Nancy Flanagan, a retired teacher in Michigan and expert blogger, asks rhetorically, “Who is to blame?” Obviously the shooter and his parents, who bought the murder weapon and did not lock it away.
But there are other causes of the senseless killings, she writes.
Two things—true things—are repeated endlessly in these dialogues. The first is that the nation exposed its true values nine years ago after the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary, choosing unrestricted gun ownership over the lives of children. The second is that we need a greater understanding and focus on mental health. In our schools, of course.
What is often missing from these heart-wrenching discussions is the fact that schools are just like malls and movie theatres and churches and political rallies—stages for playing out what it means to be an American citizen in 2021, our deepest principles and beliefs.
Despite selfless and heroic actions, despite good parenting and good teaching and due diligence on the part of school administrators and counselors—we live in a pretty ugly country right now.
We live in a country where Kyle Rittenhouse walked free. Where senators and governors boldly lie about election results. Where parents, urged by astro-turf organizations, mob board meetings to protest the teaching of facts and requiring masks in a deadly pandemic. Where thousands of brutal insurrectionists attacked our most sacred building and democratic processes, led by the President of the United States.
Also this: the Oxford HS shooter lives in a state where a gang of angry young men conspired to kidnap and execute the Governor, fantasizing about taking her to a remote location and ‘putting her on trial.’
None of this mitigates the reprehensible behavior of this teenager. He is fully responsible for what he did. But it’s worth thinking about the unique context of growing up in America, the people respected as leaders in this nation, the ruthless tactics used to acquire and maintain power and ‘freedom.’
She discusses answers like school counselors, mental health programs, social-emotional learning, and the backlash against them.
It might help to pay as much attention to individual children and their problems as we pay to their test scores.
If we were truly a nation that cared about life, we would enact gun control laws and stop the slaughter of children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We are a nation that cares about $$$$$. Children are expensive to raise/educate/feed etc. …same with senior citizens and the mentally ill. Our nation doesn’t give a rat’s a_s about people. It’s every man for him/her self. Not a nice place to live right now!
Good morning Diane and everyone,
The principal had evidence from 2 teachers that something was wrong with this student. He was called to the administrator’s office and that administrator didn’t think to look in the kid’ s backpack???? Instead of insisting that this kid get immediate mental health attention and be removed from the building, the administrator let this kid go back to class because the parents didn’t want to take him out of school! What???? Sounds like negligence on their part to me. It’s truly disgusting if this is what happened. Are they watching out for the well being of teachers, students and everyone in the school or what??? Disgusting.
Are you blaming the Principal or the parents….or both? I think it’s pretty significant that the parents are being charged. It won’t undo the situation and the loss of life, but making parents responsible for their spawn is a turn in the right direction.
Both.
Maybe the parents wouldn’t allow for a backpack check or pulled the “We’ll sue your a_s off” statement? I’m sure there is more to the story and it will all come spilling out soon. I find it hard to believe that the Principal pulled an “Adminimal” stunt and allowed kids/teachers to be shot/killed. Let’s just wait before placing blame on school Admin.
Administrators should know something about the laws related to searches, and many school districts have an attorney that can be called to confirm the legality of any action. I remember there was a lawsuit in a school district related to drug sniffing dogs that were sent in to sniff lockers. Some parents complained the district did not have just cause to conduct the search. I don’t recall the outcome.
I agree with Mamie: both. (But perhaps these administrators got the same irrelevant and useless “professional [sic] development [sic]” that I did during my 20 yrs as a teacher.)
If anyone reading this is an administrator, please address Lisa’s possible explanation of “We’ll sue your a*s off.” What specifically does the law say?
1) Is there not legal protection for an administrator who sends a threatening student home when that student is judged to be a danger to other students?
2) Can an administrator, under such conditions search a backpack or call in a police officer to do so?
3) Can an administrator in such a situation keep a student separated at a desk in the office for the remainder of the day?
Mark…..I’m not a fan of school Admin and the job that it has become since school deform took over. I’m just trying to give the Principal the benefit of the doubt about what went on in that meeting with the parents. This will all come to light over the next few weeks….until the next shooting happens and attention will be focused on another school/school district.
Hmmm. I have to open my purse for inspection when I go into a museum in NYC. Yet a student who alarms teachers to his penchant for guns, violence and his feelings of worthlessness can’t have his backpack searched while in school? Crazy world.
From Leagle.com:
Any analysis of a search in a school must begin with the principle that the school setting “requires some modification of the level of suspicion of illicit activity needed to justify a search.” New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325, 340, 105 S.Ct. 733, 83 L.Ed.2d 720 (1985). In the leading case of T.L.O., the United States Supreme Court held that searches by school officials in public schools “should depend simply on the reasonableness, under all of the circumstances, of the search.” Id. at 341, 105 S.Ct. 733. Thus, the search of a student on school grounds is not governed by probable cause, but is instead governed by the less demanding standard of reasonable suspicion. Id.; State v. D.S., 685 So.2d 41, 43 (Fla. 3d DCA 1996).
Mamie, see my note below about the law with regard to searches of backpacks and lockers. In schools, it is acceptable if there is “reasonable suspicion.” It’s a very low bar.
my note above
As I said there …
In a just country the Supreme Court would be charged as accessories.
Bingo. And the worst is yet to come. If the court further guts gun control measures in places like NYC.
When do we want proper gun control? Now!
When will we get it Never!
Until never comes, we need to have metal detectors and bag searches at all schools, just as we do at courthouses.
I agree with you, but the devil is in the details! How much time would it take to process over 1,000 students in a HS every day? How many man hours would teachers have to give in order to bag check every student?….and we all know the responsibility would rest on the teachers with no increase in salary or time. How much $$$$ to install metal detectors when $$$ for basic needs to run a school aren’t being met?
It’s nice to dream big sometimes!
You raise important issues. ON the matter of the money:
Wouldn’t want to spend all this money since it’s just the lives of children in the balance.
Others will say, “I don’t want this because such a thing would never have at Upper-Middle-Class White Child High School where my kids go,” even though all these shootings are by white children at middle- and upper-middle-class schools.
But yeah, if it became necessary to sweep the nuclear fallout from the roofs of schools each morning, administrators now would say, well, we’ll have the teachers do that.
They’d probably have the Russian teachers do that.
I do understand that You are not making the argument that it’s too expensive and that you are right on about basic needs to run schools not being met.
My son attends a private, all boys HS and I don’t mind that they hired a retired police officer (armed) to work as an SRO. He is friendly with the kids and walks around inside the school and around the property. There have never been any “incidents” at the school except for some fighting that accompanies some sporting events or normal “stupid boy” activities that guidance counselors/Principal/VP handle. It’s an extra safety measure IMHO. If it was decided to put in metal detectors, I would go along with that, also.
I don’t think schools should feel like the prison system, but some common sense safety measures in our troubled society is necessary….the gun laws will NEVER change. There will always be people who will dispute this even as the bodies of children pile up.
Bob,
I can tell from your comments that you have actually worked in the insanity called public schools.
Good point, LCT. Metal detectors would be unnecessary if we had responsible gun laws like most of the rest of the civilized world.
I’d say we need “mental detectors” even more than “metal detectors.”
The teachers in this situation are the ones who did their duty and did just that “mental detection.” The administrators dropped the ball after it was handed off to them. Ofc, they see a LOT of middle-school and high-school boys drawing pictures of guns and killing.
When I was teaching, I once had a student draw a picture of me with a swastika on a homework paper.
When I showed it to the VP, he did nothing.
(Proud) boys will be (proud) boys, right?
But it was in Arizona,so who could expect any different?
I got the hell out of that state and never went back.
It’s only become worse since.
Oh, and the VP in question also lectured me about lack of classroom management skills, essentially blaming me for the “incident”.
I finished the year, but not coincidentally, that was also my last year teaching.
Who needs such crap, anyway?
I pursued a career in computer programming instead.
also lectured me about lack of classroom management skills = I don’t want to be bothered with any of this stuff
Every teacher here has experienced this again and again and again and . . . .
What high-school girls draw: hearts and anime figures
What high-school boys draw: penises, swastikas, and guns
Arizona is a now officially a fascist state
“A 61-year-old wheelchair-bound man was shot nine times in the back and side after allegedly shoplifting a toolbox from a Lowe’s home improvement store on November 29, 2021”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/12/03/indefensible-outrage-over-man-wheelchair-fatally-shot-back-arizona-cop
Tucson is where I lived, not incidentally.
You think Florida is bad?
Try Arizona.
Bob, I’ve taught in 3 different states and Arizona is the only one where I experienced that (among other things).
Try Terrorzona!
SomeDAM, And Tucson is generally one of the less crazy areas in AZ! The question that fascinates me is, will AZ’s self destruction come more fascism or from environmental damage?
Tucson has been living on borrowed time for a long time now.
They have been sucking water out of the ground like there is no tomorrow.
which is apt because there is no tomorrow.
Not for Tucson.
When they finally suck the groundwater dry, the whole town will blow away like a tumbleweed in the wind.
And if they think the aquaduct that currently diverts Colorado River is going to save them, they’d better think again.
All the Colorado River water is already spoken for — and then some.
After everyone upriver eventually takes their share, there won’t be a single drop left for Tucson.
And the reservoirs like Lake Mead are already drying up.
It’s not a matter of IF Tucson will whither away, but when.
Unless of course, they can truck in water to feed the city and all those water hungry golf courses and resort hotels.
Good luck with that.
Sadly, I think you are correct. We care more about guns, again as a rights issue, than the safety and mental well-being of our young people. When I first entered teaching, I never thought about guns in schools. School shootings were indeed rare. Now that we have more guns than people, our easy access to guns is placing our young people at greater risk. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/more-guns-than-people-why-tighter-us-firearms-laws-are-unlikely-2021-04-14/
Nothing can be done about mass shootings says only nation where these are regular occurrences.
I need to be clearer about what I am proposing: A TSA for schools, an SSA, staffed and funded by the federal government.
You might be on to something, Bob. I doubt the red states will accept it. DeSantis is trying to revive the Florida Guard. I cringed when I heard it as I was thinking militia. DeSantis claims it will be deployed to help in state disasters like hurricanes. I frankly don’t trust anything he says.
Metal detectors at the entrance to all schools would probably help, but they may not want to call it the “SS” A.
I agree with everyone in these threads about school safety regarding protecting young people from credible threats. I would like to remind everyone, however, that the overwhelmingly vast majority of students in our schools are not potential criminals, and that our schools are not prisons. Metal detectors, armed police on campus, random searches, active shooter drills, and the like give students, especially students of color, anxiety and feelings of insecurity rather than security. I’d also add that treating people like criminals makes them act like criminals. The solution is not surveillance schools or bomb sniffing dogs. The solution is more teachers, more counselors, less testing, less competition, more support.
LCT
After reading your comment, I withdraw my agreement for metal detectors.
My guess is making the schools into prison like complexes with metal detectors and armed guards would probably lead to more shootings of students, by the very guards who were supposed to be protecting them.
Metal detectors are only a band aid at any rate and any student who is really bent on mayhem and murder would just shoot the guard monitoring the metal detector.
Very thoughtful, SDP.
I worked in a high school that had serious concerns about gun violence. Everyone felt safer when they put in metal detectors. Every student went through them each morning. Yes, it took awhile, but the problem was almost eliminated. I remember one report of a student who left a gun outside a window to retrieve from inside. He was caught. Other measures were taken as well that changed the climate noticeably. Students, staff and parents felt safer. Even if they changed the laws, it would take awhile to get all of the illegal guns off the streets, but it is a start.
Metal detectors also induce trauma in young people. And in me.
“Everyone felt safer when they put in metal detectors.”
That feeling might not be legitimate.
Random testing of TSA security checkpoints has been very spotty with regard to finding guns and other weapons and there may be reason to question feelings of security associated with the Mere existence of TSA checkpoints.
This article is from 2017 and TSA might have improved since then, but a lot of this stuff is highly dependent on the people you have doing the screening — how well trained they are and how seriously theY take their jobs.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-operation-us-airports/story?id=51022188
One problem is that these jobs are often low wage positions and hence it’s hard to attract the most qualified people.
I disagree with this. Not every preventive measure is zero-cost. There are some schools—many schools—where students regularly bring weapons to school. In schools like that, I think parents would reasonably feel better if metal detectors were there. Other schools—most schools, thankfully—don’t seem to have that problem. And there is value in not living under a prison/surveillance apparatus.
I think there also is a question of whether metal detectors would be effective in preventing school shootings. If a student is truly serious about shooting a bunch of students and teachers, he or she will find a way to do it. In a parking lot. On a bus. In the stands at a homecoming game. This is basically a counter-terrorism issue.
So which random mass shooting at a school was in a school that had the problem with guns being brought to school regularly.
Perhaps a rapid transition of the Court would correct the error made in Heller. The new Court could then effectively put the Slave Patrol Amendment back in its box.
The issue is that one can NEVER KNOW when one of these incidents is going to happen. The communities always react like this: Here? How could this happen here?
And the answer is, given the current circumstances, they can and do happen anywhere. Rarely, but not rarely enough. Communities never know when they will be the winners of this macabre lottery.
Very tough issue. I find myself in complete agreement with the opposite positions of both Bob/ Lisa and LCT/ Flerp. I would not have been in agreement with Bob a few years ago, even though we’ve had the high # guns/ capita + loose gun laws for a long time. But the current political atmosphere– combined with its amplification by print/ cable/ social media— and the pandemic– is a tinderbox. The many nutjobs among us have already put sensible, democratically-inclined folks in a state of watchfulness, demanding better safety-rails– a sort of jail. Without those rails, we are left parsing out psychologically how not to ignite their fuses.
Bob, I recognize that this could happen at any school. But I think the odds of it happening are so low that it’s not worth taking every possible precaution at otherwise safe schools. To put it bluntly, I am willing to roll the dice with students’ lives (including my own kids). Every day I take risks that could end my life, such as crossing the street and driving on highways. We could save lives by reducing speed limits to 30 mph on highways, but we choose not to, because we don’t think the benefits outweigh the costs.
FLERP,
I don’t think you would disagree with the view that a student who expresses homicidal thoughts should get immediate attention and be separated from the general student population. I’m convinced he should have been sent home, whether or not his parents agreed, and he should have been searched for weapons. If a kid says I want to kill others, listen to him, take him seriously, and take action to protect others.
Diane, I certainly agree with that.
“If a kid says I want to kill others, listen to him, take him seriously, and take action to protect others.”
I don’t think anyone would disagree with that.
The problem is that the kid in Michigan didn’t say “I want to kill others”. He drew a single violent picture. And the school was absolutely correct in immediately pulling him from class and having his parents come in immediately for a meeting with (I presume) a trained guidance counselor.
And then what? If there were no previous warning signs for the kid that the school had knowledge of, if this was the first time the school ever saw a violent drawing by the kid? If the kid and parents appear reasonable? The school seemed to make a fairly reasonable decision — based only on the past history of the kid and the knowledge they were given directly from the parents who they presumed also didn’t want a violent incident — that there wasn’t an immediate threat that day. And they decided that rather than to call social services to immediately remove the student from the house for that single drawing, the family had 48 hours to get him counseling or they would have him removed from his home.
During the Parkland shooting, the kid was clearly troubled for a while and had a history. But so far we haven’t seen any evidence that this kid had prior issues. The school reacted to the “trigger” – the violent drawing – immediately. But if – as it appears – this was the very first trigger and the kid’s parents were hiding all information that would cause that single relatively small “trigger” (a single drawing) to become a more actionable one – then it is very hard to fault the school. Yes, they could have decided the parents were liars and called the police. They could have expelled the kid. And if he went home and killed himself, the school could have been blamed, too. If he went home and OD’d on drugs because the school overreacted to a single drawing, the school would likely also be blamed.
I definitely want schools to react immediately to threats. But more important is that parents not provide automatic guns to their kids and parents should be forthcoming about that if they are informed of even the smallest possible trigger so that schools can react properly to how serious the trigger was.
If this kid had been forced to go home alone and jumped off a bridge, the school would be blamed for overreacting to a single drawing and making the kid feel like a horrible school shooter because he did one drawing for a video game idea he had. And everyone would be second guessing the school for not believing the parents and kid and making the kid feel suicidal.
Again, I blame the parents for not telling the school that their child was newly in possession of an automatic gun when they were specifically called in about this single drawing.
