I COULD HAVE BEEN SALVADOR RAMOS

I’ve been reading everything I can find about the Uvalde Massacre. The news that the police did not respond as current strategy and policy says they should - that it took them an hour for a member of a Border Police SWAT team to finally ask the school principal for the keys to open the door to the room Salvador Ramos was barricaded in, where he killed 19 children and their two teachers after bursting in yelling “It’s time to die!” - all that is disturbing but unsurprising. Southern cops collectively don’t have the brains to find their ass with both hands on a clear day with a three hour advance notice, in my experience.

But what has really interested me was an article I read about the murderer, Salvador Ramos. About his life before this event, about what drove him to commit this terrible crime.

It might not have had to be this way.

Salvador Ramos had a stutter and a lisp. For that, he was made the butt of jokes and became the target of any bully in school. It didn’t help that he was being raised by a drug addict mother and had no clue how to deal with life. Things for him went from bad to worse, till one day he couldn’t deal with it anymore.

Don’t get me wrong. None of what I just wrote justifies in any way what happened.

But to me, it explains the unexplainable.

You see, I’ve been there myself. But fortunately, I hadn’t done that. But I have a personal reaction to that knowledge. I was bullied as a kid growing up. Not for the reasons Salvador Ramos was bullied, but the reasons are the least of it. Bullies bully, and the kid who doesn’t fit, is always the target.

Bullying happens all the time, and not just with humans. I’ve seen it with my cats. I have eight cats who live with me, so I can say I have some experience with the ways of Cat World. The animal that is “different” from the others, that has trouble defending themself, standing up for themself, can expect to have their food taken from them by the others, can expect to be swatted at, chased around, and generally bullied. It’s called dominance, and it’s part of establishing he social pecking order in the pride of miniature lions.

I bring that up because it’s also the way the two-legged animals operate. An elementary or middle school isn’t that different from a pride of young cats. They’re establishing their social pecking order. I know the cats that end up on the lower ends of the social order don’t like what happens to them. Neither do the kids it happens to.

I was bullied because I am Aspergian. No one knew or understood that back then; I was just a “problem” for my parents to deal with, a kid who embarrassed them with the school authorities. A kid whose report cards always had the note “Does not cooperate with others. Does not work and play well with others. Does not respond to properly constituted authority.”

Well, hell yes! It didn’t take that long for me to finally figure out that the authority figures were part of the problem. I knew what was happening to me, but somehow those fucking morons always decided it was my fault it was happening. Whatever the reasons for why it happened, I damn well knew even when I couldn’t put it into words that it wasn’t my “fault.”

Being the “weird kid”, being “different,” is something no kid wants to be. It’s something for which the “perpetrator” earnestly wishes for capital punishment. And when you don’t know why that is, when every attempt to become “one of the crowd” ends in failure, you eventually decide - consciously or unconsciously - to withdraw from the game. For me, I concluded if they didn’t want to hang out with me, I didn’t need to hang out with them.

Fortunately for me, there were things I could do, like read voraciously, like build models and study them, find out why they existed, that would eventually lead to the life I live and the success I have. That had nothing to do with anything that happened in the public schools. As far as school was concerned, I developed a “history” as a “sickly child.” Whenever I got too bored, or too pissed off at the way things were, I could “come down with a cold” and get three or four days off, days spent reading what interested me rather than what I thought of as the crap we had to endure in the classroom. I finally came to revel in being weird and didn’t care what they thought - though I really did; I’d have loved to be “one of the crowd,” but it wasn’t something I could do, no matter how hard I tried. There was one particularly boring teacher in high school, who taught the class I had right after lunch. I had been assigned a seat right in front. I would come in and fall asleep in front of him. Then he would wake me with a question - and I always answered it, since I had read the textbook the first two weeks of that semester. He finally stopped asking questions and I still got a B for getting 100s on my tests. And a report card that said, “Does not respond to properly constituted authority” for my father to yell at me over. I didn’t care.

