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.
Thank you, TC, for sharing your difficult story, it helps me understand better. On another note: if you watched the news clip of Abbot's press conference where Beto came in and "spoke truth to power", the most terrifying thing was seeing Dan Patrick the bully leading other bullies in shouting down and cursing at Beto. nr
Powerful testimony, TC. Thank you for sharing and advocating. Listening to Abbott talk about providing free health care to the families when he and the other legislators have not allowed the Affordable Care Act to be enacted in Texas all these years, and rank 50th in the 50 states for mental health funding, made me want to puke...instead I yelled F*** you! at the TV screen.
Thank you TC; makes a lot of sense. Also to Going Downtown, that I just finished reading. Hard to tell which is worse: 40 million semi automatic rifles or 70 million voters for trump; the combination is truly worrying.
To the one thing making you different from Salvador Ramos was maybe that you had a father who was present enough to go shooting with you.
TC, this was a really well presented discussion. You make sense in every paragraph. And it rings true for me because the single biggest reason I wanted to finish school and "get out of Dodge" was the bullying factor. I was a target for another reason. I was the "weak cat of the litter" in my school. I walked with metal/leather strapped brace - polio before the vaccine.
I too found strength in my own ways. I learned how to use humor to disarm and how not to irritate the bullies somehow. But I watched as they shifted their venomous attacks to other kids - like the Jewish kid with a big nose who had the audacity to have a beautiful Irish red head girlfriend. They would surround him, taunt him and then beat the crap out of him. All because this "different" dude had what they couldn't get. He had that girlfriend because he was such a nice guy. So..."Let's get him!"
I learned how to fade into the woodwork, do my own thing, find my own interests, and other friends who were not part of the bullying clique. Polio taught me two things. First, no amount of pain will ever be that bad for me. If I could survive and thrive after that, I could get through anything. Polio made me tougher. I have a very high threshold for pain. And, if you have such an obvious impairment, you would have to have a heart of granite if you didn't feel some sympathy for anyone who might be a little different. So polio also gave me the gift of empathy.
Ramos could have been rescued years ago. You are so right. Sadly, he didn't have the same skills that we were able to marshal by ourselves. There are millions of these situations across the country. Powder kegs ready to explode because we don't consider investing in the social services that we have the science to understand. We are sliding back to some perverse dark ages.
The number of firearms is staggering. 40m semiautomatic is just the start. Add in pistols, rifles, civilian and military, security and law enforcement… we have more weapons than people. And, broadly, people are seen as just another tool or commodity. Funding mental health is the same waste of resources as funding education or healthcare… just make them do what we want … if they won’t, they’re expendable… but keep them coming. I’m thoroughly disgusted by the inhumanity I observe.
Your "superpower" is the light you shed on today's events by sharing your personal experience. It comes through in your military writing and here. Heartbreaking to read but critical to do so! Too often, it is " chldren killing children".
Boys seem so vulnerable today. They are in a "social media soup" of bullying. I keep an eagle eye on my three beautiful grand-boys. But if you ever watch the YouTube stuff they get into ( because they all have phones) .....even with diligent monitoring stuff gets through. The pre-teen kids mimic obnoxious and disrespectul stuff purveyed by stomach curdling & immature guys who gawk their way through YouTube bits because they think it is funny. Some of it, adults can get arrested for. If the school and parents do not jump on it quick and early it escalates. THIs is, in ADDITION, to all the challenges you and others shared here from your own youth.
I am sure someone else is already on to this but some of this experience has to feed into the fact that so many of these late- teen shooters choose schools to be their " killing fields" and young children and teachers as their victims.....as if they are trying to obliterate the wounds of their own younger lives.
"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 40 million...Forty. Million."
A well armed militia, cocked and ready to assemble for the call to bear arms. Terrifying, TC. Shared.
Outstanding, hopefully will get some more people thinking about solutions that don't involve making schools a Maginot line and staffing them with Special Ops wannabes.
In fairness, though, all southern cops aren't Rod Steiger in Cool Hand Luke or Jackie Gleason in Smokie and the Bandit, and those aren't limited geographically. This is another example of the need for improved training and supervision in law enforcement everywhere as well as the need you point out to provide help for those who need it as soon as we become aware of their needs.
