Bullying and School Shootings From TV- CSI

As I stated in my last post, there are over fifty books that deal with school shootings, many of which show the shooter as a victim of bullying. My book, He Was Weird, is one of those. However, in spite of all of these books, Hollywood has not picked up on this and made any films about school shootings. In fact, the only movie I know of about a school shooting is a BBC production of Lionel Shriver's book, "We Need to Talk About Kevin." I wasn't too impressed with the film as it left out what I felt were important parts of the story and the shooting scene was crap. Lionel should sue. Fortunately, television hasn't been afraid to deal with the subjects of bullying and school shootings and I will be looking at these in my next few posts.

[caption id="attachment_825" align="aligncenter" width="286"] Scene from the Bully for You episode on CSI.[/caption]

The first one I know about appeared in Season 2 of "Crime Scene Investigation," CSI for short. The title of the particular episode explains it all, "Bully for You." It opens with the discovery of a dead body of a boy in the boys' bathroom of a local high school. Almost immediately, the investigation of the CSI team uncovers the fact that the dead boy was a high school bully. Therefore, all of the victims of the bully are interviewed who tell their individual stories of how they were bullied, some are rather bad, but it is deduced that none of them could have shot the bully.

Further interviews and the obvious great forensic work by the CSI team lead to the inevitable twist in the story. In the end, it is discovered that the shooter was a female guidance counselor at the school. A background check showed that she was traumatised by an school shooting at her previous school, where she was assistant principal and happened two weeks after Columbine. At that school, one day, eleven people were shot and killed by the shooter. She explained it all happened because some Sophmore  didn't like people making jokes about his glasses. That was her justification for shooting the bully. It was better to shoot one bully than to have a mass shooting like the one she experienced. Does she have a point? Maybe, but it was no excuse for murder.

What I liked about this particular episode was that it neither glorified the bully or justified the murder. For me, it reinforced my belief that bullying is wrong but there are better more effective means of dealing with it than taking lives.

To buy He Was Weird, go to https://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-Weird-Michael-Lefevre/dp/1909740942/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490815891&sr=1-1&keywords=he+was+weird