When someone continually attacks you with verbal assaults, setting physical boundaries may in fact be the correct response. The sticks and stones perspective was something that someone pulled out of thin air. It's simplicity made sense to common people, as simple things often do. It also fit with the "talk it out" counseling perspective that pervaded middle-class America over the last third of the last century. Like any predominant ideology, it just seemed natural, so nobody actually thought to test if the idea was in fact founded on any solid grounds. Accordingly, schools developed zero tolerance policies on physical violence.
However, if you look at things like Iowa named chair Professor Leslie Baxter's work on the manner by which girls exert emotional violence on each other, you quickly realize the no physical altercation policy was a gender biased approach to conflict. Boys push other boys to indicate enough is enough. Girls do things like spread nasty rumors, gang up to insult particular ones on social media and in person, create social isolation, etc. The research shows that one altercation usually solves the issue for boys and they often end up being friends afterward. This is not the case for girls, because their goal is complete social and psychological annihilation. The problem is that we punish boys for dealing with their issues in a fairly effective manner, while we ignore what's going on with girls.
Small wonder that as soon as we see these no-tolerance for physical altercation policies go into effect that boys start falling off the cliff in education.
My sense is that the superfan type feels protected to lash out at the types of boys he was afraid to stand up against in school.