I saw a post on Twitter that said this:
“They be putting metal detectors in the wrong schools.”
This is in reference to the possibly regular practice of having metal detectors and/or searches upon entry at some high schools in mostly Black, poor, major city neighborhoods, but not having them at all at suburban schools.
YUP. Throw a stick at anything in the U.S. and you find systemic racism. NOT IN OUR SCHOOLS, says Right Mr. White.
Nancy is exactly right. There is no right to life in America. Not for kids in schools, people in malls, movie theaters, grocery stores, bars, or at concerts.
As long as a minority of Americans hold sway over the rest of us, and refuse to accept sensible gun restrictions, necessary vaccination mandates, and reasonable abortion accommodations, none of us have a right to life. Only fetuses. Preferably fetuses with guns.
Bingo. or Loteria. Both work.
The warped, perverted, an strict destructionist interpretations of the Supreme Court since 2005 are responsible for thousands of senseless violent deaths in the same way the executive in-actions of Covid Donnie are responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
Yup. And you ain’t seen nothin yet.
strict destructionist interpretations
A gem!
I was just thinking of the conversations these judges might have with their kids. If they follow strict constructionist logic, then their kids must be masters at stretching the “truth.”
If we were truly a nation that cared about life…
Would we continue to imprint ideas or opinions,
in the strict sense of the word, PREJUDICES
on the minds of children?
(The doctrinal blinders of EXCEPTIONALISM)
Would we continue to persuade/convince
children they are “defective” in some
predefined manner, exploiting their
emotional vulnerabilities?
(Scores, word inventory/usage, parroting
“facts” codified into existence, by the
PTB.)
Would we continue to negate or empty the
“spirit” of the child and fill the vacuum
with new content: approval of “others”-
conformity-group think- flock mentality?
(spirit: self approval/esteem/reflection/
reliance)
Would we continue to “condition” children
to believe a degree cast a glow of
superiority over less titled mortals?
Whenever any proposals, even the mildest ones, are made for gun control measures, guess what political party stands in the way of any progress. The GOP then accuses the Democrats of gun confiscation and violating the holy of holiest, the 2nd amendment. This happens after each and every gun slaughter, it is indeed nauseating, disgusting and enraging to those of us who don’t really consider guns to be an essential part of our lives. I don’t own a gun, have no need for a gun and do not want to own one. Doesn’t make me a bad person or unAmerican, whatever that means. Certain weapons should be banned. We have no problems with banning the sale of hand grenades, bazookas, flame throwers, shoulder-fired missiles, or RPGs, etc., ad (very) nauseam. The sale of semi-automatic rifles and hand guns should be banned but that’s just me fantasizing. What kind of father purchases a 9mm Sig Sauer pistol for his 15 year old son?
‘course, the anser to this here problem is to arm ever teecher n studant in the skool so they kin asert there second amindmint rite to protect theirselves. Specialy what with CRT running amuck everwhar.
–Flor-uh-dah Man
InSanetis
Precisely
At least you bring some levity.
cx: theirselfs
I was wondering about that.
Thanks for fixing it.
cx: theyselfs 🙂
Good point, speduktr
Alternative acceptable spelling: therselfs
Bob
You definitely need to install AutoFloriduhcorrect
cx: Flor-uh-duh or Floorduh
We also live in a country that spends more on its military than the next ten highest-spending countries combined. We are a country that ramps up tensions with China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. because they refuse to submit to our imperial control (even as China, for instance, has eliminated homelessness and Cuba exports doctors during a pandemic). We are a country that rains bombs on countries around the globe whose lands we occupy and whose resources we appropriate. We are a country that expects people to “support the troops” for doing this, even though a high percentage of those troops are poor people and people of color who face rampant racism, police brutality, unemployment and untreated mental health crises when they come home.
We are a country that promises a $15.00 minimum wage, student debt forgiveness, $2,000 checks, a public healthcare option, then delivers none of that and claims to have “lifted 50% of children out of poverty”. We are a country that promises a $10 trillion dollar infrastructure bill, cuts it down to $1 trillion over 10 years, most of which going to benefit private corporations while stripping out nearly all the provisions that help ordinary people and then turns around and demands that people VBNMW.
We are a country that protects the corporations that are dumping toxic chemicals into our land and water and emitting carbon gases into our air condemning our children to a future on a barely habitable planet, if they have a future at all. Then we are a country that praises the president who fell asleep at the global climate summit and failed to pass any significant measures to curb such environmental disasters.
I know it’s a lot of fun to throw dirt at the Republicans (and, yes, they deserve every bit of it). But nothing will change until we realize this is not a Republican problem. It is a problem inherent in our country itself, starting from its foundation of genocide and slavery and continuing through hundreds of years of bipartisan protection of profits over people.
YUP.
You have taken a lot of heat, Dienne, from me and others here and persist in making this argument. The disconnect is this. I, for one, think that everything you have said here about the United States and how it conducts itself is demonstrable. But when we are given the choice between fully metastasized cancer and amputation of a limb with a localized cancer, we take the latter. Terrible choices. But real ones. Society of Sane Persons Nominee for Worst Human of the 21st Century IQ45 or Status Quo Joe.
You have got to be kidding! China curing homelessness? I believe there are a few indigenous groups that are having their homelessness cured by sterilization and “work camps” among other less than humanitarian methods. Yeah, we have done a lot of reprehensible things over the years as has every other government on this earth. If we are going to hold up the Chinese as a moral example, perhaps we should examine their thousands of years of history. We have only been at it for a few hundred years. I am for acknowledging the worst of our actions as a way to inform future actions. We can see how dangerous it is to ignore the past in the ridiculous culture war rhetoric. Self flagellating what aboutism does nothing to advance a civil society.
Well, in her defense, speduktr, the nations behind the Iron Curtain had full employment too! That comment spoke sets of volumes about the author.
I agree. Both parties have failed the American people to some degree, and today billionaires and corporations are pulling the strings that override democracy. I also agree that America has its own sordid past and present that make us hypocritical at times. Other western nations have their own baggage as well. Democracy is not a guarantee. We have to keep fighting and pushing to make it better.
It is true that both parties have failed the American people to some degree, but empowering one of those parties can usher in an era of change, and empowering the other of those parties can usher in fascism.
Stacey Abrams fights and she got two decent Senators to replace very bad ones. AOC and the squad fight. They don’t whine and say that both parties are the same.
I don’t understand what anyone thinks whining about how bad the Democrats are or who lies about how there is no difference between the parties believes they are doing.
Work to elect more progressive candidates in the primary. Don’t give up because you lost one primary and act like a spoiled child who decides if they don’t win, they will simply spoil democracy for everyone.
^^retired teacher, just to be clear, I meant this comment to affirm what you said above.
I was definitely NOT referring to you when I said I didn’t understand how whining about the Democrats being no different than the Republicans helped. I apologize if it seemed as if I was.
Thank you for your comment.
I know and accept there is a big difference between the two parties. The Republicans are out of touch. I cannot understand how anyone can vote for these vandals. I also think there is work to do among Democrats. I see the corporate Democrats as an impediment to progress. I hope the party continues to become more progressive.
https://www.ajc.com/news/this-has-been-happening-for-a-long-time-modern-day-slavery-uncovered-in-ga/SHBHTDDTTBG3BCPSVCB3GQ66BQ/
I very much hope that some will read this story. Slavery in the United States. Right now.
Bob, the story about modern-day slavery in Georgia was horrifying. How little has changed since 1865.
Yes, to get to Northern Florida or Southern Georgia from where I am, you go north for a 2-3 hundred miles, which is simultaneously back in time about 170 years.
Horrifying. Words fail.
IKR, Flerp?
Slavery is another global problem. The strong exploit the weak. It is shocking it exists here right under our noses.
Slavery was also happening in Southern Florida, at Epstein’s place.
And also in NY City and Arizona at Epstein’s places there.
And sex slavery is not even just a habit of the wealthy class.
School shootings and slavery are just Business as Usual in our society.
Also, exploitation of migrant workers that,if not technically slavery, is borderline slavery has been happening for a very long time in Florida, Georgia, California, NY and pretty much every other state where the workers pick our fruits and vegetables.
Absolutely, SomeDAM!
Why didn’t autocorrect catch that?
Maybe there is a Flooriduh version you can install.
Supposed to be a response to Bob’s theirselfs correction above.
Not sure why it appeared here.
Flooriduh is spelled incorrectly, SomeDAM. It’s Flor-uh-duh or Floorduh. You’re welcome.
And then there is Florid Da-DAAH, which is a Pride Parade thing.
Good points, but you use poor examples when you write, “We are a country that ramps up tensions with China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.” These countries are also threats to humanity.
Just one example from each: China is annihilating the Uyghurs; Russia gave us the Gulags; Castro threw his ally Huber Matos in prison for 20 yrs for disagreeing with Marxism; and a Marxist dictator reduced Venezuela to poverty and chaos despite its rich oil deposits. The leaders of these countries also consider(ed) themselves rulers for life.
In the US, we are not there yet, though I have no doubt that many of our right wing extremists are studying the methods of the above dictators (and past tyrants too), as evidenced by January 6th and the daily news.
Do the American people deserve any responsibility for these circumstances. 74 million of them voted for an authoritarian fascist and half of the other 81million are clueless about almost everything you mentioned. Something tells me that the resources to come to the same conclusions you did were not denied to them.
And those same folks and more are going to vote in 2024 for the guy who just announced that he is creating his own separate state military under his sole control.
It’s not the idea of the existence of an American SS that bothers me as much as the fact that their recruitment rolls would become waiting lists very quickly.
In a video message to the community Thursday, the head of Oxford Community Schools said the high school looks like a “war zone” and won’t be ready for weeks.
This is where we are in 2021. Will anything remotely constructive be done? Of course not, the GOP will block, kill or decimate any effort to reduce gun violence in this country.
and the “progressive” party will not look progressive
And parents and teachers will oppose creating a federal TSAlike force to do bag checks and oversee metal detectors at entryways in schools because kids aren’t worth the cost and it’s inconvenient and blah blah blah. OFC, given ‘Merca, there will not be rational gun control, and such a step in lieu of that will not be taken.
Nothing can be done about mass shootings, even mass shootings of children, says only country where these are routine occurrences.
The GOP in Michigan are already screaming about arming the teachers OR having lock boxes in the schools for gun trained teachers to have access to preloaded guns in case of emergency. Stupid and more stupid! I wish I lived in Canada even though they have their own problems.
What you describe is a shootout at the OK Corral. Once he started shooting, he could have fired many shots before teachers retrieved their weapons from a lockbox. Which teacher would shoot a 15-year-old?
“The solution to gun pollution is dilution”
Guns are solution
To problem of guns
Solution’s “dilution”
By infinite nums
When everyone has one
Then all will be safe
Especially machine gun
With which you can strafe
From nationofchangedotorg: When Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) stood on the Senate floor for 15 hours last week, joined by nearly 40 of his colleagues who recounted stories of six-year-olds gunned down by assault weapons and trauma doctors who attempted to resurrect dozens of bullet-pierced bodies in Orlando, he knew he was waging a battle against a powerful force.
On Monday, Republicans in the Senate proved, yet again, how strong the National Rifle Association’s grip is on the nation’s highest lawmaking body. Democrats’ efforts to pass legislation to prevent suspected terrorists from buying firearms and to expand background checks to all gun sales both failed in the Senate. Just 47 senators voted in favor of the first measure and 44 for the second.
Roughly 90 percent of Americans — including 80 percent of gun owners — support these measures. But the gun lobby’s outsized political spending and influence in Congress prevailed. In total, the NRA has given more than $36 million to the 56 Republican senators who blocked the gun control measures on Monday. end quote
This is from June 21, 2016. Nothing changes in this country, thanks mostly to the NRA and the GOP.
Sen. Chris Murphy in 2021 via newsweekdotcom: Quote – “But I listened to my Republican colleagues come down here one after another today and talk about the sanctity of life.
“This is at the very moment that moms and dads of Michigan were being told that their kids weren’t coming home because they were shot at school due to a country that has accepted gun violence due to Republicans’ fealty to the gun lobby.
“Do not lecture us on the sanctity and importance of life when 100 people every single day are losing their lives to guns. When kids go to school fearful that they won’t return home because a classmate will turn a gun on them when it is in our control whether this happens.
“You care about life? Then get these dangerous military-style weapons off the streets, out of schools.
“You care about life? Make sure that criminals don’t get guns by making sure that everyone goes through a background check in this country.”
“This only happens in the United States of America, there is no other nation in the high-income world in which kids worry about being shot when they go to school.
“It happens here in America because we choose to let it happen, we are not unlucky, this is purposeful and a choice made by the United States Senate to sit on our hands and do nothing while kids die.” end quote
$$$$anctity of Life
“We choose to let it happen.”
There it is!
MUrphy was brilliant.
Ooooo! Collective guilt. Makes me feel
Queasy
Nothing trickles down in this country but insanity …
yup
Raygunomics
The NRA is has no conscience.
States, Governors, and Senators have no conscience.
Far too many voters have no conscience.
They have perpetuated a spiraling out of control GUN CULTURE – not a prevalence of guns, a gun culture.
These governors, senators, and state representatives (ex. in Missouri) are multi-million funded by the NRA and their likes, are die-on-the-vine (pun intended) “Personal Rights” local control no-one-can-tell-me-to not carry a gun, wear a helmet or wear a mask, pass laws that make it ILLEGAL FOR STATE LAW ENFORCEMENT TO COOPERATE WITH FEDERAL INVESTIGATIONS CONNECTED TO GUNS.
It is not only the laws for access and no regulations – it is the GUN CULTURE they have created, enabled, financed, and denied.
Guns in the streets have existed forever. School shootings for decades (our experience was 15 years pre-Columbine in my experience). Mass shootings – Texas 1960s. Still – except for the jewelry story gas station “hold ups” – these shootings were anomalies – tragic isolated circumstances.
In recent decades, years, weeks and days? Movie theatres, malls, parks, concerts, broad daylight street corner arguments and road rage incidents.
Where is the legislation in spite of 60% (?) of public favors some version of limiting access, registration, and off-limits assault weapons?
Why isn’t every state and local official applauding the courage and common sense of Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald.
Why isn’t there a microphone in the face of every legislator who receives funds from the NRA and the big box stores who sell guns and also support them?
Where is the outrage?
In 2019, a public letter was written to the U.S. Senate endorsing Amy Barrett. The signatures included Firearm Owners Against Crime, Iowa Firearms Coalition (Iowa is the site of two of the four most racists cities in the nation) and, Gun Owners of America. Other signers were from the Koch network and from the Christian right.
Barrett, like her conservative colleagues, lied during confirmation hearings about Roe v Wade. The U.S.is not only unique among other western democracies relative to guns, it will also become unique among the same group in banning abortions.
Majority opinion and existing law mean nothing to ideologues plotting a civil war nor to religious fanatics who believe serving God negates democracy.
I find it interesting that kids can never be held responsible for things they do because they are “only kids.” Yet when they commit heinous crimes so many are willing to treat them like adults. Just an observation.
Having recently retired from teaching high-school students, I can assert with confidence that MANY are extremely emotionally volatile, have very little self-control, cannot envision the actual consequences of their actions, and have extraordinarily grandiose notions about themselves and about what happens to be going on in the breathtakingly small worlds they inhabit–peopled by superheroes and supervillains. They are still, very much, children. Some might sort of not look like children anymore, but they are. The teen mind is a very different place from the adult one.
For these reasons, I VEHEMENTLY, EMPHATICALLY oppose charging teens as adults.
The parts of the cortex that do planning and control are barely formed in them.
Nothing done by high-school kids surprises me anymore. I loved teaching them, but they are very strange beings. Nothing like rational adults.
There is a movement in NYC (and other places) to allow 16-year-olds to vote.
!!!!!
If you are old enough to drive, you are certainly old enough to vote on a referendum that allows 16 year olds to buy and carry concealed guns.
Or so the logic undoubtedly goes.
And old enough to serve in the military?
Would “social emotional learning “ have prevented this? Did the school have a SEL program?
Did you read Nancy Flanagan’s full post?
I did, at least I think I did. She said nothing of substance. Full relevant text:
“She discusses answers like school counselors, mental health programs, social-emotional learning, and the backlash against them.
It might help to pay as much attention to individual children and their problems as we pay to their test scores.”