Tom, you have done yourself--and the rest of us--proud. from my own point of view (which is tempered by my own experience, a lot of which you already know), this has probably been your most moving piece. the reason is obvious: you're offering a point of view that issues from a place we NEVER get any access to when these things happen: the shooter's place. and it's a place I would wager is actually pretty familiar to most of us, but we're very quick to deny that familiarity at exactly the times we should be embracing it; times like right now. I was bullied for very much the same reasons Ramos was. I had a disabling stammer and my own way of doing things, which led to years of "Unsatisfactory" grades in all things relating to "Behavior." I just kept reading, secure in the knowledge that I wasn't any good at "working and playing well with others." this ended--at least for a long time--when my genius of a fifth-grade teacher decided it was his job to figure out a way to "draw me out," which he did. I discovered that actually, I was extremely good at working and playing well with others if the circumstances were right. to this day, I would always rather make something collaboratively than alone. but at the same time, I got sent to Speech Therapy. the exercises might have been useful, but I tended to ignore them because I was just so horrified at being grouped with other kids who, it seemed to me at the time (with the abundant, absolute certainty of the ten-year-old) that THESE kids didn't have as much on the ball as I did, or had other stuff going on that I didn't have. I realized many years later that this was my primitive way of keeping myself separate and, therefore, "special" and that I would have been better served by just joining in and possibly picking up a few "pointers." the larger point I'm trying to make is that I ( and you, and a lot of us) can definitely, at least on SOME level, understand and even identify with someone (the "kind of person") who'd want to get even with the rest of the world by murdering twenty-odd nine-year-olds. when I read about Ramos, my immediate reaction was to think of a few lines from Auden's "September 1, 1939," which is the poem everyone likes to trot out when things like 9/11 or military invasions occur but (tellingly, I think) NEVER when these increasingly frequent, so-called "lone wolf" attacks happen:"...I and the public know/What all school children learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return." well, uhhh....yeah.
TC, thank you for sharing your story. I am thankful for your finding your path and the success that followed, although I regret it took many years of pain and struggle.
I wonder if bullying is more a "male" thing than a "gal" thing? I ask, because my little high school group of five gal pals were all considered "different," but we never actually got bullied by the "in crowd." We ignored them. All five of us went on to have productive lives. Even now, I would rather be me, the "different" one, than any of them.
I heaved a huge sigh after reading your reflections. I too never read about or saw or heard about anyone shooting students and teachers in a school until my own children were in middle school and high school. My first question was: How can anyone that young get a gun that powerful? From a local store? Federally licensed or not it is a bunch of crap! The answers of course are terrible and they get worse day by day. Abbott is a fool and so are the legislators in my state of Michigan who refused to move reasonable bills this week out of committee for debate and vote. Bills introduced in 2021 by democrats in both chambers and sent to committee to die. I have come to believe that even sanity has become part of the cultural divide. It took a good number of years before automobiles were regulated, licensed, taxed, requiring liability insurance and trained drivers and all the rest. There is the issue of gun violence and the issue of stupid legislators who cut funding for the very things poorer communities need. As far as mental health goes....the nation and all of us in it are being forced to live in a crazy making house that is not getting any better. If we decide to swallow the Fascism pill it will be because we're finally too tired to keep fighting the stupidity and we want some "strong man" to take over and solve the problems we've been trying to solve for God knows how long. I hope we don't succumb to such a sign of hopelessness (like grabbing the opioids) but we're close to caving when confronted with such obvious mendacity, cruelty, and total stupidity.
So much of what you said made perfect sense to me Tom, including your mention of Franz Klammer’s incredible run down that mountain that I have never forgotten, I too was a loner, 1.1 GPA for all of HS, 3.89 for college, I loved ski racing especially the downhill, man against the mountain, I aspired to make the US Olympic team but wasn’t good enough in part because I didn’t start young enough. I have read that there are 20 million AR15’s or their variants in the US, if there are 40 million the problem is twice as bad. That gun was designed to be a very efficient killing machine, because of it’s low recoil, it was easy to use; the always jamming POS that I used in VN, (try being in a firefight with a jamming gun), has been vastly improved in the years since, from what I have read. We don’t allow Stinger’s to be sold to the public for fear of what a lunatic would do with one, the same risk for tragedy exists with the sale of the AR15, which can fire as fast as you can move your finger 3/8”. What happened in Uvalde was entirely preventable, those responsible are, starting with the POS Govenor and his predecessors who prioritized self reliance, in the Texas tradition, over community care, to include every one of those puffed up cowards standing along side or behind him on that stage the other day. Fuck them all!
