When I was a boy in the 1950s and when my father was a boy in the 1920s there was always fighting but there seldom were deaths resulting from the fighting. But today, often things escalate quickly to guns without all the intermediate ways to solve the situations.
Let me start with the 1920s with a true story about my father's older brother Bob when they moved to Breckenridge, Texas to illustrate what I'm concerned about. My Uncle Bob and the whole family had just moved to Breckenridge in the mid 1920s and he was getting beat up every day after school. He finally was tired of all the blood and said to his Dad, "I can't take being beat up every day by the same guy." So, my Grandad said, "You have to find a way to make him stop without killing him. You need to get a stick and when he comes around the corner with it and he will leave you alone after that." So, my Uncle Bob did this and got a 2by4 and knocked the boy out as he came around a corner past a fence by hitting him on top of the head with the 2 by 4. The boy never fought him again. This was how things got resolved in the 1920s in Texas.
In my childhood things were handled differently. By then there were gangs some places so whatever plan you had wasn't going to work because they WOULD kill you with knives then that they pulled out of their boots. So your best bet would be to avoid gangs then. But if it was just a troublemaker in school you had to make it worth their while not to fight you. My method was just to tell anyone trying to pick a fight with me that if they injured me I would never let up in the coming days until they were dead. This avoided almost all fights. However, this wouldn't work now because now people at that point would go and get a gun. This wasn't true in my era because only gangsters, and upset lovers would resort to gunfire back then because guns were considered only a proper thing for hunting or warfare and you were severely looked down upon in society to ever use a gun for anything else. So, people who didn't want to be completely rejected by everyone and shunned by them the whole rest of their lives didn't use guns in the 1950s or even the 1960 or 1970s.
So, even now in regard to solving kids arguments and fights things are so polarized and crazy now that it is mostly now like full time warfare in school all the time. There are no longer the fights to resolve things now. Now, there is only the disagreements and then someone might die for really no useful reason at all. Real resolutions to problems don't seem to exist like they once did. What has happened to society in the U.S.?
I was driving my 15 year old daughter home from her tutor's and we were listening to the radio to a talk show. The commenter had on the father of a boy who had been tortured in school by bigger and older boys until he took a gun to school and killed them about 10 years ago in Santee, California. The boy is now 25 years old and the step-Dad was recounting how it all came to be. After the boy who was 14 at the time and small for his age was beat up, harassed burned over and over again on the back of the neck with a hot lighter he finally snapped because no one was protecting him at school. It sounded like the final straw was sexual abuse when he went and got his Dad's gun. he shot the two boys dead who were making his life a living hell and has been in prison for the last ten years. He will get out when he is 65.
When I was young I would protect people who were small for their ages because I was usually about a head taller than most kids my age. So, even though I was always good natured I could also be scary when I saw people being harmed. So, if you are big and can protect others so they don't feel they have any other choice but to go get a gun and kill someone and basically end many lives including their own, I think you should try to protect those who need protection any way you can before people die. If people don't step in before people snap and get a gun many many more lives will be lost unnecessarily both now and in the future.
One of the ways to save lives is to pull your child out of school and to home school them rather than to watch them die from bullying. Or you could pull them out of the public school and either put them in a private school or a public Charter School. Anything you can do to stop the violence being visited upon your child would be good. If your child complains of serious bullying, "Would you rather have your kid dead or are you willing to pull them out of school to protect their lives and potentially the lives of others?"
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