What if wearing face masks for the entire school day, for years on end, is not a good thing for the mental health and social-emotional development of students?
Then we have the real-world complicated dilemma: Does wearing masks have a higher cost (in mental health, s-e-development, and death) than that caused by the increase in Covid cases (mild, serious, long term, and deaths)?
Mark, I appreciate characterizing it as a dilemma, because that characterization acknowledges that there are costs to masks, instead of pretending there are zero costs.
Of course, the real issue here with school shootings is whether students are required to wear masks. GIVE ME A BREAK.
Not saying masks are the cause of mass shootings. Just saying that if we want to talk about student’ social and emotional development and mental health issues—topics raised by Flanagan—we shouldn’t have a knee jerk reaction to immediately shut down the question of what the costs of masks might be.
Understood. I agree that masks are not ideal and doubtless have associated costs. But the alternative, . . .
Bob,
I don’t remember you or anyone else saying there was no costs to wearing masks. I am not sure where that falsehood came from. That’s why no one has advocating mask-wearing pre-pandemic.
But it would certainly be easy to see if the East Asian countries where mask-wearing has been common even before the pandemic have suffered an epidemic of school shootings when compared to the US.
Anyone know?
Is someone really suggesting that parents in Hong Kong and Japan and other countries don’t care about their children’s social-emotional development and mental health?
Given that the US has a lot more school shootings than countries where mask-wearing has been far more common, I have no idea why anyone would even bring up mask-wearing.
The Japanese have long understood the freaking germ theory of disease and routinely wore masks in public during flu and cold seasons long before the current pandemic.
Maybe it’s psychologically harmful for kids to wear seatbelts. They’re restricted in their movements and probably feel as if they’ve lost their “freedom.” Or maybe their clothes are too restrictive and that causes them psychological problems. Perhaps we should get rid of clothes, too. Maybe it’s psychologically harmful for kids to be subjected to the “block schedule” where they have to sit in a seat for 80 minutes straight. Maybe kids shouldn’t have to follow any rules at all because it curtails their self expression and damages them psychologically.
These are distinct issues. What I hate is that every time one of these incidents occurs, people waste a lot of breath about who is at fault in this particular case and give almost zero time to figuring out what, as a practical matter, can be done to prevent this stuff in the future. Yeah, it’s lots of fun to watch these idiot parents in this case get their just deserts and to fume about what morons they are, but how about this bigger picture issue? What about laws requiring guns and ammo to be locked up? What about bag checks and metal detectors so that this kind of thing is much less likely to happen?
1,000 articles on the negligence of the parents and of the administrators. ZIP, almost, about these FAR MORE IMPORTANT MATTERS.
It’s interesting to read the progun sites on this stuff. One I recently visited pointed out that there are over 20,000 different firearm statutes on the books around the country. It didn’t point out, though it could have, that many of these are convoluted and difficult to grok. It’s not at all uncommon that people act out of complete ignorance, and it’s not uncommon that there are loopholes in the laws that allows such insanity as 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse walking around during a volatile public disturbance with a loaded military-style weapon.
“Maybe its psychologically harmful for kids to wear seatbelts”! A PERFECT response, Mamie. This antimask stuff is just stupidity. Dangerous stupidity. I retired recently. It horrifies me to read and think about what my colleagues like you, who are still in the classroom, must risk because some people don’t want to be in the slightest bit inconvenienced.
Mamie Krupczak Allegretti — Do you really think that forcing children to wear face masks all day at school is the same thing as having them wear seatbelts, or wearing clothes? Do you really think that the impact on emotional and social development is the same? Do you think that anyone concerned about this is stupid and should be mocked?
A blogful of teachers, and seemingly none of them have ever met a child.
A friend of mine’s speech-delayed 4-year-old has worn masks in therapy for more than a year and a half. She’s really worried. What an idiot she is!
At this point, all I want is for people to acknowledge that masks are not zero cost for children.
Flerp,
Actually, I do agree with you about younger children wearing masks. Children learning language and facial expressions may be impacted. I’ve thought about this as I have young children family members. But for older children, there is no reason that I can see for them not to wear a mask.
Mamie,
I don’t know how one calculates “the cost” of wearing masks versus “the cost” of mandatory vaccines versus “the cost” of having entire hospital systems so overwhelmed during a pandemic that medical care for ALL people for all illnesses is impacted and children lose parents and grandparents.
Everything – including seatbelts – has “a cost”. At some point common sense has to rule.
Mask mandates and vaccine mandates during a pandemic save lives. During a pandemic they save more lives than mask mandates and vaccine mandates during a typical flu season.
We have experienced decades of flu seasons, and even at the highest rate, our medical system – and the world’s medical system – were not stretched thin and overwhelmed as they have been during this pandemic.
NYC public school parent,
I think it should be mandatory for everyone – including students – in school to be vaccinated. But that’s not the case. I have students who are unvaccinated and refuse to wear a mask in school. I deal with this stuff every single day. Here are my choices: 1. quit my job and try to find something “safer” or 2. try to protect myself as best I can knowing full well that the school can’t/won’t. This is what teachers (and students) have to deal with now. Students who want other students to wear masks and feel like they have some modicum of protection have to deal with other students refusing to wear masks. That’s the situation we’re in now.
The Japanese need to join the 21st century.
The germ theory of disease is so yesterday.
Pretty much every informed person now knows that diseases are caused by Wiberals (woke liberals)
The Very Reverend Jimmy Swaggart tried to end Covid at the very beginning by selling his $100-dollar-a-bottle “Silver Solution” (water with silver in it), but would the libtards let him? Nope!
And that Ivermectin wards off said vermin.
In short, we have moved (thankfully) from the “germ theory of disease” to the “verm theory of disease”
lol
Or maybe “worm theory of disease”, cuz until recently, that’s what what Ivermectin was used to protect against.
Well, there is certainly scientific logic to the silver solution .
Silver bullets work on wearwolves, which have fangs like vampires and vampires actually are bats and SARScov2 is alleged to have started in bats.
So the logic is sound.
I remembered this incorrectly. It was another idiot televangelist: Jim Bakker
Makes sense, SomeDAM! This is just good science!
But given the bat connection, this makes me wonder whether crosses and wooden stakes (tiny ones, of course) might also be effective against SARScov2
Come to think of it, that’s what the mRNA vaccines produce, tiny “stakes” (spikes on the protein). Undoubtedly why they work.
But the “cross” method of protection remains to be investigated.
But the Big data for such an investigation probably already exists.
Just begging for some econodemiologist to crunch the numbers for cross-wearing members of the public to see if there is a negative correlation between cross wearing and COVID incidence.
And of course, as any good econodemiologist knows, such a correlation would be proof positive that crosses prevent COVID. I bet there is a (fake) econ Nobel in it for sure.
“Mask Wearing = Wokeness”
I must be pretty woke
Cuz mask is what I wear
Except when drinking coke
And eating fries out there
I don’t know what it means
But doesn’t really matter
Cuz being woke, it seems
Is madder than a Hatter
What, SomeDAM? You wore a mask and survived? Didn’t this do permanent psychological damage to you!!!!!
Mask of Insanity
I haven’t seen a smile
For really quite a while
The mask is all I see
Insane it’s making me
Given that we will not have sane gun control laws in this country and given that there are more guns in private hands than there are people, if we do not create a federally funded TSA-style force to do bag checks and oversee metal detectors at the doors of all schools, then the cost of that failure will be measured IN THE BLOOD OF CHILDREN.
I agree 100%, Bob.
Far, far too heavy a cost. If we really want to DO SOMETHING about these random horrific killings of kids in schools around the country, then we must take the only doable practical measures to prevent them. I don’t understand why this isn’t obvious to everyone.
We must deal with the systemic issue in the ways that we can, practically, deal with the systemic issue.
We could discuss having metal detectors in schools but in this case, the school had 2 teachers that came forward with examples of alarming behaviors from this student. If these behaviors don’t warrant expulsion from school and immediate care by a mental health professional, I don’t know what behaviors would.
I agree entirely. The sheriff (I think it was) in the county where Oxford is located said in an interview that if the school had brought in an officer, then this drawing would have “triggered a protocol” whereby the student would be removed and remanded for treatment.
The administrators will likely argue, and correctly, that situations of kids making alarming drawings are very, very common. They encounter these all the time, but a kid’s making a drawing doesn’t mean that he intends to murder people. I think that’s a stupid argument, but they will probably make it. Such drawings are, alas, pretty common among middle-school and high-school kids.
It should be school policy that if you make a drawing in school depicting armed violence against anyone in the community or hate speech toward anyone (e.g., those drawings of swastikas), then you will be expelled, the police will be notified, and authorities will be brought onto your case to ensure that you will be treated.
Agreed, Mamie. Given the student’s alarming behaviors, he should have been removed from school at once. His parents did not want to take him home, but that decision belonged to the school, not the parents.
Part of the problem is that school administrators are afraid of parents and the word “lawsuit.” I had a student once who showed many troubling behaviors. I brought it to the attention of administration. They knew totally what was going on. After graduation, that student committed suicide. If a student broke his leg in school, he would get immediate and appropriate medical attention. But mental illness is still a taboo subject in many ways. Perhaps administrators don’t want to be seen as overreacting in these situations but perhaps some overreacting wouldn’t be a bad thing!
It seems unfair not to recognize the administrators were quite proactive by almost every standard. The first warning seemed to be on Monday and the school was immediately calling the parents, and more notably, persisted even when the parents apparently ignored the first calls. They had the parents in the school by Wednesday.
And at that time, the only thing the school had was an internet search for bullets and a single drawing. This seemed to be a kid who showed no warning signs before that week and hadn’t been in trouble. The parents were not just informed, but called in to the school. The parents – who knew they had bought him a gun – themselves saw absolutely no reason for concern and it certainly seems that the parents did not inform anyone at the meeting that they had purchased an automatic gun for their kid just a few days earlier.
Hindsight is 20/20, but those aren’t the circumstances that would trigger a backpack search for a weapon, especially if the parents – who were RIGHT THERE WITH THE ADMINISTRATORS! — not only did not give any indication their kid would have access to a gun but they also demonstrated so little concern that they insisted their kid remain in school when the school asked them to take their kid home for the day.
The parents’ reaction would make sense if they wanted to have their kid have his chance to shoot up the school. Or if makes sense if the two people who knew their son best were absolutely positively certain that the school was in absolutely no danger from their kid. It isn’t completely ridiculous that an apparently quite proactive administration that had the parents in the office would not think that the kid was an immediate danger that day.
Clearly he was, but I would certainly like to see evidence that other schools typically do full body and backpack searches the first time a kid who wasn’t previously on the radar as a problem kid comes into the school with his parents to talk to school administrators about a drawing the kid did that appeared threatening and concerning.
Had they searched his backpack, lives would have been saved. But does that mean he should have had his backpack and body searched every day from that day forward? Would there ever be a time when the kid could have come to school without having his backpack and body searched? How are schools to handle this?
I want to protect kids at school, but we have given administrators an impossible task, because even in this case, when the school actually didn’t just ignore the threat, the administrators could have only stopped it because the kid happened to choose that day to bring the gun.
This kid did a drawing that included someone bleeding, a gun, and the words “The thoughts won’t stop. Someone help me.”
I think it’s completely irresponsible–breathtakingly so–that in such a circumstance they didn’t call the police, have them take him out of the school, do a search of his backpack and locker and person, and contact the district attorney to get him to require that the student receive counselling before readmitted to the school.
Here’s an analogous situation: If someone tells you that he or she is thinking of committing suicide, you take that seriously. You don’t say to yourself, “Well, I’m sure he/she will be fine.”
The local sheriff said in an interview that IF the school had called a resource officer into that meeting, that’s exactly what would have happened. These administrators clearly did not know WT_ they were doing.
But it’s water under the bridge now. I hope that widespread publicizing of what these administrators did in response to the drawing will lead to people taking this stuff as seriously as it needs to be taken.
I am not arguing that the administrators should be arrested or even fired. In fact, above, I gave reasons why they might think that this is just another example of a stupid jerk kid being a stupid jerk kid. But there is an important lesson to be learned here. You treat this stuff with utter seriousness. You do not brush it off. There must be a zero tolerance policy for this stuff in schools.
Kids need to know: we see this stuff, we call the police, and you’re out. Off to the shrink you go.
It’s my hope that every administrator in the country read about what these folks did and learned a lesson. You don’t just send the kid with extremely violent ideation, comments, or behavior back to class.
Before this event, the kid posted on his Instagram, I believe it was, a photograph with a countdown to the shooting. I haven’t seen anywhere in the media any remarks about what was in the background behind that countdown. It was a famous photograph of Robert Johnson, the great blues player/singer (1911-1938), that had been altered to make the eyes fiery red. The red eyes are a reference to a folk legend that Johnson became such a great blues guitarist by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads (a standard motif in such stories). The story is related to, and a version of it related in, one of Johnson’s great blues tunes, “Crossroad Blues,” which was famously covered by Eric Clapton and Cream.
“Kids need to know: we see this stuff, we call the police, and you’re out. Off to the shrink you go.”
And off to a foster home or other placement you go, until we determine if your parents are part of the problem! OR, how about: Off you go to a charter school, because you’ve forfeited your right to attend public school.
Bob,
I agree with you 100%. Perhaps because we have worked in these situations, we come to this issue with first hand experience of how schools work in these situations and the frustrations that we have to go through. I’ll say it right out. By not taking immediate action to get this kid medical mental health assistance IMMEDIATELY, they put the people in that school at immanent risk of harm or death. There is no way around it.
Bob,
I find it curious that teacher’s are held responsible for students’ test grades yet administrators shouldn’t or can’t be held responsible when a student LITERALLY asks for help in a note and they don’t get that help immediately. If this student had broken his arm and asked for help and was sent back to class by administrators, they would be negligent just as they are in this case.
Nailed it, Mamie!
There are many times I see stupidity in school officials, but in this case I saw the kind of response that should work IF the kid did not have parents who were complicit in this. From the NYT:
“On Nov. 30, the morning of the shootings, a teacher observed drawings by the Mr. Crumbley that raised concern. The county prosecutor, Ms. McDonald, has said that the drawing featured images of a gun, a person who had been shot, a laughing emoji and the words, “Blood everywhere,” and, “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”
The teacher, Mr. Throne said, notified school counselors and the dean of students. The student was immediately removed from the classroom and taken to the guidance counselor’s office, where he claimed the drawing was part of a video game he was designing, Mr. Throne said.
After the student’s parents arrived, school officials asked “specific probing questions” regarding the student’s potential to harm others or himself, Mr. Throne said. His answers, which were confirmed by his parents, led counselors to conclude that he did not intend to hurt anyone, the superintendent said.
“At no time did counselors believe the student might harm others based on his behavior, responses and demeanor, which appeared calm,” wrote Mr. Throne, referring to both meetings.
Counseling was recommended for him, and the parents were told they had 48 hours to seek counseling for their child or the school would contact Children’s Protective Services, Mr. Throne wrote.
“When the parents were asked to take their son home for the day,” he wrote, “they flatly refused and left without their son, apparently to return to work.”
I usually try to put myself in the shoes of other people to see if what they did was within the bounds of normal behavior, and I can absolutely imagine that if I had been proactive enough to immediately call in the parents and it was the first time,with no other warnings, with the parents right there reassuring me and the kid was perfectly fine and had no prior incidents, it would not appear to be an incident to call the police.
But the parents??! Blaming the school lets the parents off the hook. They KNEW they had just bought their kid a handgun! They knew it and they kept that information from the administrators. They knew it and they didn’t take their kid home or even check where the gun was. I am even skeptical they kept the gun in a drawer — why should we believe them when it was clear they specifically bought the gun as a gift to their kid and the mom announced it herself on facebook!
If the parents had been honest with the school administrators, this would not have happened.
“administrators shouldn’t or can’t be held responsible when a student LITERALLY asks for help in a note and they don’t get that help immediately.”
Administrators immediately got him help. They removed him from class and called his parents and had his parents come in – IMMEDIATELY.
The extent of the boy’s actions was a drawing. A DRAWING. I don’t believe for one minute that the sheriff would have arrested a white boy with no previous problems whose parents were right there explaining the drawing was for a video game.
The administrators didn’t ignore this. They got help immediately. That help was the parents. Of course they were wrong to believe the parents but at that time, they had no reason to think that a kid who had never been in trouble before would have two parents who would lie to them.