Thank you, TC. I am so glad that you share and use your experiences to put events into context. I am glad too to know you, now. I almost skipped over this Mess. From it I come away with two gems. First, explained why does not provide justification for the act. So many of us stop there as if understanding the why is the end of the story. Which makes the second gem so important. That is, if we know the patterns repeated and do nothing about their prevention, not of the potential for another tragedy, but to do the kind of things (treatments, change in how we teach or guide kids), we, in the plural, fail as a society, because they fail to learn how to do better. I'd like to think it should be less about one kid repeating the slaughter and more about nurturing the generation of would-be bullies and bullied that copes with the diversity that exists, in constructive ways. Keep telling the tale. Your Mess I find a complement to HCR and Dan Rather, both of whom I also gather nourishment for my soul.
I am a gun owner. I have a large collection as the result of serving for many years in two different branches of the United States armed forces.
Access to weapons must be tied to the same sorts of responsibilities and restrictions I was subject to while serving in the military. Civilian gun owners should be required to pass a training class annually that teaches markspersonship and reinforces the ethics of being a responsible firearms owner. Gun owners should be subject to on demand mental health screenings administered at the federal level. All the nonsense of states being in charge of their individual gun laws must end. One standard needs to be put in place for the entire nation.
This issue affects all of us, and it is a human rights issue first and foremost. Human rights are more important by far than my individual right to have a firearms collection. That must be subject to the authority of the government, and if we do not have a government we can trust enough to decide who should and should not have access to weapons of death, we are doomed as a nation-state in the long-term anyway.
No private militias are going to solve our social or cultural deficiencies, or stop the conditions that have brought us to this point where children are constantly being slaughtered in their houses of learning, and going to any public venue in this country including grocery stores, comes with the risk of being murdered by someone whose mind had been poisoned by toxic indoctrination and cult thinking.
Thank you, TC, for sharing your difficult story, it helps me understand better. On another note: if you watched the news clip of Abbot's press conference where Beto came in and "spoke truth to power", the most terrifying thing was seeing Dan Patrick the bully leading other bullies in shouting down and cursing at Beto. nr
Powerful testimony, TC. Thank you for sharing and advocating. Listening to Abbott talk about providing free health care to the families when he and the other legislators have not allowed the Affordable Care Act to be enacted in Texas all these years, and rank 50th in the 50 states for mental health funding, made me want to puke...instead I yelled F*** you! at the TV screen.
Thank you TC; makes a lot of sense. Also to Going Downtown, that I just finished reading. Hard to tell which is worse: 40 million semi automatic rifles or 70 million voters for trump; the combination is truly worrying.
To the one thing making you different from Salvador Ramos was maybe that you had a father who was present enough to go shooting with you.
TC, this was a really well presented discussion. You make sense in every paragraph. And it rings true for me because the single biggest reason I wanted to finish school and "get out of Dodge" was the bullying factor. I was a target for another reason. I was the "weak cat of the litter" in my school. I walked with metal/leather strapped brace - polio before the vaccine.
I too found strength in my own ways. I learned how to use humor to disarm and how not to irritate the bullies somehow. But I watched as they shifted their venomous attacks to other kids - like the Jewish kid with a big nose who had the audacity to have a beautiful Irish red head girlfriend. They would surround him, taunt him and then beat the crap out of him. All because this "different" dude had what they couldn't get. He had that girlfriend because he was such a nice guy. So..."Let's get him!"
I learned how to fade into the woodwork, do my own thing, find my own interests, and other friends who were not part of the bullying clique. Polio taught me two things. First, no amount of pain will ever be that bad for me. If I could survive and thrive after that, I could get through anything. Polio made me tougher. I have a very high threshold for pain. And, if you have such an obvious impairment, you would have to have a heart of granite if you didn't feel some sympathy for anyone who might be a little different. So polio also gave me the gift of empathy.
Ramos could have been rescued years ago. You are so right. Sadly, he didn't have the same skills that we were able to marshal by ourselves. There are millions of these situations across the country. Powder kegs ready to explode because we don't consider investing in the social services that we have the science to understand. We are sliding back to some perverse dark ages.
