School massacre, saved by a television fluff piece
My school years were rather full of bullying. I was small, I was quiet, and I was good at mathematics: these things added together to form a rather large target for these young sociopaths. I counteracted the bullying with good grace – I hid and cried every day for a most of a school year. One of my fellow bullied school friends, however, took a much different approach.

My high school didn’t have much to be proud of – we were deemed one of the worst schools in the state with the worst standard of education in the nation. We were a gaggle of no-hopers, born from generations of destitution. Our town boasted the highest rate of child poverty in all of the United States, but was runner-up in child abuse. Our consolation prize was murder, an incredible amount of violence against our fellow man. As such, my school’s halls were full of The Disturbed and The Left Behind. These students, male and female alike, made it their mission to make the lives of all who may have had a chance of escaping this tainted and rocky cycle of deprivation a living hell. I had great visions of absconding from that rotten prison, as did the aforementioned student. Then his mood changed, and all hope one could see in his eyes was dashed.

And so, when one of the school teachers undertook a long-overshadowed charity event of some sort, a local television crew arrived to film it. As the presenter was setting up her piece-to-camera, the student’s locker neighbour came running up to her, “Are you here about the gun?” he excitedly shouted.

What started as a good news story quickly turned into a full school evacuation. We’d had some gun threats at a football match, so we wanted to be extra careful. I was on my way to my first class of the day - gym - when the alarm went off.

It transpired that this bullied student had started to slowly carry in his deceased father’s gun collection over the course of several weeks. Handguns, semi-automatic weapons, boxes upon boxes of ammunition, gallons of petrol and homemade bombs were recovered from the young man’s locker and car.

His plan was to kill the main perpetrators of his bullying and everybody else – innocent or not – involved in his torment. He got to school early and blocked all outdoor entries / exits to the school gym, including those of the locker rooms. He then planned on throwing homemade bombs into the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms. As the survivors attempted to run away, they would have found all exits blocked. This would have made them easy pickings, which would have allowed the gunman to then fire upon the panicked students as they tried to flee. Once satisfied with his kill, he planned on setting fire to the gym. Planned death toll: 80, more if it tickled his fancy.

In its place, a kid happened to see just a single gun in a bag and wanted his face in the local television news limelight. This, just seconds before the bell rang and all 100 of those kids went to gym class. Seconds.

I was in that targeted gym class and constantly wonder what would have happened if all those pieces hadn’t fallen into place – if the locker neighbour hadn’t spied something suspicious, if the television news crew wasn’t there. Would this kid have told a teacher or would he have allowed it to go ahead? What if the news crew had gotten there just two minutes later? What if this, what if that? Columbine, when it happened two years later, would have been a tragic follow-up to a much bigger event.

Instead, it barely made the local news. You’ve never heard of my hometown. It is tragic, but it isn’t the site of a tragedy.
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 15:48, 3 replies)

*click*
Good story.
( sanityclause is waiting until, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 17:02, closed)

That's why I'm glad i went to a school in England
The worst you'll get is someone grassing the bully up and not planning mass murder
(NuffMuff fucks shrubbery, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 18:57, closed)

yeah its just left to deranged farmers...
(dunblane)
(Frample Tromwibbler climbs an obstacle like old people fuck, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 22:51, closed)