What the sheriff said was that if an officer had been called in, this incident would have “triggered a protocol,” and the student would have been removed from the school and gotten treatment.
Yeah, you’re right, NYC PSP. Clearly, there was no issue with that child that wasn’t effectively dealt with.
Bob
Most (perhaps even most guitar enthusiasts) would not get the Robert Johnson reference.
But you are right. There was significant foreshadowing in this case.
In fact, I read that a parent told police that their child stayed home from school on the day that it happened because they were afraid.
I love Robert Johnson. I learned a great many of his tunes, using transcriptions of his actual playing. Really unique. Just wonderful.
Bob, would you post links to some of Robert Johnson’s work?
Happily!!!
I’ve shared here some of the most well-known tunes (well-known from covers by later rock n roll bands–e.g., the Rolling Stones cover of this)
“The administrators didn’t ignore this. They got help immediately…. the parents… at that time, they had no reason to think that a kid who had never been in trouble before would have two parents who would lie to them.”
Does anyone know how many and what percentage of previous school shootings were perpetrated by students “who had never been in trouble before” ?
The reaction to these events is always, “How could this have happened here? Not here!” And yet people still argue that, well, we needn’t do anything at MY school.
“One of the problems is that administrators are afraid of lawsuits.”
Yes. And school boards. And angry parents. The average tenure of a Principal in the U.S. was only 4 years (as of the 2016-17 school year). It’s an extremely precarious job. There’s a LOT of covering one’s tushy and trying not to upset parents in this job, for the obvious reason. I had a Principal say to to me once about a young man who was being constantly disruptive in my class, “But you know, don’t you, who his father is?” End of discussion. And then there was the student who said in class one day, “Go ahead. Send me to the Principal’s office. We’ll do what she always does. We’ll talk about the baseball team, and then she’ll send me back.”
Bob,
Of course the child wasn’t dealt with effectively. But I object to how this particular school’s administration actions are being characterized. Specifically, I mean a guidance counselor who apparently must be drawn and quartered because all he/she did was immediately call in the parents and have them with the kid – with no previous record of being a problem – in their office to make sure there wasn’t an immediate danger instead of calling the police.
Just wondering who at the school would be to blame if the kid had been immediately sent home and come back and shot up dozens of kids as they left the school?
Or if he had been sent home to stay alone (the reason the guidance counselor who people want to draw and quarter didn’t sent him home is because he would have been alone) and gone to the local elemementary school and shot up kids at recess there or coming out with their parents?
Or gone to the park to shoot up kids? Or gone to the shopping mall?
This is about the PARENTS who were specifically called by the school and forced to come in to address this.
This is about the PARENTS who gave their kid an automatic weapon that he could have used anywhere.
This plays right into the hands of the pro-gun lobby. Making this about school administrators. Blaming the school administrators because they were supposed to be able to know that the parents sitting right there reassuring the guidance counselor that this kid who had never been a problem and was just designing a video game were blatant liars and had just bought their kid an automatic weapon as a gift and had him practice with it?
Blaming school administrators who did the right thing and called the parents because they didn’t do ENOUGH?? There is never “enough” when the gun lobby allows these kinds of weapons in anyone’s hands.
This could have been prevented. And it could have been much worse if the kid had been sent home to shoot up the local preschool kids instead, where the kids weren’t trained in how to barricade doors.
Sometimes it is the school’s fault. But in this case, the school did not ignore the problem, they just believed the parents would not blatantly lie to them.
It is not always the parents’ fault. But sometimes it IS the parents’ fault. This is a case of the parents being at fault. Pro-gun parents are at fault. Not the school.
They should have done what the Sheriff said they should have done. They should have called in an officer to deal with this. The Sheriff was quite clear about this, and he was right.
“but in this case I saw the kind of response that should work IF the kid did not have parents who were complicit in this.”
That’s a big “IF”. Do we not KNOW that many parents are irresponsible, incompetent, uninformed, impaired, ignorant, and/or dishonest?
Have we not SEEN and HEARD over the last several years, in the news or in person, the growing extremism in society? The insults, belligerence, harassment, and death threats at town halls, school board meetings, state and federal capitols???
Yup lots of Trumpanzee Represenative Massies out there.
Bob
Robert Johnson is undoubtedly the greatest unknown blues guitarist.
Ever seen the documentary called The search for Robert Johnson?
I have not. But I’ve studied everything I’ve ever run across about him, and I own several books of transcriptions of his amazing work. And while we’re talking about great classic blues players:
Bob,
You take the sheriff at his word? I thought the sheriff sounded like an idiot. I agree that if the student was African American the police might have arrested him. But a white kid whose parents were just there saying that he had just drawn a picture?
You think that if the kid had not had a weapon on his that day, the sheriff’s office would have arrested him? You don’t think the sheriff’s office would have joined with their Trump buddy gun-toting friends about how this poor white child’s rights had been abused and what is wrong with the school for calling them out because of a DRAWING when the kid’s own white parents had just been there specifically explaining that the kid was just designing a video game?
I find it ridiculous that people believe this sheriff that he regularly arrests middle class white students because of a drawing when their own parents are right there saying that the drawing is part of a video game.
I repeat, blaming the school takes the parents and the gun rights culture off the hook. And while sometimes the school is to blame, the fact that the school immediately had the parents in the school simply because of a drawing tells me that the only mistake they made is believing that parents would not want their kid to shoot a lot of kids and would tell them the truth.
The Sheriff sounded to me like a professional who knows what he is doing.
NYC PCP– There is NOT one person or entity at fault here; it is not the school or the parents–IT’S BOTH!
In fact, law enforcement can share the blame, too, because in this day and age their response to threats should include removing any such student from the school and keeping him in custody until the parents CAN figure out a way to meet their responsibilities.
AND, a standard component of law enforcement policy and practice should be clear communication to schools that they (law enforcement) will ALWAYS remove a student under such circumstances, and should ALWAYS be called in such circumstances.
This is no different than paramedics saying “Don’t hesitate to call us…don’t dismiss your symptoms and assume they are unimportant.”
If it hadn’t been for H.C Speir who recorded Johnson’s songs, maybe no one would ever have heard his songs — or songs by many other Mississippi Delta blues artists of the era either.
And Alan Lomax. No Lomax, no Leadbelly and lots and lots of field hollers and work songs and prison songs and outlaw songs throughout the South.
But Johnson. Wow. His guitar playing was breathtaking. So original and spare and beautiful. I agree with you. Others, including all the thousands who covered him, didn’t even come close.
The Library of Congress has a magnificent collection of these early recordings–spirituals, work songs, field hollers, prison songs, outlaw songs, blues of every description–gathered by these pioneering ethnomusicologists. Back when I was doing research on this stuff, I went there to do it first-hand, but there was a LOT of material available online at the LOC website and elsewhere.
Bob
I’d be interested in your take on The Search for Robert Johnson.
I didnt know much before watching that so don’t know how accurate it is but it does interview several people who knew him and it came across as believable, at any rate.
I think a lot is still unknown about him, though, particularly about the year of his “disappearance” during which time he transitioned from a rank amateur guitarist to a master, allegedly with help from the Devil.
Who knows?
I will definitely be looking this up, SomeDAM. Thank you!
Mark,
I would agree with you IF the school had not taken immediate action, which is not the case in many schools!
You don’t see many schools that are so proactive that a single drawing immediately triggers the kid being pulled from his classroom and parents immediately called in.
Scapegoating the school because they didn’t know Trump supporting gun-loving parents would blatantly lie to them? And taking at his word this sheriff who claims he would definitely have not believed Trump supporting white parents and arrested this son if the weapon didn’t happen to have been in his backpack that day?
We are talking about a culture where a 17 year old can tote an assault weapon after killing people and police see him and don’t think he is a problem.
I don’t think it is helpful to demand that any student who has never been in trouble before be immediately subject to a full body and backpack search if a drawing with a swastika or gun is found on his possession. I DO believe his parents should be immediately called in. I DO believe that student and parents need to be talked to. I don’t believe that a white middle class kid would ever be arrested by a sheriff because of a drawing that his own parents came in and said was just a video game.
Maybe the kid didn’t have his gun that day. No way would the sheriff had arrested him and I am doubtful he would have even searched a middle class white parents whose parents might be likely to sue. So then what? It makes the fact that he brings the gun the next day and shoots everyone okay?
This is about the parents. They had every chance to explain they just gave their kid a gun, which would definitely have triggered a more immediate danger. Instead they offered the kind of explanation that would have put the sheriff on their side, against the school, for violating their kid’s “rights”.
“At the Crossroads”
I made a deal with Satan
To play a mean guitar
And now I am just hatin’
That I’m a rockin’ star
I might own Rock-‘n’-roll
Appear on Rolling Stone
But Devil owns my soul
And evil I’ve become
The original Crossroad Blues lyrics by Johnson:
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above “Have mercy, now save poor Bob, if you please”
Yeoo, standin’ at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride
Ooo eee, I tried to flag a ride
Didn’t nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by
Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’ sun goin’ down
Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, eee, eee, risin’ sun goin’ down
I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin’ down
You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown
You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown
That I got the crossroad blues this mornin’, Lord, babe, I’m sinkin’ down
And I went to the crossroad, mama, I looked east and west
I went to the crossroad, baby, I looked east and west
Lord, I didn’t have no sweet woman, ooh well, babe, in my distress
“I repeat, blaming the school takes the parents and the gun rights culture off the hook.”
“Blame” is not the correct word, and I just realized that I have been misusing it too. “Fault” would be better, as in “a fault or weakness in the system.” Here we have multiple faults, and we have identified them, so the next step is to try to correct them as much as possible, so that in the future fewer students will be killed and injured.
So: Do we need to improve the policy and response of teachers? Administrators? Law enforcement? Parents? Governments (local, state and federal)? In this specific case, my tentative answers would be no, yes, probably, definitely, and might be possible at the local and state levels.
Then there is the question of how? The devil is in the details…
so the next step is to try to correct them as much as possible, so that in the future fewer students will be killed and injured.
A TSA-style bag check and metal detectors at every school
A zero tolerance policy for hate speech and drawings involving guns in school. The response: involve the police immediately, remove the kid from school, and get him (or rarely, her) help
Exactly right, Mark. And Mamie nailed it:
If someone walked onto an airplane or into an airport with a drawing of a plane exploding and said, “I’m having thoughts about blowing up this plane. These thoughts won’t stop. Help me,” and showed it to the airline attendant, what do you think would happen?????? So…why didn’t the same thing happen in this case???
So, if the person who made that comment in an airport check-in line then said to the TSA officers, “Oh, I was just rehearsing aloud this idea I have for a videogame about blowing up airplanes,” would they say, “Oh, hey, then. No prob”? Uh, I don’t think so.
It blows me away that this even has to be explained to people.
Here’s a truth about discipline: it has to be consistent, and the rules have to be known. Kids spend a LOT of time talking with one another about what they can and can’t get away with. Every administrator in this country needs to be quite clear: you do the hate speech or drawing thing involving guns, swastikas, etc., in this school, you’re out. We call the police, they remove you from the school, and they get you help. Every time. No exceptions.
These are children. They have to be protected. That’s Duty 1.
The Devil is in the crossroads.
USA:
Lord, babe, I’m sinking down.
nycpsp @12/5 12am– The actions of the parents are very troubling, and yet as you imply, perfectly consistent with slow-on-the-uptake parents blind to psych issues the kid was having (which he may have hidden entirely from them), as well as, well, probably kind of stupid. I’m putting it together with dad calling the school after the shooting was made public to report he’d found the gun missing, so his son might be the shooter. They probably realized that 15 mins earlier [still too late], when mom texted son ‘don’t do it.’ So we have parents shown the note/ drawing at 10am same day, with no clue gun was not at home [unlocked in their bedroom drawer], no doubt feeling defensive and in denial.
In this situation, we really have to be able to count on school leaders to take sensible decisions. Had the teacher who saw the note taken the initiative to call the cops on her own, she would have [I assume] been fired for not just reporting it up the ranks per protocol. It’s hard to fault her. I know there are more competent admins, because my sis is one. Crumbley’s note was a classic cry for help— for suicide as well as for school shooting. My sis has had many encounters with potential and real suicides, in and out of school, and would have reacted proactively regardless of parents’ instincts—and the first question would have been about gun(s) available to the troubled student—not waiting for parents to volunteer info.
Back when I was first teaching, I had a student start leaving me love notes. I immediately reported this to my Principal. Then, when she left one threatening suicide, I took it immediately to the Principal, and he had her removed to psychiatric care.
Bob– this is a long subthread without “reply” indications. I answer your 12/5 2:44pm comment way below as a general comment, so as to get more margin space. I disagree with your ‘zero tolerance’ prescriptions.
Still looking for your answer, Ginny!
But, sane gun control laws, universal bag checks and metal detectors for schools, zero tolerance for drawings and speech embodying hate and violence against persons in the school community aren’t going to happen. And the school shootings are just going to continue. Expecting different results from the same circumstances.
Nothing can be done about mass shootings says only country where these are a regular occurrence.
I am NOT imputing that attitude to you, Ginny. Ofc not. But the sentence expresses my frustration about this pretty well. Even when kids’ lives are at stake, it just doesn’t matter enough to people generally for them actually to do things that would stop this. The sane gun control clearly isn’t going to happen, so I have made suggestions in lieu of that.
Bob, I am on your side but have a different perspective:
School shootings are going to continue as long as those who want to stop school shootings normalizing and legitimize the false narrative that school shootings can be stopped if only there was better school security or guidance counselors or metal detectors. That is exactly what the right wing gun lobby wants us to say.
We should all be pushing one narrative — this is NOT PREVENTABLE unless we control guns.
That is the only narrative that will change this.
I agree with that.
That’s just NOT going to happen. We keep having this conversation, and kids keep dying. We must do what is doable. To do otherwise is unconscionable, indefensible, immoral, wrong.
“we must do what’s doable”
I agree, but don’t you see how you keep raising the bar on what is “doable”? This school clearly had strong policies in place so that the very first time a kid was found with any type of drawing that could possibly be interpreted as a threat, the kid is immediately removed from class and parent immediately required to come into the school to help administrators assess how imminent this threat is. That is a very good policy.
Unfortunately, that policy did not take into consideration that two parents would lie about their kid and his access to guns and refuse to take the kid home. Those parents were not “in denial”. They misled the administrator about the kid’s drawing (confirming the benign nature that it was a video game idea) and his access to weapons. That is why this single incident “only” triggered a requirement for the kid to be in counseling in the next 48 hours before the school called social services to remove the student from his home. The school did assess the kid as a potential threat, but not an imminent threat. That is actually quite a proactive response by a school – it was significantly more proactive than the response the school had when bethree5 recounted her own kids’ experience. In fact, it is the kind of “proactive” response that probably would bother many parents whose kids had been in no previous trouble but drew a single picture with violent imagery that their teacher saw.
Schools could change that policy so that any drawing found that could possibly seem threatening results in the immediate calling of police and that student being subject to full body and backpack searches before he is ever able to enter the school for the remainder of his time. And all kids who are caught with a single violent drawing are immediately removed from their home until a full investigation of their parents and home access to guns is completed. That is certainly a possible school policy which takes into account that immediately calling in the parents is a waste of time because anything parents say might be a lie. It is more efficient if police question parents as soon as any drawing of violence is found.
To me, this school was acting proactively. This school was acting in a way that would have resulted in the first trigger — the single drawing by a kid who apparently had no previous red flags in his record — resulting in a more serious response if the parents had been honest. The response of the parents did not cause the school administrators to blow off the kid — they were still requiring that he get immediate counseling. But the school did not call police to remove the child from his home until a full investigation of the parents could be made because this “trigger” – a single drawing – and the information the parents gave the school led them to make the judgement that this kid needed immediate help, but that the threat was not imminent.
But certainly we can say that a single drawing by a kid with no previous red flags whose parents vouch for him must always trigger a full body and backpack search for the remainder of his schooling plus an immediate call to police and removal from home until a full investigation is complete to see if his parents are lying, because the assumption by schools from now on must be that the first time any student makes a drawing, that student must be considered to be an imminent threat and removed from their family until a full investigation is completed.
