Mother says Joplin, Mo. shooter was bullied

Mother says Joplin school shooter was bullied:

The mother of Thomas White, the Memorial Middle School shooter, is claiming that her son was bullied…

Norma White said that her son would come home with injuries, crying and begging not to be sent back to the school. The Associated Press is not naming the boy because of his age.

“He came home once limping; he had been kicked by an older kid in the halls,” she said. “He came home once with a huge welt on his head from someone slamming his locker door on his head when they passed him in the hall. His hand was injured once too.”

“He did suffer from bullying. He would come home crying, begging us not to send him back to school.”

While I can definitely empathize, it’s still no reason to bring a MAC-90 to school.

Mrs. White is placing a lot of the blame on herself…

Norma White did not directly blame the shooting on the bullying.

But she said she now wishes she had done more to raise the problem with school officials.

White spoke to her son’s teachers about the problem only a couple of times – during parent-teacher conferences – but never made a formal complaint to the administration. She said she advised her son to tell his teachers, but he often insisted nothing would be done about it.

It also didn’t help that White had such easy access to the guns that White’s father wasn’t supposed to have anyway.