This Is Not Right....

I have no words.... Article reprinted from Towleroad.

12-Year-Old California Boy Takes His Own Life After Facing Anti-gay Bullying for Being School Cheerleader

Tragic news out of Folsom, California as a young boy committed suicide Wednesday after facing ongoing bullying for being his school's only male cheerleader.

Ronin Shimizu, 12, was Folsom Middle School's only boy on the Eagles cheer squad last year. He was being homeschooled this year because the bullying got so bad.
Sacramento station KXTV reports:

He was bullied very badly," Riley Coleman said as she teared up. The Folsom Middle School sixth grader was on the squad with Ronin last year. "It's not ok to bully people," she said through tears. 

"So sad to know that people can hurt you that way," student Allie Flahive said.

"I was devastated when I found out. I started crying," Ronin's friend Grace Velander said. "I've known him since 6th grade. Me and him had classes all last year together."

 

A school official confirmed the Shimizu family reported multiple times that Ronin was being bullied in school. Said one fellow student: “I heard that people called him gay because he was a cheerleader”.
The school district released a statement saying:

"We are shocked and deeply saddened by this unspeakable tragedy, and our hearts go out to Ronin's family during this difficult time. Many students, teachers and staff who knew Ronin remember him as a positive and outgoing child, and our school communities are truly grieving this loss today. We are moved by the outpouring of support from families and community members asking how they can help."

 

Friends of Ronin said the young boy was passionate about his cheerleading and loved it.

A vigil for Ronin was held last night at his home.

 

How Do You Help Someone.......

............who has given up.

Who views death as a real alternative.

Who is so sad that he can not bring himself to leave the house.

Who has suffered so much and yet life has been so cruel to reward him with so little.

I have a friend who feels like this.

I cannot help him.

I only know that if he did decide to leave life........... mine would end.

.....WTF......... Gay Student Kills Himself ..............

..............seriously............. WTF......... how the hell did the two morons involved in this think it was going to turn out???................

Read...............

A New Jersey college student jumped to his death off a bridge a day after authorities say two classmates surreptitiously recorded him having sex with a man in his dorm room and broadcast it over the internet.
Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, 18, jumped from the George Washington Bridge last week, his family's attorney, Paul Mainardi, said.
Police recovered a man's body in the Hudson River just north of the bridge on Wednesday afternoon, and authorities were trying to determine if it was Clementi's.

Two Rutgers freshmen have been charged with illegally taping Clementi having sex and broadcasting the images via an internet chat program.
Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said in a statement on Wednesday that his group considered Clementi's death a hate crime.
"We are heartbroken over the tragic loss of a young man who, by all accounts, was brilliant, talented and kind," Goldstein said.
"And we are sickened that anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the surreptitious video, might consider destroying others' lives as a sport."

One of the defendants, Dharun Ravi, was Clementi's roommate, Mainardi told The Star-Ledger of Newark. The other defendant is Molly Wei.
They could face up to five years in prison if they are convicted.
A lawyer for Ravi, of Plainsboro, did not return a message. It was not clear whether Wei, of Princeton, had retained a lawyer.
A Twitter account belonging to a Dharun was recently deleted, but in a cached version retained through Google he sent a message on September 19: "Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay."

Two days later, he wrote on Twitter: "Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it's happening again."
Clementi's driver's licence and Rutgers ID were found in a wallet left on the bridge last Wednesday after two witnesses saw someone jump from it, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because Clementi's body had not been positively identified.

Mainardi issued a statement on Wednesday confirming Clementi's suicide.
"Tyler was a fine young man and a distinguished musician," Mainardi said. "The family is heartbroken beyond words."
Ed Schmiedecke, the recently retired music director at Ridgewood High School, where Clementi graduated this year, said Clementi was a violinist whose life revolved around music.
"He was a terrific musician and a very promising, hardworking young man."
NYPD harbour officers recovered the body of a white man, clad only in pants, wearing a watch and without identification after a New York City Parks Department employee spotted a body floating in the river, police said.

The body was taken to the city medical examiner's office; authorities hoped to use the watch as identification.

AP

.....Prime Minister's Gun Legacy - 200 Lives Saved A Year.......

........I was never a fan of Prime Minister John Howard, but his decision to ban semi-automatic weapons and shotguns............ good move........... here is the article reprinted from The Brisbane Times...........

TEN years of suicide data after John Howard's decision to ban and then buy back 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns has had a stunning effect.
The buyback cut firearm suicides by 74 per cent, saving 200 lives a year, according to research to be published in The American Law and Economics Review.

A former Australian Treasury economist, Christine Neill, now with Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, said she found the research result so surprising she tried to redo her calculations on the off chance the total could have been smaller.
''I fully expected to find no effect at all,'' she told the Herald. ''That we found such a big effect and that it meshed with a range of other data was just shocking, completely unexpected.''

Mr Howard's agreement with the states to ban and buy back more than 600,000 weapons after the massacre at Port Arthur in April 1996 cut the country's stock of firearms by 20 per cent and roughly halved the number of households with access to guns.
Two of the independent rural MPs now holding the balance of power in Parliament opposed the plan. At the time the Queensland MP Bob Katter said Australia had got ''to the ludicrous point of completely disarming the nation'' and said ''everywhere they ban guns the death rates from guns go up''.

Tony Windsor, then in the NSW Parliament, tried to introduce an amendment that would have registered gun owners rather than firearms.
Dr Neill says that while it seems surprising that a 20 per cent cut in the number of firearms would have cut the number of suicides from firearms by 74 per cent, none of her academic colleagues have found fault with her finding.
Her co-author is the Australian National University academic Dr Andrew Leigh, elected nine days ago as Labor MP for the ACT.

They used what is known as a difference-in-differences approach, exploiting the fact that some states withdrew guns more quickly than others and examining whether their firearm suicide rates fell faster.
A previous study had found no nationwide effect, noting that firearm suicides began falling before the buyback. However, Dr Neill and Dr Leigh found that states such as Tasmania that withdrew guns quickly had a much bigger decline in firearm suicides than states such as NSW that withdrew more slowly. Whereas the earlier study had found an increase in suicides by other methods, suggesting substitution, Dr Neill's study found no evidence of substitution within any state.

''It is simply not the case that there was an increase in non-firearm suicide deaths in states that brought back more firearms,'' she said. ''I am confident these lives were saved.''
Most of Australia's 2100 suicides each year do not involve firearms, making the 200 lives saved as a result of the firearm ban small in relation to the suicide total. But Dr Neill said applying an accepted financial value to each of these human lives resulted in an economic boost of $500 million a year - an outcome, she said, that represented $800,000 for each weapon destroyed.

''This is clearly one of John Howard's greatest legacies - perhaps even one of his greatest economic legacies,'' Dr Neill said. ''It also succeeded in its stated goal. Before the buyback, Australia used to have a multiple shooting every year or two. In the 13 years since, there have been none. I have calculated the probability of that happening by chance. It's extraordinarily low.''

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