What bothers me is the assumption that school officials must be to blame for not properly assessing whether a threat is imminent or not, with the bar constantly raised (now schools are supposed to assume that parents could be blatantly lying to them and they should assume every drawing is an imminent threat that needs police action and home investigation.) So I don’t seem any option but to have an extreme reaction for every single questionable drawing because everyone seems to be saying that the response of this school to immediately remove the kid from class and call in the parents to find out if the threat was imminent or not is a terrible policy that caused this.
I wonder if any psychologist would accept the job where the school sends them every child who is caught with any drawing that could possibly be interpreted as violent, and that psychologist is personally responsible if that kid ever acts violently in the future. Is there really anyone in a school capable of assessing the “imminence” of a threat 100% of the time? Wouldn’t their “success rate” depend on luck?
How many of these school shootings occurred in schools where students go through metal detectors and searches before being allowed to enter the building? Maybe that is a solution, but how does it stop kids from simply shooting from outside during dismissal?
This is about access to guns. The school officials did not “fail”. They took reasonable proactive action, but were misled by dishonest parents into believing that the threat wasn’t “imminent” but could be dealt with just like other students who are found with drawings have been dealt with.
Do you believe, RT, that gun control sufficient to stop school shootings will be enacted in the United States?
And again, go tell the parents of those dead children how very responsibly the administrators acted.
If I were a parent and my kid was shot dead because a gun-rights supporting parent purchased an automatic handgun for their 15 year old as a gift and then those parents came to school when the administrators properly reacted to finding a single violent drawing done by a kid with no previous issues and told the administrators that their kid was designing a video game and had no access to a gun, I don’t think I would particularly appreciate lots of people telling me “it’s all the school’s fault for believing the parents’ lies”. I would be angry that people were not blaming the real culprits – the lying parents and the gun culture that puts lethal weapons in teenage hands “legally”.
You tell the parents that the fault is in the school and this could all have been prevented if we didn’t have such inept administrators too stupid to know that a drawing is clearly an imminent threat and idiotic teachers who don’t tackle a kid who is clearly an imminent threat to the ground before he can get his gun, and give a violent drawing back to a kid so he can change it before the administrator sees it.
Tell the parents how the teacher should have immediately removed the drawing instead of allowing the kid to keep it so he could cross some of it out. Tell the parents the teacher – seeing the imminent threat – should have called the school security officer instead of allowing him to walk down to the administrator’s office.
All of that is what we have been doing for years. Blaming the school.
This school – unlike earlier schools – acted proactively at the very first sign of a potential threat and it still wasn’t enough. It will NEVER be enough, but let’s keep the focus on how it’s all because the school didn’t do something more than immediately call in the parents at the very first inkling of a potential threat and make sure the kid got counseling. I don’t believe the police when they claim that if white middle class parents sat there in the room and explained to the police that the kid was designing a video game, the police would have arrested the kid immediately instead of bonding with the pro-Trump parents about how ridiculous school officials are to call the police because of a single drawing.
That’s what we have been telling parents for years. That the school could have done something to prevent this. And the schools keep trying and trying to enact more policies to prevent this and when it happens, it is still “preventable” because the school “should have known” that just having the parents come in because of a single drawing by a kid who has never been in trouble before is not enough because the parents could be liars.
Parents who lost kids may be comforted if they know that in the future, the first time a kid who had never been in trouble before is caught with a drawing of a gun shooting, the police will be called and that kid will be removed from the home immediately until a full and thorough investigation of the family happens.
Or they might be comforted to know that parents who buy their 15 year olds automatic handguns and lie to administrators will be prosecuted. They might be comforted to know that this country is not going to excuse those who give weapons to young teenagers anymore because “it’s legal and if something happens, it is always the school’s fault”.
The parents didn’t tell the administrators that he had no access to a gun.
My interest is this and this only: given that experience has shown pretty darned definitively that we are NOT going to get sane gun control legislation in the shooting range that is America, what should schools do to keep the children in their charge from being killed in these common but random events?
I agree that blaming the school and the administrators has an ex post facto lynch mob stench to it, and it distracts from the important consideration: what, practically, do we do to stop this madness, given that we are going to be precisely as successful in fixing the gun laws as we were after Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland and and and and and and
I didn’t realize that. The parents told the administrators that they had just purchased an automatic handgun for their kid, and taken him shooting with it and it was easily accessible to him?
(Honestly, I think it is just as likely that a police officer would bond with white Trump-voting pro-gun parents who absolutely reassured them that the kid was designing a video game and had never shown any propensity for violence.)
I don’t think anyone said that the parents told the administrators this.
In one of his first interviews, Sheriff Bouchard described several other recent incidents in which his office was brought in, a firearm was recovered, and the child was removed from the school. He described this as the “standard protocol.”
“what should schools do to keep the children in their charge from being killed in these common but random events?”
I only see one solution — to not allow any student or school employee to enter the school without checking each person for weapons.
If the very pro-active actions by this particular school (calling in the parents IMMEDIATELY so they could better assess the imminent threat when a violent drawing is found on a kid who has no previous red flags) can’t prevent gun violence, then I don’t understand what else the school can do. This kid could have not happened to have his gun that day but planned to bring it in the next day. How is that “preventable” unless every person entering every school goes through TSA level checks.
But I think all of this just helps the far right distract from the main issue, which is that kids have access to guns.
A solution would be to prosecute the parents – not the ones where a kid obtains a gun illegally, but the ones where the parents allow the kid access to a gun.
If you are going to buy a gun for your 15 year old, you are responsible for what he does with it. Period. If you don’t like that, don’t buy the gun for him.
Both named Robert?
Both guitar players?
Both play the Delta blues?
Hmm
Bob made a deal at the crossroads
Fell down on his knees
Bob made a deal at the crossroads
Fell down on his knees
Asked Satan down below “Have mercy, make poor Bob shred, if you please”
Shredding is the resort of the incompetent guitarist, one of those followers of Bob’s Rule for Playing Instruments at The Guitar Center: There is an inverse relationship between how well a person can play and how loud he or she turns up the amplifier.
When I was living in New Hampshire, an elderly woman was shot and killed while working in the flowerbeds at her home. The judge ruled that she was at fault because she was outside wearing white gloves during deer-hunting season.
It’s hard to multitask — simultaneously addressing two entirely separate issues — but you are doing an admirable job of it.
Probably comes from using your hands independently to play guitar.
I never mastered that cuz I play clarinet .
I also never mastered singing while playing clarinet, although not for lack of trying.
I must admit I’ve never used an amplifier for my clarinet.
And shredding has never been high on my priority list of things to accomplish.
But maybe squeaking for clarinet is the analogue of shredding for guitar.
In both cases, minimization is the goal.
I never did manage to entirely eliminate the squeaking.
In my next life, I am going to learn to play the clarinet because a) klezmer (<3)and b) the clarinet part in Beethoven’s First Symphony, c) Gershwin, and d) all that other great clarinet jazz
Singing while playing the clarinet!!! OMG! That’s sooooo funny!
Bob
I used to play classical music and marches in band and orchestra, but now I prefer playing along with YouTube recordings of a wide variety of musicians in lots of different genres. I especially like playing along with people like Norah Jones, Chris smother, John Hiatt, Ry Cooder and the Tedeschi Trucks band and one of my favorites is folk musician Bill Staines cuz most of his songs are in the key of the clarinet (Bflat).
I haven’t read music in a long time, so all of what I play now is by ear.
Chris Smither
Not smother
Van Morrison is also very fun to play along with.
Another strange twist: parents caught & can get out for $500K each. (Only 10% need be posted.)
I’m guessing that some right wing pro-gunsters put up a GoFundMe, or even some individuals post their bond.
Can’t understand why bond is allowed in this case: obvious flight risk, & who’s to say they don’t continue to pose a danger to others?
Another strange twist: parents caught & can get out for $500K each. (Only 10% need be posted.)
I’m guessing that some right wing pro-gunsters put up a GoFundMe, or even some individuals post their bond.
Can’t understand why bond is allowed in this case: obvious flight risk, & who’s to say they don’t continue to pose a danger to others?
Under “normal” circumstances, they can never charge the parents. The father made a grave mistake in this case when he called and stated that his gun was missing and that his son was likely the shooter. It shows that he knew the gun was accessible to the child. It also didn’t help that the child took photos of himself holding the gun. Both parents acknowledged that the gun was bought as a gift for the child with the mother taking him target shooting over the weekend.
From Chris Murphy’s speech: “Make no mistake about it: There is a silent message of endorsement sent to would-be killers, sent to individuals whose brains are spiraling out of control, when the highest level of the U.S. government does nothing, shooting after shooting.”
& those texts (“I’m not mad at you… don’t get caught” & “Ethan: don’t do it.”) from the mom, the parents not responding to messages from the school, the parents not taking their son from school when told to do so & the parents fleeing the area, leaving their son alone in jail.
Beyond abnormally abnormal circumstances.
I have the news on, & the reporter just said if they are released on bail, they will be fitted w/electronic monitors. ?!
Disgusting
US Representative Massie, Kentucky
‘Santa, bring ammo’: GOP congressman and family pose with guns for Christmas photo days after school shooting
Thomas Massie condemned by gun control activists and gun owners over social media for posing with assault rifles in holiday photo in wake of Oxford school massacre
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/thomas-massie-guns-christmas-family-photo-b1969962.html
disgusting. disgraceful.
Take a look at the Wikipedia article about Thomas Massie. Very strange. He has BS and MS degrees from MIT, where he excelled at designing solar electric cars that exceeded 70 mph, yet is a climate change denier. John Kerry called him an “a*shole” and Trump tried to get him kicked out of the Republican Party; but Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene think he’s great. She and Massie tried to sue Nancy Pelosie last June after she fined them for refusing to wear masks in the House.
One of his big issues is “protection of victims of gun laws.” His argument: Laws that prohibit guns in certain places (like legislative proceedings) and that require gun owners to store their guns securely (some states have such laws) keep people from being able to reach for the gun quickly in order to protect themselves. And he’s a proponent of arming teachers.
An idiot gun nut.
Ofc, the gun used in the Oxford incident was in an unlocked drawer in the home of the child shooter.
Bob,
We don’t even know that the gun was really kept in an unlocked drawer in his parents’ room. The parents GAVE that gun to their kid as a gift. He was posing with photos of it. I don’t believe the parents because they have absolutely no credibility about this. The kid was given the gun. The parents either thought he was taking it to school to show it off, or left it at home, but it was the kid’s gun.
‘We did just buy a gun for our kid’. That’s what parents say when called in after their kid makes a drawing. And most people assume that parents don’t want their kids to be school shooters.
Maybe the parents were afraid of the kid themselves and that’s why they were too scared to take him home that day. But that is no excuse.
If someone walked onto an airplane or into an airport with a drawing of a plane exploding and said, “I’m having thoughts about blowing up this plane. These thoughts won’t stop. Help me,” and showed it to the airline attendant, what do you think would happen?????? So…why didn’t the same thing happen in this case???
The Koch bros were also MIT grads.
MIT is an odd place. It produces some very smart grads and some very dumb ones.
A VAM supporter who used to post here as VirginiaSGP also claimed to be an MIT (CS) grad. I have no idea if it was true, but if it actually was, it doesn’t speak well for MIT cuz the fellow was a clueless twit.
“if someone walked onto an airplane or into an airport with a drawing of a plane exploding and said, “I’m having thoughts about blowing up this plane. These thoughts won’t stop. Help me,” and showed it to the airline attendant, what do you think would happen?????? ”
The attendant would ask them whether they wanted Coke, Diet coke, beer or a cocktail??
Hi NYC PSP,
You say that,
“Maybe the parents were afraid of the kid themselves and that’s why they were too scared to take him home that day. But that is no excuse.” So they may have been so afraid of their own kid that they allowed and wanted him to be in school with everyone else without notifying the administrators of their fear of him and why they were afraid? That doesn’t seem to make sense to me.
Mamie,
Well, everyone is blaming the school for not understanding that a single drawing by a kid who has previously demonstrated no problems and whose parents come in and specifically reassure the school that this is just an idea for a videogame should have known.
So yes, it sure makes a lot more sense that the parents who knew for a fact that their son had just be given a very dangerous weapon should have known. And given that we all agree that the parents would have 1000x times more reasons than the school to have known, what reason would the parents have for absolutely REFUSING to take their son home?
We want schools to react to these trigger warnings but not overreact. And to me, the school reacted quite quickly by immediately calling in the parents for a single drawing.
And yes, I think that if everyone’s argument is that a single drawing of anything that could possibly look dangerous can only be addressed by immediately calling the police and subjecting that kid to a full body and backpack/locker search for the remainder of his time attending the school, regardless of what his parents say, seems unworkable.
I won’t argue with those who believe no person should enter the school (and that includes teachers) without having the same search process that is done on airplanes. That is a possible solution, although some would argue not the best one.
To me, a much more sane law would require that any parent who is called into a school because their child has done any drawing of a gun shooting a person – regardless of thgat child’s age – must inform the school of any access to guns that student has and remove him from the school. I am not sure if we should expand that law to say that student should be subject to full body and backpack searches before ever being allowed to enter the school grounds for any purpose.
But if anything, it saddens me that this “blame the school” mentality only serves to cover up the truth — that this incident shows that it is impossible to know when a “good” kid will act out. And maybe giving kids easy access to guns that can kill many people in a very short time is a very bad idea.
I don’t blame the Columbine parents whose son was able to illegally purchase weapons without their knowledge.
I absolutely place all the blame on parents who BUY guns for their kids, have them practice with it, and specifically cover up that fact when the school has them in for a meeting about a single concerning drawing that their child has done showing a shooting.
I absolutely place all the blame on gun culture and the refusal to enact reasonable gun control.
I refuse to mitigate their blame by pretending that this school – which called in the students’ parents immediately and asked him to be taken home- is to blame for not realizing that every child is a potential school shooter and even a single drawing should trigger an immediate arrest regardless of the parents being right there explaining how that drawing is just for a video game and reassuring the school that their child poses no danger at all, let alone an “immediate” one.
“To me, a much more sane law would require that any parent who is called into a school because their child has done any drawing of a gun shooting a person …must inform the school of any access to guns that student has.”
I find this unreliable, given the prevalence (among many adults!) of pride, ignorance, denial, lying, and general irresponsibility regarding their children’s behaviors. I also think it is unfair and unethical to practice this as a protection for the student body and community, when it depends so much on the good character of each parent, in each incident.
And, Mamie, I really don’t give a microbe on a hair on a rat’s tushy about there being consequences for the administrators in this particular situation. What matters–what REALLY, REALLY matters is that we learn the lessons of this. The OBVIOUS lessons.
Bob,
To me, the obvious lesson is this:
School shootings are not preventable unless guns are controlled. Period.
This was a proactive school and they still had a school shooting. Maybe there is something the school could have done that day and have them be lucky enough to discover a kid armed with a gun the very same day they happen to search him. But if they don’t? Then the shooting happens another day or another day.
Expecting administrators to be able to distinguish between imminent and non-imminent threats when they call in parents and talk to them the very first time any violent drawing is found on a kid who hasn’t been in any trouble before?
Impossible! That what I say. The administrator was given the same impossible job that teachers are given when they are expected to turn 100% of a large group of unmotivated students who struggle with addition facts into students who can proficiently perform when taking an Algebra exam in 9 months.
Yes, an administrator might catch some problem kids and a teacher might be able to bring some low-performing high school students up to grade level in 9 months. But there will always be students that they miss.
It is impossible to recognize all the desire for violence that kids have. But keeping weapons – especially weapons that kill multiple people in a very short time – out of their hands is a far better way to keep schools safe than “better guidance counselors”.
The truth is that despite the prevalence of guns, most students who want a gun have to jump through some hoops to obtain one illegally. Those hoops are a good thing. It likely prevents a lot of students who can’t just grab their parents’ gun from acting rashly.
^^Also, I want to know more about the other students who didn’t come to school that day because they were supposedly aware of threats. Were calls about that made to either school officials or the police?
If the sheriff received a single call about a warning and didn’t immediately inform the school to check all backpacks of every student, aren’t they to blame?
Should every threat be accompanied by a full body, back pack and locker search of all students?
Why did some students know and not inform – or their parents not inform – the school and police? And were police informed?
AIRLINE PASSENGER TO TSA AGENT: “Blood everywhere! The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”
TSA AGENT: OK, go ahead and get back on the plane.
This is what the kid’s note with the drawing of the pistol, a bullet, a gun, and a bloodied, dying person said. “Blood everywhere! The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”
Yeah. Send him back to class, and don’t search his backpack and locker. Smart move. So proactive and responsible.
