheknack said:
And what are the "other answers"? That's a slap in the face to anyone who was unable to stop bullies as children. I faced bullies as well, and I don't know how you did it, but the only thing that permanently stopped a bully before I outgrew them all was when I grabbed a big stick and threatened to bash his head in with it. Don't like that? DEAL WITH IT, IT WORKED BETTER THAN ANY OTHER METHOD. I tried all the others I could think of.
Great plan, Einstein. That's how you deal with bullying: threaten to brutally murder the bully. I'm sure that you'll look like the victim when you, a bigger kid, are brandishing a stick and threatening to crack his skull open.
Oh, wait. That almost makes it sound like you stopped your bullying by becoming no better than a bully yourself. Oops.
lacktheknack said:
And quite frankly, "threatening to mildly injure" is a much better "solution" than your proposed "switch schools" or "threaten with greater injury" (a common effect of self-defense training), and some of your other ones simply won't work. De-escalation requires the other person to be somewhat reasonable, walking with friends requires friends, evasion requires speed, standing down requires cowardly bullies, NONE OF WHICH I had to work with.
Except that self-defense training is something you acquire for yourself. It isn't a plastic rectangle that can be taken from you and used by the very people you intimidated with it. See the potential problem with that? Because then you have not just a bully, but an
armed bully with a low-voltage cattle prod who's pissed at you for threatening him.
lacktheknack said:
I LAUD this kid for having the balls to make motions of fighting back,
...great. Brandishing a weapon now constitutes, "Having the balls to...[fight] back."
lacktheknack said:
as well as having the brains to fire a warning shot first.
Jesus Christ. You're not helping the situation by constantly talking about it as though it's an actual gun.
lacktheknack said:
I laud the mother for actually using the full extent of her power (up to arming her kid with a non-fatal stun-gun) as far as she needed to to make a goddamned difference.
Yeah. Real mother-of-the-year material. Putting her son in a situation where the school has literally no choice but to regard him as a threat worth calling in the police for. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and instead of doing any number of things that could've helped him, she did one of the few that predictably got him arrested.
Ultratwinkie said:
What kind of gated community white bread police do YOU have? In the REAL world the cops don't come until after the fact. Some schoolyard threat of a fight is NOT going to get them off their ass. EVER.
AMERICAN POLICE DO NOT COME UNTIL SOMEONE IS DEAD, DYING, OR HAS DRUGS. PERIOD.
Kids bully others all the time, and the only time anything is done is AFTER the fact and ONLY in extreme circumstances. This is what the school system does. They talk tough but they are useless for anything other than a "talking to." No consequence, no actual help. It only serves to make the matter worse.
Oh, police only show up if there are drugs or corpses?
Funny thing about that: I don't recall either of those in this story.
Regnes said:
The media is already involved, they won't expel him, damage control is the school board's priority, they need to save face. The story isn't about a kid bringing a stun gun to school, the story is about schools not doing their jobs.
Yes, but it's also about not giving the less-than-savory message to bullied kids across the nation, "Don't feel down: just take a weapon into school and
threaten your way to happiness!"
Look at this shit:
?I got kicked out of school for me bringing the weapon to school, but I honestly don?t think that that was fair,? Young said. ?I didn?t use it on nobody ? all I did was raise it up in the air and went back to my class.?
Fucking
wow. As bad as I feel for the kid and his situation, this makes him look unbelievably stupid. It's like he's saying, "I brandished by gun in the bank, but I didn't use it on anyone and just made a regular deposit. I don't get why the police showed up."
You were brandishing a weapon in a school. Of course you're going to get arrested.
Regnes said:
He's already won because the principal has admitted to asking him to not dress in a homosexual manner
The wording of the article was "...school staff had been trying to get him to ?tone down? his accessories." And no, it's not because he was dressing "in a homosexual manner." He was wearing women's clothing. It's cases like this that perpetuate the bizarre idea that if someone is gay, they're compelled to dress like the opposite gender.
)