In this blog post from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a grandfather tells the tale of how he stepped in on his granddaughter’s behalf to put a stop to her being bullied.

He handled it with class and reason and the school was able to do something about it so I have to commend him for that. In his blog post, the gentleman also mentions a point that I’ve been saying for years. If schools truly wanted to do something about bullying they would stop worrying about being sued and actually punish the bullies.

However, the author of the post trots out not only Columbine but other school shootings as well as being caused by bullying.

We live in an age in which doing things like picking on a child who’s perceived to be vulnerable or “different” carries Major Life Consequences. The classmates of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold regarded them as two harmless, outcast losers who didn’t matter…until they became everyone’s worst nightmare. This is the baffling part of the current tsunami of school bullying: Are our children actually stupid or do they simply have an insanely short attention span? Columbine was in 1999, so many of today’s teens and grade-school kids were in diapers or not even born. But, since Columbine, one hundred and twenty-four American students and teachers have died in gun-related incidents in public schools. The names are not as familiar as Columbine – except for Virginia Tech – but thousands of people were battered by the shock waves of these events in places like Grundy, Virginia; Red Lion, Pennsylvania; Cold Spring, Minnesota; Florham Park, New Jersey; Red Lake, Minnesota; and Dekalb, Illinois.

First off again there is no definitive proof that the Columbine scumbags Harris and Klebold were bullied. However, there is definitive proof that they were, in fact, the bullies themselves. Not only that but they weren’t the loner outcasts as so many people make them out to be. They were actually popular and had a large circle of friends. Not to mention bullying was never mentioned in any of the journals of the killers that have been released publicly.

He also mentions some locations that I am familiar with where bullying also did not place. At Red Lake, there was no evidence that Jeff Weise was bullied. As a matter of fact, people did try to befriend him but Weise was such an anti-social jerk that it was hard for people to befriend him. In Cold Spring, Minn. was the shooting at Rocori High school. In that case, it was never proven that the shooter John Jason McLaughlin was bullied. Not to mention that his victims, Aaron Rollins and Seth Bartell, weren’t even his alleged bullies. And in Virginia Tech Cho Seung Hui was not bullied but was just jealous of people who were more successful than him.

My point is that bullying and school shootings should not always be mentioned in the same breath. It plants the seeds in kids’ heads who are being bullied that mass murder is an acceptable solution to their problems.