But clearly, NYCPSP, you are wasting your time talking to me. I just won’t see reason. Go tell the parents and brothers and sisters of the four dead kids who responsibly the administrators acted. I’m sure that they will be oh so receptive.
cx: how responsibly
The heroes in this situation are the teachers who brought this to the attention of their administrations.
I am not calling for the administrators to be arrested or even fired. I am calling on people to be very, very clear about the fact that these people dropped the ball. They really, really screwed up. They failed to take the OBVIOUS and RESPONSIBLE actions. They failed in DUTY 1, which is to protect the children in their charge, and kids died as a result.
Every teacher knows the experience of sending kids to the office because of truly egregious acts and having administration do little or nothing, other than telling the teacher that he or she clearly isn’t good at classroom management.
But again, this is a systemic problem. Administrators today live in constant fear of parents. Their tenure is tenuous, and this drives what they do and, importantly, don’t do.
In no way am I absolving the parents of the responsibility they bear for this incident. BOTH the parents and the school administrators are to blame in their own ways. Any normal parent would be mortified to see his/her child draw a picture like this. But for these parents to see this drawing after having bought a gun for their child (!!!) and then refuse to take him home and get mental health assistance – I don’t even have words for it. And school administrators were wrong to send him back to class and not take measures to be absolutely sure that he wasn’t a threat to the people in the school is unconscionable to me.
Mamie, unconscionable is precisely the right word. I conceded before this discussion even began that the administrators acted as administrators often do to what is, sadly, a common occurrence in our schools–finding drawings like this. And I stated right up front that no, I don’t think that the administrators should be charged or even fired. The important thing is that we learn the lessons of this. That going forward we do what these administrators FAILED, absolutely FAILED to do, which was to ensure that the students in their charge were protected from a credible threat. That was the Sheriff’s point about what his office would have done had it been called in. And you nailed it, Mamie, when you drew the analogy to someone making a threat while standing in the boarding line for a plane. Or someone suggesting that he or she is considering suicide. These matters of the utmost seriousness have to be treated with the utmost seriousness.
Again and again, when something like this happens, people focus on blaming individuals. I understand that–the outrage. But the far, far more important thing is that the lessons be learned. What, if it had been done, would have prevented this from happening?
Bob,
That’s nice of you not to call for the firing of these administrators. I’m not sure I agree. Of course, I don’t have all the information and I’m only giving my opinions on what has been reported – like we all are. When teachers fail their evaluations and get put on a TIP plan, they have to make a plan as to how they are going to improve. And might I say, it usually doesn’t involve protecting the rest of the school from physical harm and possible death. So…. what is the plan for these administrators and entire school system to handle a similar situation in the future? That will have to be worked out.
Suppose that a TSA agent had overheard a passenger in the boarding line talking about rushing the cockpit and disabling the pilot and copilot and causing the plane to crash, but the agent had talked to him and had been told that he was just thinking about a videogame he was going to write about such an incident. Suppose that the agent then let this person get on the plane and that he had then done precisely what he had warned that he was going to do. Would we say, “Well, that agent acted responsibly. He didn’t think that the threat was real. So, no prob”?
Ridiculous. Of course not.
Of course, no TSA agent would do such a thing. Why? Because doing such a thing would be mind-blowingly stupid and irresponsible. And he or she would have been trained to understand that. Zero tolerance for such stuff.
Mamie, the reason that I did not call for the scalps of these administrators is that people are driven by the unexamined habits of the tribe. This kind of thing–finding these egregious drawings–happens, unfortunately, a lot. And usually, it’s just some stupid jerk kid being a stupid jerk kid. I’m with you that their inaction–not checking the backpack and locker, not calling the police in for the conversation, not demanding that the student be removed and given treatment before he returns to school and class–was breathtakingly stupid. But breathtakingly stupid is, unfortunately, common enough. Sheeple do a lot of dangerous and breathtakingly stupid things if others are routinely doing the same. But there needs to be an agreed-upon protocol going forward.
I feel as if Bob and Mamie are misrepresenting what the school administrator knew and what this drawing was. The teacher didn’t hear a “threat”. The teacher found a concerning drawing which did not make her immediately tackle the kid and make sure he didn’t immediately kill everyone in her class. The drawing – a single drawing – was AMBIGUOUS. In hindsight it is possible to read all kinds of certainty and imminent threat in the drawing, but both the teacher and the administrator did the proactive thing by immediately calling the parents to be able to better assess how imminent this threat was. Comparing it to someone about to board an airplane talking about bombing it is – to me – completely unfair to the school. It assumes that the very first time any child draws a picture of a shooting, that child should be immediately taken away from their parents and assumed to be a potential criminal no matter what the parents say, and remain in foster care until a full investigation of the kid can be done.
It WAS a cry for help, and the guidance counselor treated it as such. I still don’t understand what Bob and Mamie are saying would have happened if the kid hadn’t had his gun in his backpack that day but planned the assault for the next day. The kid would have left the school and what? Come back the next day to shoot up the place? If the school had forced the parents to take the kid home, then what? The kid would come back another day to shoot up the school?
That’s why I do not understand the rush to mitigate the parents who gave a deadly gun to their kid and place blame on the school official who immediately called in the parents.
School officials cannnot prevent this unless the rule is that all students who make any violent drawings be subject to full body and backpack checks for the remainder of their time in the school system. I agree with you that a possible way to address this is to mandate metal detectors and body and backpack searches for every single kid every day.
But this kid’s parents could have prevented it by simply telling the school THE TRUTH. When you lie, you are to blame. You aren’t “clueless”, you are LYING. The parents lied. I don’t care why they lied. But their lie is why this happened because had they told the truth, the school would have acted because the school demonstrated that they do act even at the very first sign of a potential threat — an ambiguous drawing.
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis:
What actions, at what times, could have prevented this from happening, and why were these not done? A few answers to that:
No gun law in the state of Michigan that would have required that this gun be kept locked away securely.
No bag check and metal detectors at the doors of the school.
No calling the police when this note was found.
No checking of the kid’s backpack and locker after this note was found.
No administrators and/or police remanding the kid for psychiatric evaluation and treatment and not allowing him back into school until this course of treatment was completed.
“Failure Modes and Effects Analysis”
There is a parallel here with risk management in outdoor education and adventure, which divides risks into two types–natural and human–in order to see more clearly what the risks are.
Consider a group of friends visiting the rim of the Grand Canyon, but camping at a flat, open site 1/4 mile back from the canyon edge. Consider two activities: slow hiking and a spirited game of tag.
Is the tag game risky? Depends on the location.
Is the rim of the Canyon safe? Depends on your behavior.
Is it safe to attend school in Michigan? Depends….
Haaa!!!
Go way back up to Bob Shepherd @ 12/5 2:44pm & number of other of his posts recommending zero-tolerance/OOS suspension for drawings of guns, swastikas et al, & universal metal-detectors backpack-checks at entrance to all pubschs
Chiming in here on how gun drawings & related actions can be hard to parse and impossible to place ‘zero tolerance’ rules around. Teachers and admins will always be required to read between the lines & use knowledge of students & sensible judgment.
All 3 of my sons got called on carpet in similar situations. None of them were the least bit violent [rather the opposite]; the operative factors were peer pressure, GAGA, & vindictive [or hurt] friends. All 3 incidents were in wake of Columbine, & new admin sensitivity to bullying.
Middle son, in midsch, drew a cartoon intended to be funny [Doh!] involving a gun & a kid in class, then wadded & 86’d it. Background: middle son was a soft touch, & had friends in elemsch who were Downs’ syndrome, loners spurned by others etc; in midsch he distanced himself from them. The kid in class was one of those who felt spurned by him. That kid, triggered by a joke at his expense, retrieved the cartoon from bin, flattened out the creases, & brought it home to mom, who was mid-divorce & feeling angry/ mama-bear, complained to admin. What followed were guided peer-to-peer meetings between son & the once-friend. Middle son learned a lesson.
Eldest, in hisch—a kid both naïve & with impulse-control issues—made a joke in cafeteria about placing an “exploding hamburger” in principal’s pocket. He had a new & very dicey [psych-disturbed] female ‘friend’ who promptly reported the conversation to guidance. It could have been resolved right there, but guidance supv was on vacation, & newbie passed it up the chain. What ensued was an interview w/the asst princ for discipline to determine whether he needed to be given an out-of-school suspension. The admin sized him up appropriately, & he was let off with a warning. Eldest learned to be more careful about who he befriended. Around the same time as he got to know her better, he learned of her dysfunctional family background, & she showed him a small gun she kept in the pocketbook she brought to school [!]
Youngest, in midsch, was caught in an in-class incident where a bunch of boys laughed at a girl, causing her distress which felt uncomfortably like sexual harassment. [Should I note that both she & my son were SpEd?] She told her mom, who complained vigorously to admin. The boys listed in the complaint included my son, who had been her close friend in elemsch: clearly, his choice to GAGA despite their friendship stung. The follow-up was impressive. There was a meeting at school moderated by the principal, run by the local cop-partners who handled town-school relations, attended by parents of the 8 students named. Follow-ups included heart-felt [for my son at least] written apologies delivered in person to the girl’s home.
Hopefully you glean from these incidents that ‘zero-tolerance’ rules regarding apparent evidence of potential violence or bullying cannot easily be interpreted. As you’ve noted, adolescents are a strange species, whose barely-developed frontal cortexes give rise to a wide spectrum of behavior, where it is not simple to parse potential suicides/ killers from the rest. Zero-tolerance rules/ procedures [incl daily metal detectors/ backpack checks] put potential violence at front of daily consciousness for all kids: some will envision initiating violence themselves, some will feel fear all the time, some will manipulate the system. Some—in schools where such events have never happened—will resent the implication that admin sees them all as potential criminals.
Crumbley’s note with accompanying drawing was different from the above examples– clearly begging someone to intervene in suicidal/ murderous ideation. It was spotted immediately by a teacher, and passed up the chain; admin flubbed it. The answer to that failure is not zero tolerance for images/ notes that are easily misinterpreted, nor metal-detectors/ backpack checks for all pubschs.
If a zero-tolerance policy had been in place and if it had been clearly communicated to the students beforehand and kids had seen other kids be pulled out of school for such stunts, do you still think that these kids would have acted as they did? My feeling is better safe than sorry when what’s at stake are KIDS’ LIVES. I don’t think that there can be subtlety or nuance to the rule. Kids don’t get nuance. They get, “This is the rule. This is what happens if you break it.”
If a zero-tolerance policy had been in place and if it had been clearly communicated to the students beforehand and kids had seen other kids be pulled out of school for such stunts, do you still think that these kids would have acted as they did?
I’m asking a real question here. I don’t have a preconceived absolutist answer to this. And another question occurs to me: if they had been pulled out of school and put into counselling as a consequence of these actions because they were automatic triggers of such counselling, if they had to complete this before returning to school, would that have been such a terrible thing? I understand that it’s not ideal. There’s the issue of false positives, and there’s the issue of the lost school time.
Bob,
I totally agree. I think when you’ve actually worked in a school and know how they operate, you have a different point of view about this situation.
My first wife and I didn’t agree about how to parent. I had very clear rules for my kids when they were little. They knew what they were, and they knew the consequences when they violated them (I did not do physical punishment–I adamantly oppose that). My ex didn’t believe in establishing rules. She was very hippy dippy about this. And, predictably, after we were divorced, when they had visitation with her, she was constantly calling me to have me do something–talk to the kids, something–because they were “out of control.” Well, because the rules were in place at my house and were clear and consistent, they simply didn’t behave in that way when they were with me. I think that the rule has to be simple, clear, and invariant except in very unusual circumstances.
If it’s left up to subjective judgment, in this case, and the judgment is wrong, the outcome is bad enough to outweigh other considerations. It always makes sense to consider how bad the worst-case scenario is. In this case, it’s as bad as it gets: kids are killed.
I feel as if I need to repeat this — the administrators called in the parents immediately. No delay. The parents and kid both were questioned. The parents lied and did not tell the school that their child was just given a gun. The parents lied and confirmed to the administrator that this was a drawing for a video game the kid had been working on.
The administration reacted. But you seem to think they did not react enough. Which is fine, as long as we don’t all pretend that there is some magic way that “good” administrators can tell when threats are imminent or not. The way they tell that is by talking to the parents and the kid. Which they did.
Zero tolerance is fine – but that must always include kids like bethree5’s because expecting the school to distinguish between imminent and non-imminent threats for first time offenders who have never been in trouble before when their parents are also confirming to the school that the drawing of a shooting is for a video game means that no student should be trusted. Because there is no administrator good enough to know for sure what makes a threat imminent and requires calling the police.
The parents LIED. A reasonably proactive school reacted properly, and had parents who lied to them about what that drawing was. I really think scapegoating the administrator distracts from what those parents did that was so bad. They weren’t clueless. They were complicit. And schools are not yet set up to understand that a school shooter’s parents may be complicit. Maybe that needs to change and all parents treated like they might be helping their kid be a shooter so would intentionally lie to cover up for them.
The cost of not doing what we actually can do is simply too high. It is measured in the lives of children. I wish it were otherwise. It isn’t.
What if the school administrators had called the police and taken this situation to the next level with the proper authorities??? They probably would have found out the character of the parents and that they had bought a gun recently. That may have prevented this entire situation.
Mamie, yes. Oakland County Sheriff Bouchard, as quoted in Click On Detroit: “’Certainly, after the second encounter in the morning [teacher finds note/drawing; 1st encounter was previous day, teacher found Crumbley internet search for ammunition], I believe it was more than appropriate and necessary (to contact law enforcement), based on the content of what was seen on the second day… and I also know that our school resource officer would have asked him to be removed from school while that counseling or whatever was ordered by the school takes place.’ Bouchard said the resource officer would have escorted Crumbley from the school and made sure he didn’t have any weapons on him.”
And note that it would have been legal for the school officials to search Crumbley’s backpack and locker under the rule that applies in schools–that there be reasonable suspicion.
They search backpacks and lockers for marijuana at many schools, but don’t search for guns?
Because marijuana is more dangerous?
Marijuana kills
In multiples at that
And Ecstasy in pills
Is even worse for that
But guns are just benign
And dynamite divine
And searches never matter
For either of the latter
Because marijuana is more dangerous?
Marijuana leads invariably to the destruction of bags of potato chips.
Marijuana is a WSD, weapon of snack destruction
LOL!
We know where the WSD are.They’re in the area around the snack machine and east, west, south and north somewhat.
That’s why we need the bag checks and metal detectors and dedicated, trained personnel at entrances, as at courthouses and airports.
bethree says: “Oakland County Sheriff Bouchard, as quoted in Click On Detroit: “’Certainly, after the second encounter in the morning [teacher finds note/drawing; 1st encounter was previous day, teacher found Crumbley internet search for ammunition], I believe it was more than appropriate and necessary (to contact law enforcement), based on the content of what was seen on the second day… and I also know that our school resource officer would have asked him to be removed from school while that counseling or whatever was ordered by the school takes place.’ Bouchard said the resource officer would have escorted Crumbley from the school and made sure he didn’t have any weapons on him.’ ”
Right. Some Republican sheriff should be believed that he would have arrested the son of two white parents who were sitting right there explaining how the school was overreacting to their “never been in trouble before” son’s drawings for a video game, and the sheriff’s guys would have disbelieved the white parents and would have immediately searched the kid and not asked the school administrator why they were overreacting by calling the police?
And we can be sure of this because the sheriff’s office was certainly concerned about those parents once they understand that these parents were gun-lovers who had specifically purchased an automatic handgun for their 15 year old and had him practice with it and had told the school not to worry. The sheriff’s office was so “pro-active” that they showed absolutely no concern about where these parents might be, since they had implicit trust that the very same white Trump-supporting parents who had misled school administrators about their son’s access to guns and the drawing being for a video game would definitely show up to a hearing. No need to watch them — the sheriff’s had trust the parents would show up!
We can be certain that since the sheriff’s office trusted the parents’ word after this happened, why would we ever doubt that they would have absolutely not trusted the parents’ word before this happened?!
I don’t believe the sheriff. Given the circumstances and the two parents absolutely vouching that their never before in trouble kid was being harassed based on a drawing for a video game, I suspect the sheriff’s office would believe the parents. Just like the sheriff’s office showed absolutely no sign that they doubted the word of the parents even after this happened. The way the parents were trusted after this happened tells you exactly how the sheriff’s office would have treated them before this happened. As truthful people whose son was being unfairly targeted.
