Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by copperx on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @11:00PM (#31513887)

As someone who studied high school in Mexico and the US and saw students get bullied in both, cultural issues at play make all the difference. Even the most vicious bullies had a sense of "oh crap, we've gone too far" in my Mexican high school. I saw the students defend the bullied kid at both schools, but in Mexico, both bullies and the rest of the students showed some compassion towards the bullied. And the bullied got to play soccer with the other students during recess. The bullied were never wholly ostracised. In contrast, when the other students defended the bullied in the US school, there was this feeling of "you should fend for yourself; nobody is going to help you. You're on your own." It's hard to explain, but that's what I felt being a spectator.

All this is just my n=1 experience, and I could be misreading things, but I'm convinced there's a cultural element that can explain the helplessness of bullied kids in the US school system.

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Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by foobarian on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @11:42PM (#31514212)

I feel you are on to something. I think that on top of those other things, the last straw is that the U.S. society is much less integrated. My neighbors have said 3 words to me the last 10 years I lived here (moved from Europe). Where I come from the whole town would know the troubled kid, would either step in before the bullying got really bad, or sure as heck would not let the kid buy a machine gun.

Maybe the problem with the US is that the society is just too free. Or not enough churchgoing.

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