Betty Rose looks at the recent “school shootings,” makes an important distinction, and tells her story on her LiveJournal. We think it’s important and original enough to reproduce in a slightly reorganized form here.

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As horrific as Columbine was, some of it made sense to me. It was a twisted version of Revenge of the Nerds. I even had a friend who said, “I wonder why it took this long.”

Only now adult males are going into schools and picking out the girls. Oh, I’m sure there’s explanation, and justification, and whatever else the world gives adult males. They’re just shootings happening in schools, where somebody else has already done most of the rounding up of these girls for the creeps who want to pick them off. These guys are just lazy perverts. They don’t even want to make an effort to find their victims. They like them prepackaged. They’re being called “school shootings,” but they’re not.

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I didn’t go to high school. I dropped out at the end of 6th grade. I was forced to attend 7th and 8th, not by my parents, but by truant officers. Ninth grade was high school. I managed to skip most of it until I turned 16. Legally, at 16 I was no longer bound to public school. I’ve never regretted not attending.

I was molested by a great uncle at the end of 6th grade. I was 11 and he was 59. Up until then not only school, but my life, had seemed fairly asexual. I never thought of it that way, of course. It just was. Being molested got me out of the last few weeks of grade school. Then summer vacation happened.

Seventh grade was junior high school, and it was unbelievably different than 6th grade or grade school had been. Sex was everywhere, and not just because I’d been molested, or was seeing the world through molested eyes. It was hormones and the beginning of the 60’s. Girls who didn’t show up for that first week of class were rumored to be pregnant or to have given birth over the summer. So-and-so was dating So-and-so. It was like landing on an alien planet.

I wore black and started trying to kill myself that year. I had a school counselor who wanted to know if wearing black was an attempt to become invisible. Back then black did not make you invisible. Adam Cartwright and Paladin wore black. Powerful loners wore black. Nobody messed with black; at least if you were male. It doesn’t work as well for girls.

This kid named Billy also started waiting for me after school. I was the fattest kid in school, and Billy thought he could be the funniest. I only lived half a block from school. Billy would wait outside the door that was between school and home for me. A crowd always gathered around him to see what was going to happen. His humor was vicious and ugly and all about my body, my fat, my sexuality. So, for the few minutes (I would not run) it took me to clear the crowd I died inside from humiliation and shame. Then I went home and planned how to literally die in order to avoid school. Billy only lasted for a few months when I was 13. I continued to try and figure out how to kill myself until I was 15 and figured I’d better get better at it or give up. I took everything I had. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I had Sominex. I ended up barfing blue for about 30 minutes and then deciding to forget it.

I understood Columbine. I understood the black coats, and the guns. I hadn’t had guns; just razor blades. Columbine made sense to me. If I’d had a gun, though, I’d probably have turned it on myself. Boys don’t seem to aim as well, although a few fat boys have done what I would probably have done.

School shootings, my ass. Oh, these poor, poor pedophiles, who probably don’t realize that the statute of limitation has run out on their youth. Maybe they see themselves as Harris or Klebold and expect the world to view them as such. Not such a great view, really. Only it’s a much uglier picture, and they’ve become much uglier men. Maybe Billy would understand it, but I don’t. They’re grown men who prey on children, in these two cases on girls. Most of the time on girls, but I’m not forgetting the boys.

I wonder if these incidents would have ever been mislabeled “school shootings” if they’d gone in, rounded up, and sexually molested boys?

school shootings/a>, child abuse, pedophilia, gender, girls, boys, high school, Body Impolitic