Again, the Sheriff described several similar incidents in recent weeks and how his office responded.
Bouchard, btw, who has 33 years of experience in law enforcement, is a Republican and was a supporter of Mitt Romney. He was opposed in the primary for a Senate race in Michigan by candidates who accused him of not being conservative enough. Bouchard won the primary but lost the Senate race. I have been quite impressed by his comments in interviews. Very professional. Not a Trumpanzee.
The assumption that Bouchard, because he is a Sheriff, would have behaved in Trumpanzee fashion is completely unwarranted by the facts. Another example of the unwarranted “Well, then it must be” “thinking.”
Another example of fact-free, unwarranted assertion
cx: unwarranted, fact-free assertion/speculation
No, my assumption is that anyone who tries to blame the school and makes claims about how his office absolutely would have acted differently is not to be believed. I find the sheriff’s motivations for scapegoating the school to be suspect, especially when he conveniently leaves out the fact that the school did take immediate action, but was misled by the parents to believe that this drawing by a student with no prior red flags did not constitute an IMMINENT threat. I can’t help wondering how he has the chutzpah to claim that he and his officers would have known the parents were liars and their kid was an imminent danger.
Call me skeptical that the guy who didn’t bother to keep an eye on the parents he trusted to show up for court would have definitely mistrusted the parents when they confirmed their son’s innocuous explanation of what the drawing was.
The sheriff behaved in a way that showed he trusted the parents even after the shooting when he knew far more that should have made him distrust the parents.
So yes, I find it laughable that anyone believes this guy when he says his office would have totally known the parents were liars and would have searched and arrested the kid right in front of the parents. Right. Every single action his office took even after they had evidence the parents weren’t trustworthy demonstrated that they gave these people the benefit of the doubt. And you think they wouldn’t have given these parents the benefit of the doubt BEFORE this all happened?
“the Sheriff described several similar incidents in recent weeks and how his office responded.”
Can you link to this? Because I bet the circumstances are not the same. Especially given how his office trusted those parents so much that they didn’t even bother to keep an eye on them.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/michigan-da-prosecutor-karen-mcdonald-crumbley-charges-oakland-county-sheriff
Bob, thank you for the link!
However, it just supports my point (despite the Fox News slant)
“Also criticizing McDonald on Friday was Oakland County Undersheriff Michael McCabe, who questioned a reported claim by McDonald that she had been told by an assistant in her office that police had “eyes” on the parents in case they tried to flee.
That McDonald claim simply wasn’t true, McCabe told the Detroit News.
“We didn’t even know they had been charged with anything until we were informed [Friday] morning by the media,” McCabe told the News.”
The police did NOT have eyes on the parents. Period. They were “waiting”! Because nothing the parents had done that the sheriff knew about made the sheriff have any doubt that it would be perfectly okay if his department WAITED until the prosecutor had gathered all the evidence necessary to charge them first, even if that took days. In the meantime, the sheriff absolutely was certain there was no “imminent threat” that the parents would disappear because he TRUSTED those parents.
Of course, according to the link you provided, the parents disappeared on Thursday evening but once again the sheriff tries to scapegoat the prosecutor who announced the indictments on Friday — when the parents had already disappeared because the sheriff’s office saw absolutely no reason to “keep eyes” on them. How is the Friday press conference responsible for the fact that the parents disappeared Thursday evening? But the sheriff says it is – because he wants to exonerate his own propensity to trust those white parents and not bother to “keep eyes” on them.
The parents disappeared Thursday evening. The sheriff saw absolutely no need to keep eyes on them. He trusted them even though he knew the mom had texted the son “Ethan don’t do it” and he knew the parents had purchased the gun for him and they knew the parents had been IN THE SCHOOL for a meeting in which they absolutely reassured the administrators that there was nothing at all to worry about and refused to take their kid home.
The sheriff is a hack. Fact: The sheriff’s office absolutely saw no reason to “keep eyes” on the parents, who disappeared on Thursday evening the night BEFORE the prosecutor announced charges.
Fact: The hack sheriff blames the prosecutor for announcing charges as the reason the parents disappeared when he knew for a fact that those parents had already disappeared the evening before because his own office had no problem leaving them alone and not keeping eyes on them.
So please don’t expect me to trust this sheriff looking to scapegoat other people when it is clear that his office had no interest in keeping eyes on the very same parents he claims he would have considered untrustworthy liars if only the school had called him so his officers could arrest their kid right in front of them. If only the school had called them, the sheriff claims, his office could demonstrate their complete lack of trust in the very same parents who they didn’t bother to keep eyes on after they knew so much more about how untrustworthy they were.
Whatever.
The Sheriff is a procedures kind of guy. Clearly. The prosecutor notifies his office that they are planning to indict. He responds accordingly. By the book.
But to the original point, ust the day before, the Sheriff’s office was notified of another kid at another school who was reasonably suspected of planning a shooting. They removed the kid from the school and confiscated the weapons available to him because the Sheriff’s office was notified and took the appropriate action, just as it would have in this case.
Other readers of this blog: watch the interview with the Sheriff. It’s clear. It speaks for itself.
I knew when I posted this video that the reaction would be yet another reiteration of your position and of your baseless speculations, but I did it anyway in hopes that some others would view it because the Sheriff clearly lays out what his office DOES and WOULD HAVE DONE in this instance–actions that would have prevented this sickening murder of children.
Bob,
I’m stunned you are watching the same video as I am. Watch at 03:00 after the sheriff keeps scapegoating the prosecutor and implying his job requires him to have absolutely no concern about where the parents are until the moment a warrant is sworn out for them!!
Even the Fox News reporter keeps pointing out that there was talk about the charges coming on Thursday, and asked whether he could have parked a car outside the house, and the sheriff replies with a non sequitur that “a charging decision would be announced is what we were told” which actually leaves the Fox News reporter speechless for a second before she realizes her job is to help the sheriff blame the democratic prosecutor and she changes the subject.
(I can’t believe you don’t see the irony in this sheriff blaming the school for trusting the parents too much and not recognizing an imminent threat who turns around and says he just couldn’t see any reason to keep track of the parents’ whereabouts after he knew for a fact that their actions directly helped make this tragedy happen.)
And please remember that the sheriff is totally scapegoating the prosecutor’s Friday press conference as the reason that his office couldn’t bring in the parents when this sheriff absolutely knows that those parents had already disappeared on Thursday, the day before, and that disappearance had nothing to do with the Friday press conference. Maybe he wants to scapegoat the prosecutor because that is better than admitting that he saw no imminent threat that the parents would flee. He trusted the parents. He had no reason to keep eyes on them or keep a car parked outside. He was “waiting” until he actually had the warrant in hand. And yet he blames a press conference that happened the day after they disappeared for why he couldn’t find them.
Are you really buying this guy’s act? Because even that Fox News anchor is momentarily stunned when he can’t offer up an explanation for why his office couldn’t keep eyes on the parents until AFTER the warrant was sworn out on Friday. Watch at 3:00
Did you notice that the example the sheriff gave of how they reacted so quickly with another kid was an example that happened AFTER the school shooting? Not before. Anyone surprised that the sheriff’s office would take violent drawings more seriously the day AFTER a school shooting? Later he says in the 5 days before the shooting they investigated 5 threats and didn’t find a single one credible (I wonder if they gave school officials a hard time for that) and after the shooting they investigating one threat and decided the threat was credible and went to the kid’s house to search for guns.
I noticed that while the news anchor was critical of the parents, NOT ONCE was the sheriff critical of the parents. He minces no words blaming the school and the prosecutor. But he seems absolutely certain that those parents were never asked directly about access to a gun (not sure if that is true) and if they weren’t asked, he doesn’t want to criticize those parents at all for not bringing that up. Don’t ask, don’t tell, when the school informs you that your son drew a violent picture. Instead just confirm the son’s lie that it is for a video game. And the sheriff will still have faith you won’t flee, even though he says the school should have known you were lying.
If the sheriff blamed the parents as much as he blamed the school, I could believe he wasn’t biased. But he does not.
I have seen lots of other law enforcement officials in other places who approach this with integrity. This sheriff is looking to scapegoat the school and prosecutor’s office for political gain. And he tries way too hard to avoid criticizing the parents who gave their kid a gun!
This sheriff had every chance to say “parents, please make sure your kids don’t have access to your guns” and instead he tells kids and school officials that they need to do a better job informing his office of any possible threats.
^^also, I am disappointed in you. You are making this personal.
It is true that I am mystified at your position, but I would never insult you by saying that of course I would expect you to have that position because that is the kind of person you are.
You win. Let’s all admire this Republican sheriff who doesn’t want to talk about gun control or the problems when gun-loving parents lie to school officials and give their kids guns as gifts. Let’s join this sheriff in scapegoating teachers, school administrators and Democratic prosecutors for everything.
“the Sheriff clearly lays out what his office DOES and WOULD HAVE DONE in this instance”
Yep. And you take him at his word. Why do we need gun control anyway? As long as we inform the sheriff to come in and do a complete investigation of any kid who makes a violent drawing, problem solved.
I never said that we don’t need gun control. I emphatically believe that we need much more strict gun control. I did say that we aren’t going to get it.
Procedure for dealing with school shootings:
React in horror that there was another of these.
Wring hands and make a lot of noise about how we need more gun control (and, ofc, we do. We do need more gun control).
When you don’t get more gun control, do nothing else that would actually make it more difficult for school shootings to occur.
Repeat ad nauseam et pro re nata (which will be frequently).
And one reason we aren’t going to get gun control is the actions of the Sheriff. I have seen other law enforcement officials talk about gun control, but this sheriff thinks the laws on the books are enough (I looked it up and found him saying that). To prove the laws are enough, the sheriff looks for scapegoats in the school, in the prosecutors’ office, but never ever blames the parents. Even when he is telling viewers to look out for the parents, the sheriff never says “they may be armed and dangerous”. Not once did he characterize the parents in any negative way (even the Fox News reporter did, but not the sheriff). It is revealing of his attitude toward the parents. That’s why it is not remotely credible to me that this sheriff would have treated this never before in trouble kid aggressively based on a single drawing, when the kid’s parents were right there vouching for the kid.
This entire incident boils down to admirably proactive school officials who did the right thing by removing the kid from class and immediately calling in the parents and then did the wrong thing by not understanding that the parents were blatant liars covering up for their kid and they should not be trusted and the kid was an imminent threat.
The sheriff scapegoats the school and makes a claim that you believe and I don’t — that if only his office was called in, they would have done something different.
And the reason I don’t believe the sheriff for a second is that when it was HIS turn to make a judgement call about the parents, he showed his true colors — he trusted the parents. The sheriff kept no eyes on the parents. The sheriff gave the parents the benefit of the doubt. Even though after the shooting those parents should have zero credibility, the sheriff still gave the parents the benefit of the doubt and took the parents at their word that they would turn themselves in.
And what’s worse, when it was his turn to explain why he didn’t have eyes on the parents, the sheriff did something completely dishonorable. Knowing that the parents disappeared on Thursday, the sheriff still scapegoated the democratic prosecutor’s Friday press conference for why he didn’t know where the parents were.
We won’t have gun control when we have dishonorable people like this sheriff using his microphone to push the false narrative that there is no need for gun control because schools can just call in people like him and all will be fine. We won’t have gun control when that false narrative gets credibility despite its absurdity (at least to me).
One thing I hope you will consider:
When the teacher brought the drawing and kid to the school counselor, that counselor spent a lot of effort to reach the parents, waiting with the kid until the parents showed up, talking to them. It took hours.
Don’t you think the easiest thing would have been for the guidance counselor to just call in that sheriff’s officer? She could have turned the kid over to the sheriff’s department instead of spending hours dealing with this. But she did something that was much harder and dealt with it herself.
So yes, I am skeptical about the sheriff’s main narrative – that this is all preventable if stupid and non-lazy school administrators didn’t just call the sheriff every time a kid with no previous record made a violent drawing. I am skeptical when the same sheriff who trusted the parents after he knows they lied to school administrators proclaims that his own office would have acted aggressively when those same parents had exonerated this kid who had never been in trouble before.
But I do respect that the sheriff’s narrative is now presented as the “truth”, yet another nail in the coffin for any reasonable gun control.
When school administrators suspect that there is child abuse in the home possibly by the parents, do they just call in the parents, believe everything they say and then send the kid back to class? Or…do they call in other professionals to help determine what is going on in the home? I don’t see why school administrators were supposed to believe the parents in this case when they seemed to show no alarm over what their kid had drawn and written. And they refused to take him home and get help. That should have been a signal right there that something was wrong. The school administrators had every right and I think in this case the DUTY to involve other authorities no matter what the parents wanted.
Mamie,
If that is your opinion, why would the school counselor ever bother to call in the parents at all?
Two possibilities:
Parents are also concerned — red flag that even the parents are concerned so this kid needs to be immediately arrested and his body and backpack searched.
Parents are not concerned — red flag that the kid has problem parents and the kid needs to be immediately arrested and his body and backpack searched.
Remember that this kid had no prior history with the school as being a problem.
I can see absolutely no situation where – if the kid does end up as a shooter – that the school counselor won’t be blamed for missing it. So why delay (and put kids in danger) when the obvious answer is to call in the sheriff right away and arrest every kid who makes a violent drawing, regardless of his past history and what his parents say?
Seriously, what is another possible scenario where the school isn’t to blame? If the parents had taken the kid home and he had come back the next day and shot up the school, we still would be sitting here blaming the school counselor for the exact same thing! She had him in her office! She should have known because the parents were ALSO worried! She should have known because the parents were NOT worried! She should just have known. And she is to blame.
In my opinion, this is all playing into the hands of the gun lobby. A school can never be too proactive, because there is no scenario where any administrator in the school is not to blame.
Except if they pass the buck by simply doing what this dishonorable sheriff claims they should do and call his office and make his office responsible for any violent actions that kid takes in the future.
In fact, I think the school should tell the sheriff that all students who are found with violent drawings, or doing internet searches for guns or bullets will be immediately – without delay – sent to the sheriff’s office. And the sheriff needs to sign off on every kid and give his permission to allow the student to return to school.
I think the school should call the sheriff’s bluff and explain that they are now deferring to his far superior judgement about this because this pro-gun Republican sheriff certainly presents himself as the solution to stopping school shooting. The school is now deferring to the Republican sheriff’s beliefs that it is not because of parents giving kids’ guns, it’s that the school isn’t letting the superior sheriff do his job.
NYC PSP, see my reply all the way down at the end of this entire comment chain (so I have more room to write.)
Further on the subject of “the state of our young people,” this from Chicago:
More confirmation about the danger of guns.
A hundred (?) or more chaotic kids, and none of them killed anyone during an entire evening (although there were injuries).
One violent kid with an automatic gun and 4 people dead in a few minutes as well as other injuries.
And in Wisconsin, one teenager with an assault weapon wanders the street and kills two and maims another person.
Weren’t you advised to not read my comments?
How could you possibly take offense from my generic reply to a video you posted?
I am very sorry I posted a generic reply about the dangers of guns in the hands of young people that offended flerp. My bad.
Good lord. Not just about state of mind of our young people, but about how a mob scene/ riot can be organized via social media. And to think I had positive ideas about that 11 yrs ago when it enabled citizens to organize protests against autocrats in the Arab Spring. Here’s the flip side.
Didn’t we already know the flip side of mobs (adult mobs) that can be organized via social media after January 6?
I always find your comments well thought out and interesting, bethree5, so I wonder what you think this video says about the state of mind of our young people since that is the subject?
(I may be censored from being allowed to ask you that question, but I hope it is allowed).
What is this video saying about the state of mind of our young people? Hopefully whatever it says about the state of mind of our young people will help inform us about how to prevent more school shootings.
A chilling note about what happened during the Arab Spring uprising in Tunisia: The protestors all received messages on their cellphones saying that they were involved in an illegal demonstration and that the government knew who they are.
“He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows when you’ve been bad or good and will burn you at the stake.”
Bob, egad, doesn’t that just figure. Reminds me of that “Zuck on a Truck” from SNL someone posted the other day.
Absolutely, nycpsp, in fact youth has no doubt been taking a page from the insurrectionists (if they weren’t already doing so). I was just feeling nostalgic for the ‘good old days’ when social media seemed harmless and even helpful [unless I’m being naïve & it was used afoul since day one].
