NEW YORK -- This is to the next school shooter:

  I saw you on the subway the other day. You were tall and skinny, but at 16 or 17 you have no way of
  knowing that you'll soon be considered handsome. You hung back from your classmates -- far enough
  to give you fair warning of impending assault, but not in a different car where you wouldn't hear the names
  (fairy! pussy! faggot!) they were calling you.

  Another, shorter, blonder kid, one with that patented wannabe-jock-Ben-Affleck-Lite expression,
  walked up behind you and shoved you. The shove was way too hard to qualify as friends-messing-around,
  and anyway:  He wasn't your friend. "What a little pussy!" he shouted at you for the benefit of his sycophants.
  He shoved you again. Harder; you fell over.

  I imagine that you, like me, had a parent advise you to ignore such people. You were minding your
  own business, trying to get home before losing too much face (or blood).

  He strutted back and forth between you and the gang of aggressive neutrals, hitting you harder and
  harder, his words becoming increasingly unpublishable.

  You were smart and scared and most of all you were angry. If you'd had a gun in your backpack that
  evening, you might have blown that jackal's head clean off. I wouldn't have blamed you. Nor would my
  wife. Nor would the other adults, supposed guardians of decency in underaged society. If you had shot
  that boy that night, it would not have been good, but it would not have been bad. The bully's chances
  of curing an illness or writing something worthwhile are limited at best.

  None of we "adults" helped you because you weren't our kid, nor even the son of someone we'd met.
  We just didn't want to catch any ricocheting bullets.

  Guns are easy to come by. There are eight for every man, woman and child in the country; surely just
  one American could do with only seven. If you were to go to school the next morning with that firearm
  and hunt down the thug who taunted you and hit you and kept hitting you no matter how assiduously
  you ignored him, and let's say you decided to dispatch the stupid boys and girls who laughed with him
  at your expense to keep him company in hell, I for one (and if they're honest, the other passengers on
  that subway) wouldn't mourn.

  They deserve it, all of them.

  Of course they do.

  But please believe me when I say these things, and these things apply to every kid who's ever read a
  news account of schoolhouse vengeance and fantasized about bringing that particular show to his or
  her hometown:

  First -- you can leave. Just hold out two or three or four or whatever years it is until you turn 18, and
  leave the stupid rotten idiots you went to school with and the apathetic adults who didn't give a damn
  while you were ostracized and beaten up. The best way to do this is to work like a dog in school so
  you get good enough grades to qualify to borrow so much money you'll never know how to pay it
  back, to go to some college as far away and in a place as different as you can possibly imagine and
  then some. An unsung advantage of working like a dog in school is that the scum who torment you
  (and yes, deserve to die) don't hang out at the library studying.

  Second -- things really are different for adults. If another adult hits you and you don't hit him back, you
  get to watch smugly as he learns his Mirandas. And you don't have to put up with any BS; in most
  states, if someone comes to your home with the intent of committing a crime, you can use deadly force
  against him, i.e., kill him. At the very least you can get a court to order him to stay the hell away from you.

  Years -- whole years -- seem like a century at your age, but they're really not. Soon enough they'll
  buzz by so fast that you'll forget most of what happened. If there's anything worse than prison, it's
  hearing the kids who hurt you memorialized as innocent martyrs shot down in the flower of their youth
  for the rest of your life. So forget where Dad sorta hides the key to the arsenal and spare shells
  downstairs. Buckle down and work on getting out of town when you turn 18.

  Remember: They're not worth it.
 

  (Ted Rall, 37, is a damn funny cartoonist, one of the best.)