(Host) Given recent events and the new school year fast approaching,
writer and commentator, Bill Schubart, has been thinking about bullies,
busses, and the hail of unregulated bullets descending on our country.
(Schubart)
Earlier this summer, Americans reacted with outrage to a video of
bullying on a school bus in which several teens unleashed a barrage of
invective against the older woman serving as the bus monitor. Viewers
were shocked by the bus-bullies’ willingness to attack their passive
victim at her most vulnerable points. With no apparent empathy, they
taunted her about her family problems, her poverty, her appearance and
her weight. Like a cougar attacking the throat of its prey, a bully is
adept at finding its prey’s weak spot.
According to
psychologists, bullies know where and how to attack. They use their
offense as a defense and a way to define their power and social
standing. Witnesses may feel empathy for the victim, but are afraid that
the bully will turn on them and so they stand on the sidelines or even
participate.
Marlene Snyder, Development Director for the Olweus
Bullying Prevention Program based in Clemson, S.C, is quoted in
Discovery News talking about the motivation behind bullying, "The simple
reason is bulling shows that they have power over others. The reason
that they do it repeatedly is that they are getting away with it. Nobody
is calling them on their bad behavior."
In the bus-bullying
case, Americans rose up and reacted with anger, the bullies were
chastened and the victim became the focus of an outpouring of sympathy
and donations.
So when yet another disturbed young man amassed a
stockpile of weapons, ammunition, body armor and explosives with no
apparent regulatory impediments and started shooting people in a packed
movie theater, the country again reacted with shock and horror at the
story, and at the grief of the families of the dead, dying or
wounded.
Our leaders and would-be leaders dropped everything and
flew in to show their empathy for the victims and their families. There
were lots of pious words about family, community and shared grief but
not one word about the proliferation of unregulated guns. Just days ago,
another gunman walked into a Sikh temple and started shooting in what
some suspect is an act of "domestic terrorism."
I believe our
fear of discussing gun control in this day and age is the result of
political bullying by the NRA. It’s been going on now for more than a
generation. We and our leader’s need to stop behaving like the fearful
children on the bus. An outpouring of empathy and money for the victims
is one thing, withholding our righteous anger at the bullies for fear of
being bullied ourselves is quite another.
I used to hunt but
find it hard to understand those gun owners who seem less interested in
hunting than they are in bluffing and bullying a world that’s changing
in ways they find threatening – much like adolescents, struggling to
find their place in an evolving social hierarchy.
Bullying is a
complicit act, as we learned during The Third Reich. It’s imperative
that we, as a nation, insist that our leaders open a new dialogue about
reasonable regulations on gun ownership in this country.