Guess what? It's not the bullying

Let’s settle this bullying and school shooting argument once and for all:

• From 1997 to today, Austria has 3 mass shootings, none of them school shootings, resulting in combined death toll of 11 people. 21% of boys in Austria report being bullied in school.
• Estonia had one unconfirmed school shooting in the same time period, resulting in a death of a teacher and no other injuries. 20% of boys in Estonia report being bullied in school.
• Russia has had 8 mass shootings since 1997, one of them a school shooting. Total deaths from mass shootings? 47, of which 2 deaths were the result of the school shooting. 18% of boys in Russia report being bullied in school. 
• Belgium has had one mass shooting since 1997, resulting in 6 deaths (although it’s fair to point out that the same shooting resulted in 125 injured). No school shootings. 17% of boys in Belgium report being bullied in school.
• Portugal reports one single school shooting since 1997, involving two adults, of which one died. Gun crime is about 10 times more prevalent in U.S. than in Portugal so no big surprise there. 17% of boys in Portugal report being bullied in school.
• Canada has had 16 mass shootings (and I’m being generous with that term, just to add a bit more data) since 1997. Total death toll resulting in about 70 people. Four of those were school shootings, resulting in 6 deaths, with 2 deaths being the daycare worker and the shooter committing suicide. 15% of boys in Canada report being bullied in school.
• Switzerland has had one mass shooting since 1997, resulting in deaths of 14 people. No school shootings. Switzerland’s love for guns is probably pretty damn equal to U.S. and they have staggering gun ownership rates. 15% of boys in Switzerland report being bullied in school.
• France has had 3 mass shootings since 1997, resulting in deaths of 37 people. One of them was a jewish school shooting where an adult killed 7 people, 3 of them children. 15% of boys in France report being bullied in school.
• Luxembourg has had zero mass shootings since 1983. 14% of boys from Luxembourg report being bullied in school. 
• Poland has had zero mass shootings since 1997. 13% of boys from Poland report being bullied in school. 
• Slovak Republic has had one mass shooting since 1997, resulting in deaths of 7 people and 15 injured. No school shootings. 12% of boys in Slovak Republic report being bullied in school. 
• Ireland has had 5 mass shootings since 1997, resulting in deaths of 28 people. No school shootings. 11% of boys from Ireland report being bullied in school. 
• Finland has had 5 mass shootings since 1997, 2 of them school shootings, resulting in deaths of 20 kids. 11% of boys in Finland report being bullied in school.
• Germany has had 5 mass shootings (again, using the term loosely) since 1997, resulting in deaths of 61 people. One of them was a school shooting, where 17 children died and 7 were injured. 11% of boys in Germany report being bullied in school. 

Now, it would be pretty damn impossible to go over every mass shooting in United States since 1997 cause no one’s got time for that, so I’m only counting school shootings that resulted in 10 or more deaths, and semi-automatic weapon was used (and not even counting the ones with low deaths and sky-high injury rates). I’m being extra nice with this criteria, and giving it as much wiggle room as possible. So we’re looking at 6 mass shootings total, resulting in deaths of 113 kids.
11% of boys in United States report being bullied in school.

So we have combined school shootings (any gun discharge that happened around any school property) of 14 countries where the bullying in schools is either higher, or equal, to bullying in schools in Unites states, with a combined total of 46 children dead from these shootings in 21 years. Compared to 113 dead children in only a very limited percentage of school shootings in United States that involved deaths of 10 or more children murdered by a semi-automatic weapon in the same period of 21 years. 

In other words, I never want to see the bullying argument from anyone ever again. 

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students are at disproportionate risk for bullying and harassment. 60% feel unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation, 44% because of their gender expression, and 20% were physically assaulted in 2017. Whooping 40% of gay people are bullied at work as 𝘢𝘥𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘴, and yet somehow, restrain themselves from walking in there with an AR-15 and shooting up the place. Every statistic under the sun shows that your average cishet white boy is the least likely to be bullied when compared to any and 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 minority, and yet, of 95 mass shootings carried out in the US between 1982 and 2017, 92 of the perpetrators were cishet white males.

The problem is the angry white cishet American male’s tendency to use violence as a means of self-expression. It goes back to how we socialize these men from birth. Every white privileged male in U.S. is in actuality, the real snowflake, and will react with violence to anything that threatens their status in society, their manhood, or their inflated ego and sense of self-importance. The white cishet boy is used to being special. He gets paid more than better educated and qualified women, he gets less jail time than any POC who commits the same crime, and he can get elected President with a vocabulary of a five-year old and mental capacity of a boiled carrot. So when something threatens this privilege, the white cishet boy, who has been told that he doesn’t have to be literate to attend college, doesn’t have to work hard to get promoted, doesn’t have to be law-abiding to escape jail time, and can talk about sexually assaulting women without any consequences, has neither the education nor the social skills to deal with a threat to his status like a civilized human being. 

By telling cishet white boys they were special for decades, when they were in fact, less than, we have essentially created people like Nicholas Cruz. And now we reap the consequences.