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| The study noted that student killers were much more likely to have been bullied by their peers, and also were involved in discipline problems at school. The school shooters have been disciplined. If they hail from a paddling school they have been paddled. Many exhibited suicidal behavior. Paddling will not solve these problems—as the statistics for shootings in paddling states vs. non-paddling bear out. | | For all of the hoopla and high profile news cases, however, the study also noted that school violent deaths, a broader look beyond just mass shootings, actually declined from 1992 to 1999—although the high profile, multiple victim, cases increased. As paddling declined over those years most students became better people—but a smaller number, who disproportionally hailed from harsh discipline schools, found a way with high-powered guns to do more damage than they had done in the past. The very easy access to firearms is presented as a reason violence prone students are able to effect mass murder. Many are “copy cats” from the Jonesboro, Arkansas, and other earlier cases. Yet even so less than one percent of the more than 20,000 homicides and suicides from 1994 to 1999 of children from age five to age 18 took place on school grounds, or on the way to or from school, or at a school-sponsored event. Although even one killing is one too many children are, nonetheless, literally a hundred times safer in school than out. | | The “way out” for schools, echoing the FBI report, is a better system to identify troubled students and investigate warning signals, programs to teach conflict resolution, and programs to reduce bullying. | | To my thinking, and that of many others, paddling itself tends to counteract attempts to create and teach reasoned conflict resolution. The paddling principal, further, is himself the image and reality of a big bully—showing that might, pain, and humiliation are the way to “get even” and “solve problems.” | | With that in mind we’ll take a look at a case that has more questions than answers, and which possibly has the “real story” of a paddle-induced shooting rampage deliberately covered up to prevent people from “reading negative press about Arkansas paddling.” We can only wonder how many other similar stories with significant paddling angles have been covered up. We’ll follow with a look at a story where paddling definitely led to a violent death in a school. | |
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