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Comment by quantified | Hacker News Reader

So much of the reaction to the Columbine shooting was the event itself and not why it happened. I'm not trying to excuse the tragedy there. Only pointing out that if you push people they may snap, and even if they were in the wrong in snapping the effects of the snap still remains.

My high school was and is extremely highly regarded and was a torture chamber for some people. My kids have grown up with the oversteer and their experiences were much better (in other schools) thankfully.

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I find the culture really bad. If a colleague punched somebody in the face at their workplace frequently, and that person constantly lived in threat of violence from that colleague for many hours a day, the colleague would be fired and handed to the police.

But you can do this to a child for 6 hours and it's often considered acceptable. Why would people be surprised when a human child's natural reaction to horrifying abuse mirrors what any other living animal would do?

I've always been really upset about this. Also, the way it's treated by adults.

Teachers always just said to ignore them and they'll stop. That never worked for me. They also said you had to tell them if someone was being a bully. I did, they didn't really believe me and took no action. When it got too bad my parents reported the assault to the police. The police warned that kind of case was not a priority and then dropped it.

Eventually the bully was called to the principal and given a stern talking to. He was told next time there would be consequences. A few weeks later he punched another classmate in the eye so he temporarily lost eyesight on that eye. The bully was given a stern talking to and told that next time there really would be consequences.

>But you can do this to a child for 6 hours and it's often considered acceptable.

-- often going unnoticed and/or unreported I might add.

If a child breaks in a school and no one chooses to hear, do they make a sound?

Afaik, Columbine was not case of snapping after being bullied. That was just something some reporters guessed and it became popular narrative. But, that does not seem to be what happened in that school.

Am the furtherest from being an expert, so many caveats:

TIL Wikipedia seems to agree with your assessment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre...

My understanding has long been the FBI profilers determined that spree shooters are begging for help, hoping someone will stop them. I'm pretty sure I got this from interviews in the movie Bowling for Columbine.

So it'd make sense to be alert for warning signs. Like most everything, all the well intentioned anti bullying measures were implemented terribly by noobs and proved counter productive.

But mostly, no one bothered to check to see if any of the remedies were helping.

Well, some measures are known failures. Like zero tolerance policies.

This is a recurring theme. DARE boosted drug use. Promoting abstinence boosted teenage pregnancy. Aggressive pain management led to opioid epidemic. Etc.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

> Aggressive pain management led to opioid epidemic

This isn't what I got from staying informed on that epidemic, so I'm curious where you got this from. My impression is the Sacklers lied intensely about Oxycontin, and those lies are what did most of the harm.

I currently share Dr. Atul Gawande's assessment. It jives with my personal (anecdotal) experience. I was in a pain and toxicity study, right during the major shift from under treating to over treating pain. And Gawande's criticism about the missing followup studies jives with my experience.

https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16270370/atul-gawande-opioid-we...

In my version of the story, Sacklers were opportunists who helped bury the evidence (a la Merchants of Doubt).

Wonder if there's any chance of reconciling our info sources. Probably hard at this distance of space and time from the event.

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