I did keep trying. I learned to swim early, became a Water Safety Aid at 14, the minimum age. So I went out for swim team and made the cut. One night in the showers after a practice session with the high school swimming team, I snapped when the jock sonofabitch who had bullied me since we got thrown together in class in seventh grade decided to harass me in the shower. I beat the ever-loving holy shit out of him. He was an arrogant jock, and when the rest of the team pulled me off him, he was crying. When he died in Vietnam - one of two to die there in my high school class - shot by his own men, he still had the scar over his left eye that I put there. When I found all that out, I thought to myself, “Well, there’s one who got what he was looking for.”

And of course, the system worked as it did then; the coach dropped me, since my opponent was the best on the team at the racing breaststroke - probably the most difficult stroke in competitive swimming - and was needed if his team was going to keep its state championship and he was to keep his reputation as a great coach.

And that ended my involvement in and any interest I ever had in team sports. The last time I was in a pool, ten years ago, I am still a damn good swimmer - on my own. When I lived a 90 minute drive from the Tahoe ski resorts, I became a damn good downhill skier - on my own. I don’t even watch team sports. My idea of the greatest moment ever in sports was Franz Klammer’s win in the Olympic Downhill in 1976 - an event of complete and total individual achievement.

Nothing was ever publicly said about the fight in the showers. But “the word” got around. And from that day on, nobody ever fucked with me at that school. I later learned that the word was, “Look out, he’s crazy - he’ll kill you!”

Unfortunately, once one has been bullied, there’s a permanent odor, or something, that a bully can spot. So they’ll still come around, particularly if you are someone with a public role. But nowadays, I think the word has gotten around that I will do the research to discover where the bully works, and an e-mail to their HR department can result in their loser life becoming even more loserly - with unemployment. A professor in school once said to me, “If you can’t be loved, be feared.” It works.

Reading about Salvador Ramos, I am pretty sure he decided at some point to withdraw from trying to play the game, and decided to accept his weirdness, as he understood it without the benefit of any help. Unfortunately for us all, while I was able to do that and “get away with it,” he wasn’t.

There’s one really big difference between he and I.

I had access to guns and I knew how to use them. My father taught me to use a rifle when I was ten, to go hunting jackrabbits with him. And then around age 12 he taught me to use a pistol. The one “team sport” I stuck with after leaving the swimming team was the Jr. ROTC rifle team. (That’s actually a group of individual competitors being scored as a team; it’s not really a “team.”) I was very damn good. Expert marksman.

I’d have been a very good school shooter. Well trained and qualified. And there were days back then when I could have been very motivated.

But nobody back then ever thought of such a thing. Not once. Not at any of the schools I went to, not at any of the other schools in town (Not-so funny thing: Columbine High School - which didn’t exist back then - was about 15 miles south of where I grew up in Denver). Or any place else. I was an avid newspaper reader - I never read of such a thing. The worst “shoot ‘em up” adventure I ever heard of was Charles Starkweather’s murder spree, during which he killed 10 people between January 21-29, 1958, in company with Caril Ann Fugate (who convinced the court she was not an active participant, thus avoiding the death by electrocution which he got in June 1959).

Guns were around, but nobody ever thought of using them. Not like that. The angriest kids I knew - and we outcasts knew each other even if we didn’t all hang out together - never thought of such things. The worst thing I can remember a kid wishing for was that his parents would die in a car accident (they’d have deserved it; I visited his house once - and never went back).

It’s not like there weren’t the bad things happening to kids then, that today would be part of the “resume” of a school shooter. But we didn’t know they were happening. I only found out 30 years later that one of my two best friends (even outcasts have friends) was being regularly physically abused by his stepmother for all the years we knew each other as kids.

The worst thing any kid ever did to a school I was in was one time in high school when somebody got in and set a couple waste baskets on fire. On the weekend. When nobody was there but a janitor, who found the fire before it really got going and stopped it.

My friend who was abused by his stepmother, and a couple other kids whose stories I learned much later at the two class reunions I ever attended - we all had stuff in our backgrounds that nowadays could result in becoming a school shooter. My friend was also on the rifle team and also an excellent marksman, so he too would have been good at it.

But nobody ever thought of such a thing.

Nowadays, Asperger’s is known; teachers know when a kid has really low grades and really high test scores, like I did, and has trouble “fitting in,” that the kid is a candidate for the specialized counseling that’s available, where the kid can learn to cope socially, and maybe even find out early on what his/her Aspie Superpower is, rather than try and try and finally give up in their 30s, only to stumble into their “thing” - the story of my “path to success.”