I just want to say, for all you LFAA folks who subscribe over here and tout TAFM over there: I love you guys.
The number of firearms is staggering. 40m semiautomatic is just the start. Add in pistols, rifles, civilian and military, security and law enforcement… we have more weapons than people. And, broadly, people are seen as just another tool or commodity. Funding mental health is the same waste of resources as funding education or healthcare… just make them do what we want … if they won’t, they’re expendable… but keep them coming. I’m thoroughly disgusted by the inhumanity I observe.
Your "superpower" is the light you shed on today's events by sharing your personal experience. It comes through in your military writing and here. Heartbreaking to read but critical to do so! Too often, it is " chldren killing children".
Boys seem so vulnerable today. They are in a "social media soup" of bullying. I keep an eagle eye on my three beautiful grand-boys. But if you ever watch the YouTube stuff they get into ( because they all have phones) .....even with diligent monitoring stuff gets through. The pre-teen kids mimic obnoxious and disrespectul stuff purveyed by stomach curdling & immature guys who gawk their way through YouTube bits because they think it is funny. Some of it, adults can get arrested for. If the school and parents do not jump on it quick and early it escalates. THIs is, in ADDITION, to all the challenges you and others shared here from your own youth.
I am sure someone else is already on to this but some of this experience has to feed into the fact that so many of these late- teen shooters choose schools to be their " killing fields" and young children and teachers as their victims.....as if they are trying to obliterate the wounds of their own younger lives.
"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 40 million...Forty. Million."
A well armed militia, cocked and ready to assemble for the call to bear arms. Terrifying, TC. Shared.
Outstanding, hopefully will get some more people thinking about solutions that don't involve making schools a Maginot line and staffing them with Special Ops wannabes.
In fairness, though, all southern cops aren't Rod Steiger in Cool Hand Luke or Jackie Gleason in Smokie and the Bandit, and those aren't limited geographically. This is another example of the need for improved training and supervision in law enforcement everywhere as well as the need you point out to provide help for those who need it as soon as we become aware of their needs.
Tom, you have done yourself--and the rest of us--proud. from my own point of view (which is tempered by my own experience, a lot of which you already know), this has probably been your most moving piece. the reason is obvious: you're offering a point of view that issues from a place we NEVER get any access to when these things happen: the shooter's place. and it's a place I would wager is actually pretty familiar to most of us, but we're very quick to deny that familiarity at exactly the times we should be embracing it; times like right now. I was bullied for very much the same reasons Ramos was. I had a disabling stammer and my own way of doing things, which led to years of "Unsatisfactory" grades in all things relating to "Behavior." I just kept reading, secure in the knowledge that I wasn't any good at "working and playing well with others." this ended--at least for a long time--when my genius of a fifth-grade teacher decided it was his job to figure out a way to "draw me out," which he did. I discovered that actually, I was extremely good at working and playing well with others if the circumstances were right. to this day, I would always rather make something collaboratively than alone. but at the same time, I got sent to Speech Therapy. the exercises might have been useful, but I tended to ignore them because I was just so horrified at being grouped with other kids who, it seemed to me at the time (with the abundant, absolute certainty of the ten-year-old) that THESE kids didn't have as much on the ball as I did, or had other stuff going on that I didn't have. I realized many years later that this was my primitive way of keeping myself separate and, therefore, "special" and that I would have been better served by just joining in and possibly picking up a few "pointers." the larger point I'm trying to make is that I ( and you, and a lot of us) can definitely, at least on SOME level, understand and even identify with someone (the "kind of person") who'd want to get even with the rest of the world by murdering twenty-odd nine-year-olds. when I read about Ramos, my immediate reaction was to think of a few lines from Auden's "September 1, 1939," which is the poem everyone likes to trot out when things like 9/11 or military invasions occur but (tellingly, I think) NEVER when these increasingly frequent, so-called "lone wolf" attacks happen:"...I and the public know/What all school children learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return." well, uhhh....yeah.
Beautiful job, Tom...really.
Wow, TC. That was very good. We must be about the same age. Bullying infuriates me. I'm glad you made it out alive.
TC, thank you for sharing your story. I am thankful for your finding your path and the success that followed, although I regret it took many years of pain and struggle.
