Man Explains Why He Nearly Shot Classmates When He Was 14

Inspired by the recent school shooting in Florida, a man took to social media to share his story of nearly shooting his classmates when he was 14 years old.

Daniel Riley made a Facebook post detailing how he was an emotional and angry teenager who had access to guns. He then went on to describe a situation that drove him to feel like violence would solve his bullying problems, as reported by Yahoo.

“I start seeing all these older kids on the bus who I don’t recognize,” Riley recalled. “Then the kid who has been bullying me points at me and says ‘yeah, that’s him’ and then I realize all these older kids are on the bus because they are going to beat me up when I get home.”

After he got off of the bus, one of the kids shoved him and knocked him to the ground.

“I got up and kept walking and they were circling around me, yelling things,” Riley said. “I got home, put my key in the lock, opened the door, went inside.”

He found no safety inside his house, however, as his parents were not home and the bullies began to bang on his widows and doors. At this point, Riley recalls running to get the firearm.

“I got the gun out of the closet. I checked to see if it was loaded. I took off the safety, chambered a shell. I stuffed a couple of other shells in my pocket,” Riley explained. “There are a couple of kids outside of the front door, yelling at me to come out.”

“I had the gun held up to the door thinking, ‘I will shoot through the door then I’ll throw the door open and just start shooting kids as they are running away.’ I was just about to do that and pull the trigger when someone yelled, ‘There is a car coming!’” Riley continued.

All of the kids ran away and Riley put away the weapon without firing it, but he spoke candidly about how his emotions very easily could have driven him to use the guns that were readily available to him.

“I think it’s easy to use mental illness as a deflection and then the moment when people aren’t paying attention, they stop talking about mental illness,” Riley told reporters. “If everyone who ever pulled a trigger was mentally ill, we wouldn’t have so many people sitting in prison.”