There’s been a little controversy over Stan Lee’s get well
message to a boy who was shot.
In case you hadn’t heard, Bowe Cleveland of Taft, California
was shot on the week of January 6. A teacher talked the gunman down from
shooting anyone else. Apparently, Bowe has a nickname because of this
shooting—“Bulletproof Spider-Man.” He’s a huge comic book fan, and when word of
this got to Stan Lee, he sent the message, which you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biEXOzaYNwo&feature=player_embedded
So where does the controversy come in? Because Bowe, who not
only is a comic book fan but also a volunteer and apparently a well-liked
student at his high school, apparently bullied the shooter. Because of this,
there’s been a few comic book fans who didn’t think it was right for Stan Lee
to send a get well message to the bully, or at least wait until the whole story
had come out before he’d given Bowe his support. There are other people who
feels the first group of comic book fans are crazy—a kid who was a comic book
fan got shot. Stan Lee offered a get-well video on the Internet. What’s the
problem?
I have to admit, as a knee-jerk reaction I’m more
sympathetic to the shooter. I was bullied in high school, the same as the
shooter, whose name is apparently Brian Oiver. I’d rather not go into the
sordid details, but it lasted for a long time, and I remember
one or two times sitting up in bed just hoping that the next day wouldn’t come
so I wouldn’t have to go to school. I remember feeling weak for not choosing to
fight back, although I can’t say that I would have fought back if I had the
chance to do it again, what with my school’s idiotic “you’re fighting even if
you defend yourself” rule, and that if you were caught fighting (even in
self-defense) you’d be expelled from all academic and honors organizations,
although strangely enough not from any of the athletic teams, which is kind of
telling.
The problem is that shooting someone isn’t the same as
beating someone up. Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but I feel it needs to
be said. Plenty of people get bullied in schools, and I’d argue that comic book
fans and people with geeky interests still tend to get bullied more than most.
So it’s hard to feel any sympathy for a bully when something bad happens to him
or her. Didn’t they deserve it, in some karmic cycle of retribution?
If real life were more like Hollywood, I’d agree, but it’s
not. We have no way of knowing how much Bowe will recover, how long it will
take, and how much of a financial burden it will be on his parents. Now, you
can manage to hurt someone permanently just as bad with a knife, a club or even
your hands, feet and a little imagination, but it’s easier to scar, maim, and
kill with a gun.
So Bowe deserves sympathy, and it’s great that Stan Lee
taped that get well message for him. However, I have to wonder whether Brian
Oliver wasn’t another victim in this tragedy. I suspect most of the media will
let the matter drop, since no one was actually killed, but Brian Oliver doesn’t
seem like just another psychotic gunman. He was convinced to put the gun down,
he targeted two people that he said were bullying him, and he didn’t try to
kill himself afterwards. This strikes me as a very different set of
circumstances than other school shootings, and it’s a shame that, if the truth
of the matter ever gets out, we probably won’t know about it. It’s also worth
pointing out that we probably won’t know much about Brian Oliver, either, other
than he was just “the shooter.”
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