I wonder if bullying is more a "male" thing than a "gal" thing? I ask, because my little high school group of five gal pals were all considered "different," but we never actually got bullied by the "in crowd." We ignored them. All five of us went on to have productive lives. Even now, I would rather be me, the "different" one, than any of them.
I heaved a huge sigh after reading your reflections. I too never read about or saw or heard about anyone shooting students and teachers in a school until my own children were in middle school and high school. My first question was: How can anyone that young get a gun that powerful? From a local store? Federally licensed or not it is a bunch of crap! The answers of course are terrible and they get worse day by day. Abbott is a fool and so are the legislators in my state of Michigan who refused to move reasonable bills this week out of committee for debate and vote. Bills introduced in 2021 by democrats in both chambers and sent to committee to die. I have come to believe that even sanity has become part of the cultural divide. It took a good number of years before automobiles were regulated, licensed, taxed, requiring liability insurance and trained drivers and all the rest. There is the issue of gun violence and the issue of stupid legislators who cut funding for the very things poorer communities need. As far as mental health goes....the nation and all of us in it are being forced to live in a crazy making house that is not getting any better. If we decide to swallow the Fascism pill it will be because we're finally too tired to keep fighting the stupidity and we want some "strong man" to take over and solve the problems we've been trying to solve for God knows how long. I hope we don't succumb to such a sign of hopelessness (like grabbing the opioids) but we're close to caving when confronted with such obvious mendacity, cruelty, and total stupidity.
So much of what you said made perfect sense to me Tom, including your mention of Franz Klammer’s incredible run down that mountain that I have never forgotten, I too was a loner, 1.1 GPA for all of HS, 3.89 for college, I loved ski racing especially the downhill, man against the mountain, I aspired to make the US Olympic team but wasn’t good enough in part because I didn’t start young enough. I have read that there are 20 million AR15’s or their variants in the US, if there are 40 million the problem is twice as bad. That gun was designed to be a very efficient killing machine, because of it’s low recoil, it was easy to use; the always jamming POS that I used in VN, (try being in a firefight with a jamming gun), has been vastly improved in the years since, from what I have read. We don’t allow Stinger’s to be sold to the public for fear of what a lunatic would do with one, the same risk for tragedy exists with the sale of the AR15, which can fire as fast as you can move your finger 3/8”. What happened in Uvalde was entirely preventable, those responsible are, starting with the POS Govenor and his predecessors who prioritized self reliance, in the Texas tradition, over community care, to include every one of those puffed up cowards standing along side or behind him on that stage the other day. Fuck them all!
Thank you, TC. I am so glad that you share and use your experiences to put events into context. I am glad too to know you, now. I almost skipped over this Mess. From it I come away with two gems. First, explained why does not provide justification for the act. So many of us stop there as if understanding the why is the end of the story. Which makes the second gem so important. That is, if we know the patterns repeated and do nothing about their prevention, not of the potential for another tragedy, but to do the kind of things (treatments, change in how we teach or guide kids), we, in the plural, fail as a society, because they fail to learn how to do better. I'd like to think it should be less about one kid repeating the slaughter and more about nurturing the generation of would-be bullies and bullied that copes with the diversity that exists, in constructive ways. Keep telling the tale. Your Mess I find a complement to HCR and Dan Rather, both of whom I also gather nourishment for my soul.
I am a gun owner. I have a large collection as the result of serving for many years in two different branches of the United States armed forces.
Access to weapons must be tied to the same sorts of responsibilities and restrictions I was subject to while serving in the military. Civilian gun owners should be required to pass a training class annually that teaches markspersonship and reinforces the ethics of being a responsible firearms owner. Gun owners should be subject to on demand mental health screenings administered at the federal level. All the nonsense of states being in charge of their individual gun laws must end. One standard needs to be put in place for the entire nation.
This issue affects all of us, and it is a human rights issue first and foremost. Human rights are more important by far than my individual right to have a firearms collection. That must be subject to the authority of the government, and if we do not have a government we can trust enough to decide who should and should not have access to weapons of death, we are doomed as a nation-state in the long-term anyway.
No private militias are going to solve our social or cultural deficiencies, or stop the conditions that have brought us to this point where children are constantly being slaughtered in their houses of learning, and going to any public venue in this country including grocery stores, comes with the risk of being murdered by someone whose mind had been poisoned by toxic indoctrination and cult thinking.