Bihar’s new problem: Students bringing guns to schools

Bihar is grappling with a a new challenge that is beyond policing — students carrying guns to schools.

On Tuesday, a Class 10 student brought a pistol to a coaching institute in Muzaffarpur where he studied. After the class, he was flaunting the loaded pistol which went off. A girl student was wounded in the leg and has been admitted to a hospital. The boy fled after that.

On July 31, a nursery child carried a gun into the classroom in his bag and shot at a class 3 student at a school at Triveniganj in Supaul.

Barely a week later, another schoolboy, just six years of age, carried an airgun and tried to flaunt it by targeting it at other students. The principal snatched the airgun and reported it to police.

Last week, two adolescents were nabbed in Nalanda while doing stunts for making reels. When the police scanned their mobile phones, they found a number of reels with firearms. The boys said they did it to get famous.

In Gopalganj earlier this month, a youth was arrested for flaunting a countrymade pistol on social media. Similar incidents have been reported from Motihari, Vaishali and Banka over the past few months ago.

Last year, Bihar Police had to issue an appeal to the youth. “This (such acts) will land you in trouble. If you want to get famous, try practising shooting to participate in national and international events or prepare for joining the police and the armed forces. The police has its eyes on social media and many persons have been apprehended,” ADG (headquarters) JS Gangwar had said in a statement.

Psychiatrists and psychologists say the dangerous inclination points to the decaying environment, quest for quick fame through short-cuts and eroding family and social values that earlier worked as a big deterrent.

“This is a dangerous trend and clearly indicates the vulnerable foundation of our social set-up. Gun culture is not its only offshoot. The growing instances of rape and molestation are also a manifestation of eroding family and social values, as is the tendency to get quick fame and money through dubious means due to wrong and unbridled exposure in the era of internet and social media,” said forensic psychiatrist Dr Nikhil Goyal, joint superintendent of the Mahavir Senior Citizen Hospital, Patna.

“Children learn more from what they see and experience. If they see criminals and people amassing wealth through wrong means being idolised, they want to be like them. They spend a lot of time watching web series showing a lot of stuff that may not be suited for their impressionable age. The lust for quick money is another major factor and they feel making reels can fetch them easy money. They don’t understand it is pushing them into an abyss. Lack of parental control makes them slip easily. Once parents realise, it is often late. Ten or 20 people laughing at one’s stupidity can never bring fortunes is something they need to be made to understand. It is time for society to wake up,” Goyal said.

Professor Hassan Zafri of the department of psychology, Patna College, said unrestricted mass media, video games demonstrating aggression, missing societal and family values and preoccupation of parents in jobs leading to weak parental control combine to give rise to such tendencies in children.

“Children get involved with a lot of activities which have fatal repercussions, but they are not aware and fall in the mental trap of instant kick. Premature exposure is risky. In families, the values that were taught before are no more there. Children have access to all kinds of information available on the internet and they fail to distinguish between reel and real and many a time get drawn in the wrong direction in their quest for instant pleasure that later turns into pain,” he said.

A school teacher of a premier school said social media addiction in kids and teens was a problem many parents were grappling with, as they had adverse impact on children’s mental health manifested through deviant actions, viz. erratic behaviour, aggression, poor sleep routine and gradually it starts spilling over to classrooms and family functions. “Parents should try and lead by example. Expecting children to stay from something that the parents themselves cannot avoid sets wrong examples. We tell parents to spend more time with children and keep track of their activities, but they say children don’t listen and this should be seen as the alarm bells,” he said.