Unfortunately, the further from major modern urban centers that kid is living, the less likely there is that the knowledge to recognize what’s going on is there, and it’s very less likely that such a program exists. For that kid, there is only what was there for me: survive long enough to get the hell away, in hopes that somewhere along the line, serendipitously, something will make sense and a successful solution will be found. That is so unlikely that in the Aspie community, people like me who did that are so rare we become well-known for our mere existence.

For Salvador Ramos, the solution was even easier: a course in speech therapy to help him with his stutter and his lisp. President Biden is proof such a thing works.

Unfortunately, I don’t think such a program exists in a place like Uvalde; the people who advocated for the school to be “hardened” - which turned out to be a fool’s errand - are the people most likely to oppose ‘wasting taxpayer money” on anything but “readin’ ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetick.”

But obviously, the counseling Salvador Ramos so desperately needed, the intervention that might have saved 22 lives - his 21 victims and himself - wasn’t there in Uvalde, Texas. With the 20/10 vision of hindsight, it is clear it would have been ‘cost-effective” whatever the price.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott cut $200 million from the state budget for mental health services four months ago. This is why a town like Uvalde doesn’t have the services to help someone like Salvador Ramos.

When I was growing up, people didn’t know about Aspergers, or AD/HD. They didn’t know about effective speech therapy. So they can’t be blamed for not providing those services.

But today? Today we fucking KNOW this. We KNOW that bullying is the most important element of a cycle that too often ends in violence that’s an expression of rage and frustration, in which 19 children who had nothing to do with any of the events that drove the life of Salvador Ramos ended up dead.

For every single mass shooter who has been studied in any depth, there is one word that is in every report: “BULLIED.”

It’s not just the kid who is bullied who needs intervention. The bully needs intervention. Every bully I have ever met was the offspring of a parent of the same sex who was a bully, who bullied their child into becoming the bully.

But it’s not just Texas where the state budget for social services gets cut. And when it happens, most people shrug.

The social welfare system as it exists is part of the problem. Taking Salvador Ramos away from his crazy drug-addicted mother earlier than his grandmother finally did probably wouldn’t have solved things. Every few years here in Los Angeles, there’s another terrible story in the LA Times about a child murdered by an adult in the family, who the social worker didn’t recommend be taken out of that family for their safety before the murder happened. And then there are stories of the kids who do get taken out of those families, who are placed in foster homes, who are abused by the foster parents. My ex-wife was placed in foster care as a result of incest in her family at age 14. In two different foster families she was in, adult men took advantage of her. She didn’t end up a mass murderer, but to this day she is someone who experiences trouble in her life that can be directly traced to those events.

But after all of that, it comes down to this: if the kids of my generation had thought of doing things like this, if I had grabbed my father’s guns and tried to act out, it would have been impossible to wreak the kind of damage that is possible now. Those guns were bolt-action single-shot rifles, they were six-shot revolvers. The closest I ever was to a semiautomatic was my father’s service pistol, the classic M1911 Colt. The magazine of that weapon holds seven bullets.

Back then, no 18-year old anywhere could have walked into a gun store and purchased a weapon. Period.

In 1994, when the assault weapons ban was enacted, there were 40,000 assault rifles in civilian hands in this country. Today, in 2022, that number is 20 million.

Twenty. Million.

20 million weapons that can be fitted with 100-round drum magazines, that can fire off all those bullets in under a minute. As fast as the shooter can pull the trigger.

20 million weapons that, when their bullets hit a human, do such damage that the person will be hard to identify afterwards; and if they’re a child who was shot several times, the body may be literally blown apart - the remains identifiable only by DNA.

None of the guns I grew up with could do that to a person.

We have the knowledge to help the people who commit these terrible acts, before they get anywhere close to that boiling point. We lack the will to do anything about it.

We know how terrible these weapons are, and the response is to make it easier to get hold of them.

Angry, rage-filled, wounded people, that no one cares about enough to try and help, with access to weapons that can kill on an industrial scale.

We only care after those two things come together and create the explosion they do.

I keep thinking to myself that the solutions are simple. And they are. But without the will to put them to use, they might as well be the hardest, most difficult things that could be done.

Because that’s what they’ve become.

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