My take on the Chicago street youth mob is uninformed, i.e., I’d want to know whether this and/or similar things have been going on downtown since time immemorial, or since Trump, or since Floyd or since 1/6 etc. So I’m just assuming this is unusual as reporter seemed to indicate. But FWIW, here it is: frustrated, angry, restless– mainly due to continuing pandemic effect on economy/ future insecurity— but at the moment, spurred by a re-up of a floating sense of lawlessness absorbed from KR verdict and latest school shooting.
bethree5,
Those are great points. Although to me what it says is that we need aggressive gun control more than ever.
(I mention that because this is a discussion of a school shooting.)
I thought your stories of your own kids were very pertinent to this discussion. Because I do think it is impossible for any school official to be able to identify imminent threats versus possible threats versus maybe not threats with 100% accuracy. So maybe that means that police are always called in and required to not just search the kid and his backpack, but also his home, the very first time a kid with no previous record of trouble draws something violent. Expecting a school counselor to be 100% accurate about threats is clearly a problem given what (to me) is new knowledge that there is no point in calling in the parents since they can’t be trusted anyway.
The Danger Sits (with apologies to Robert Frost)
We dance round in a ring and debate
But the Danger sits in the metal and waits
Alternate version
The Bullet Sits
We dance round in a ring and debate
But the bullet sits in the chamber and waits
Circular Firing Squad” would probably be a better title
For “Circular Debate” poem below
The Secret Sits (by Robert Frost)
We dance round in a ring and suppose
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows
Version 3
The Bullets Sit
We dance round in a ring and debate
But the bullets sit in the chamber and wait
Circular Debate
Deck chairs rearranged
With nothing really changed
Circle is the form
Of gun debate, the norm
The Congressional Repeater
Congress is repeater
Of “sympathy and prayer”
With no authentic meat here
But tofu turkey fare
These are great, SDP! Tofu turkey takes the cake.
Pediatrics 7-1-2021, ‘Weapon carrying among boys….”
“In schools perceived as safe, non-Hispanic white boys carried weapons more often than boys of color.” “Gun-related deaths are the 2nd leading cause of mortality among children and adolescents.” “In 2010, gun homicide rates among individuals 18-24 were 49 times higher than other high income countries.”
The number of school shootings* has shown a dramatic increase in just the past ten years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/971473/number-k-12-school-shootings-us/
*As of September 30, 2021
The source defines a school shooting as every time a gun is brandished, fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason.”
The number of school shootings reached a relative minimum in 2010 and appears to have increased exponentially since, the number of incidents per year now being about 10 times what it was in 2010.
What is behind the increase?
Is it merely an increase in availability of guns? Or us something else going on?
A simplistic answer might be that Trump was responsible since there was a fairly large jump in 2018. But there was also another jump in just this past year 2021, (albeit not quite as large, but the year is not yet over) . And the significant (explosive?) decade long increase actually began before Trump’s ascendancy, at any rate.
I wonder if anyone has investigated this increase.
What’s an “active shooter” versus a “non-active shooter”?
If “active shooter” means “someone actually shot a gun,” then the huge post-2010 increase would be almost entirely due to people “brandishing” but not firing the weapon. I don’t see a clear trend (either up or down) in the dark “active shooter” portion of the bars in this graph.
But I’m not sure that’s what “active shooter” means in this graph.
FBI defines an active shooter as an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated are.
The stats actually break it down, but my comments were directed at the overall increase in shootings, at any rate.
So the big increases (the light blue bars) were in school shootings where the shooter was not an active shooter, i.e. not someone actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area? Having trouble comprehending what that means.
And you find no issue with “brandishing” a gun in school, that’s your prerogative, of course.
I’m not saying it’s ok to brandish a gun in school. Just trying to understand the graph.
My bad.
It probably means nothing that the number of times a gun was brandished, fired, or a bullet hit school property increased by a factor of about 10 between 2010 and 2021
Or , for that matter, that the “The largest number of active shooter incidents in schools was in 2018, with 11 active shooters”
Totally meaningless. No doubt
Wow.
We’re all just grinding our teeth until we figure out that the source of the disease is the Supreme Court and the forces that now prostitute it.
NYC PCP wrote in response to Mamie, at 1:59 pm (right above Flerp’s post of the “Chaos in the Loop” news video:
“I think the school should tell the sheriff that all students who are found with violent drawings, or doing internet searches for guns or bullets will be immediately – without delay – sent to the sheriff’s office. And the sheriff needs to sign off on every kid and give his permission to allow the student to return to school.NYC”
These are my thoughts, moved down here for more width of print: NYS PCP, now you are getting somewhere! There is NOT one cause and one solution to this problem. We need to approach gun violence from SEVERAL angles, and REQUIRING law enforcement to take every such kid and certify his return to school will help.
Why have you continually advocated one and only one solution–gun control by the government? We understand your position and agree that gun control is needed. BUT, why approach the murders of school children and staff with ONLY attempts at gun control, ESPECIALLY since prior efforts have basically gone nowhere?
We are coming up on the 9th anniversary of the Sandy Hook murders, which were even more detestable than those in Michigan. TWENTY(!!) 6 and 7 YEAR OLDS GUNNED DOWN, and 6 teachers and administrators! Result: ZERO federal gun control passed, though a few states did add to their gun control laws. What makes you think gun control will fare any better now?
So basically NO effective gun control after Sandy Hook, (or Columbine etc etc etc.) Next week, Michigan will be ancient history. And even if we had gun control, why depend on only ONE defense? Why shouldn’t we–to the best of our abilities—–
1) Make sure every administrator, teacher and staff member do what was done in Michigan: refer any and every violent ideation to office, remove student, call parents
2) Take it two steps further: every incident is reported to law enforcement AND law enforcement must–at the very least–remove student if parents will not.
3) Support policies and legislation–at all levels– that will not allow such students back in the school unless cleared by law enforcement and/or psychiatry. And even then, schools have the final say.
4) Require an armed officer at every school, plus the detectors, etc used by airlines.
NYC PSP– #2 and #3 is where you come in. Move beyond your insistence solely on gun control, and give us your thoughts about how we can enact #2 and #3 so as to ensure–as much as is possible– that law enforcement will be helpful, responsible, and effective, NOT the dismissive and uncooperative enablers that you fear this Michigan officer might be.
This tragic incident is in the past, but there will be more in the future, and there ARE other approaches that we can take that will be effective, while still pursuing gun control.
Of course, we could also say, “This is too expensive and impractical for such a small problem, because there are 14,000 school districts in the US, and though shootings are tragic and regrettable, the incidence is a very small fraction of 1%.”
Well said, Mark. Exactly. Though I think that in place of the Resource Officer, we need a TSA-style force for bag checks and metal detectors at doorways.
Or, we could just talk about needing gun control and do nothing and continue to watch this stuff happen. Kids and teachers killed.
The Onion put it best: “Nothing can be done about gun violence says only country where this is a regular occurrence.”
Prepare yourself for about a hundred 200-word screeds, in reply to your note, repeating the same stuff each time, including unwarranted assertions about what you “must think.”
“I think that in place of the Resource Officer, we need a TSA-style force for bag checks and metal detectors at doorways.” –Bob Shepherd.
Yes various possibilities. The TSA-style bag check staff and the metal detectors would do a better job during the morning opening rush than one or two Resource Officers without that equipment. I included the armed officer because at Sandy Hook, the murderer got through the locked front door by blasting the glass out with one of his guns.
The big picture is that in all these attacks, there are multiple defenses a would-be terrorist must overcome. ALL need to be as strong as possible, especially when gun control–which we wish would be the obvious, primary, simple solution–is not yet possible.
Mark,
I agree with most of what you say.
What I object to is the false narrative that I have seen here — where supposedly there are “good” school counselors who have some special ability to see a kid who has never before been in trouble, look at a violent picture the kid drew and the words written on the picture, and know that this drawing was not just “a cry for help” that required immediate attention but a clear warning that the school must completely disregard the parents (because who can tell if a parent is covering up or not) and instead hand the student over to law enforcement.
We keep raising the bar and legitimizing the view of the Republican pro-gun sheriff that there is some magical ability that specially trained school officials or sheriffs have in which they are able to accurately recognize the difference between a potential threat that requires immediate intervention and presence of the parents, and an imminent threat in which there is no point in notifying parents since they can’t be trusted and police must be immediately called to remove the child from the school premises, search the student’s body, backpack and home for any potential weapon, and perhaps institutionalize the child until a trained professional who will be personally held accountable for any future violent actions of the child makes a judgement as to whether the student may return to school.
The fact that the kid had the gun on the same day he drew the picture was mere luck that meant that slightly more concerned parents might have been convinced to take him home from school so he could come back another day to do his shooting. It was mere luck that meant that maybe different parents would have said “hey, my kid has a gun at home and I better make sure he doesn’t have it right now.”
I did not say “we only need gun control”. I said “This school instituted very good policies to try to keep their students safe — look how much care this school took with a student with no prior red flags — and it still wasn’t enough and never will be”.
Instead the message is: “of course the school shooting happened because the school is run by inept people who didn’t care or were too stupid to see the obvious – that this kid planned to shoot up the school right then and there.”
As a parent, I don’t find it particularly comforting to hear sheriffs who don’t want to stop parents who give their teenagers automatic weapons as gifts, but does promise that kids who are caught with drawings of guns will be taken care of if he is called. How? By forcing their parents to take them home? So they can come back the next day with a gun?
Just once I would like a reporter to ask that smug sheriff if he will promise parents that from now on, his officers will search the homes of every kid who does a violent drawing or does an internet search of bullets or guns to make sure there are no weapons in the home. If the sheriff hems and haws and alludes to some “better ways” that don’t include immediately searching the home of every student who draws a violent picture for guns and removing them, then he is just bloviating.
Mark, I agree with you that we need more than just gun control. But don’t you see we have all been propagandized to take gun control off the table by pushing the false narrative that there are all these other security measures we can take instead.
You say I’m focused on gun control, but I am not. I am just INCLUDING gun control as a primary thing since we have already tried all those other things.
Let me repeat — we have already done all of those other things that people say will work and IT IS NOT WORKING. Let’s stop helping the right wing by agreeing with them that it didn’t work because the school workers were too stupid or lazy or not lazy enough to call police who would have easily prevented this.
How about we try gun control too? Funny how that is the one thing that hasn’t been tried! Instead we help legitimize the false narrative that we haven’t really done all these other preventative measures “the right way”. The sheriff knows “the right way” and his way allows parents to gift their kids as many guns as they want, with parents safely knowing the sheriff is there to keep the school safe if only the school had called him so he could arrest the kid whose parents assure him is not a threat to anyone. And if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Imagine if the sheriff would have said “this shows how near impossible it is to identify students who plan to shoot up the school in an hour”. Instead this sheriff said “all the school had to do was to call me”.
Mark, here is one idea I have that the sheriff won’t countenance. How about we make every parent who purchases a gun for their teenager responsible for everything that teenager does with the gun? I understand that some kids obtain weapons illegally, but this was not that case. If a parent owns a gun, it is his responsibility to keep it out of the hands of their teenagers or be responsible for the consequences. Don’t excuse the parents as “clueless”. Call them what they are — parents who intentionally deceived the school because they enjoyed knowing their kid had an automatic weapon in his possession.
I have mixed feelings about the metal detectors and pat downs you suggest but if we have them, they need to be for every person in the school, not just students. Teachers, aides, administrators, custodians — no one enters the school without being searched for a weapon.
But I just find it incredible that we sit here and discuss forcing every person entering a school to do a TSA check and talking about immediately detaining every child who does a violent drawing and doing home searches for weapons, but we still can’t even talk about gun control. Somehow it’s not impossible to imagine all kids being detained and searched for drawings but it is impossible to imagine gun control.
“What I object to is the false narrative that …supposedly there are “good” school counselors who have some special ability to see a kid who has never before been in trouble, look at a violent picture the kid drew…”
That “false narrative” about counselors with a “special ability” is irrelevant. Given the extreme negative consequences of mass murder if that theoretical “special ability” fails, we should instead institute a clear, blanket policy like Bob suggested: ANY and EVERY violent drawing or threat, WITHOUT exception, will result in immediate suspension.
Furthermore, as I suggested, the student isn’t eligible to come back until cleared by law enforcement and/or a psychiatrist and even in that case the school has the ultimate right of refusal. A policy like this does not ensure success, but it would shift the responsibility, the work, the time, the expense, and the possible blame to more highly trained professionals in law enforcement and psychiatry, while still keeping the final decision for the school to make.
“We keep … legitimizing the view of the Republican pro-gun sheriff that there is some magical ability that specially trained school officials or sheriffs … to accurately recognize…”
Also irrelevant and too risky. Instead, just that simple, clear policy for every student: You threaten in any way, out you go.
“there is no point in notifying parents since they can’t be trusted”
We can notify parents, but why would we assume they are not aware of and enabling their child’s behavior?
“…perhaps institutionalize the child until a trained professional who will be personally held accountable for any future violent actions of the child makes a judgement…”
Trained professionals in law enforcement and psychiatry have more resources and knowledge of child criminality than we do, so why would we not shift the problem and the accountability to them? It’s not like we’re loaded with money, personnel and resources to deal with violent threats, and we do have a responsibility to protect our other students and parents.
“I don’t find it particularly comforting to hear sheriffs who don’t want to stop parents who give their teenagers automatic weapons as gifts…”
But we have no effective gun control laws that would allow a sheriff to prevent a parent from buying a gun and giving to their teenager. What we CAN do is install TSA type systems in schools. The complaint that these would be cumbersome and expensive reminds me of the auto industry’s complaints about seat belts many years ago. And if expensive planes and the flying public are worth protecting, why not expensive schools and children?
“Let me repeat — we have already done all of those other things that people say will work and IT IS NOT WORKING.”
I have worked in Title One schools in three states during the last 20 yrs, and NONE of those three school districts had a TSA style check in any of their schools (12, 9 and 3 schools in those districts). NONE had a “threaten violence and you’re out” policy. So please tell me where I can find information about the schools where “all those other things” were tried and why they did not work. Also I would be very interested in knowing the details of the failures, why improvements were not made, and the possible relationship of lack of money and staffing to those failures.
“Let’s stop helping the right wing by agreeing with them that it didn’t work because the school workers were too stupid or lazy…”
You’ve said this many times, but you are only rehashing the past. You offer nothing for tomorrow. The school staff did everything right except for that last detail of letting the boy back in school because his parents would not take him. Couldn’t we change THAT policy to “ANY threat of violence and you’re suspended and removed by the sheriff IMMEDIATELY?” Where has that been tried and how did it fail??
“How about we try gun control too? Funny how that is the one thing that hasn’t been tried!”
Nation-wide gun control has not been enacted because it goes nowhere in Congress thanks to the gun lobby, the 2nd Amendment and the courts. What is your SPECIFIC plan for getting gun control laws passed and enacted? And what is your SPECIFIC plan to prevent disturbed and violent students from buying illegal guns or bringing knives, flame throwers, clubs, acid, etc etc etc and bringing THOSE into schools?
“Instead we help legitimize the false narrative that we haven’t really done all these other preventative measures “the right way”. The sheriff knows “the right way” and his way allows parents to gift their kids as many guns as they want,”
No, the laws are made by the legislative branch of our state and federal governments; the laws’ constitutionality is judged by the judicial branch; and the laws are enforced by the executive branch, including the sheriff in this case. If the sheriff’s “right way” has violated the relevant laws (which we know is common among police agencies) as passed by Congress and his state legislatures, he will be judged in the appropriate court.
But the question for the future is, how can we enact clear and effective laws and policies that will REQUIRE schools to remove a student under these circumstances, REQUIRE the school notify law enforcement, and REQUIRE law enforcement to immediately take the student WITHOUT acting like you say this sheriff in Michigan did?
Do you have any suggestions other than saying nothing will work except gun control? Do you have any suggestions how to get gun control enacted?
“Mark, here is one idea I have that the sheriff won’t countenance. How about we make every parent who purchases a gun for their teenager responsible for everything that teenager does with the gun?”
Yes, we should definitely hold parents responsible for what their children do with their guns, and in this case the parents have been charged with involuntary manslaughter. Apparently, this is unusual, so the law needs to be strengthened here.
As for the sheriff, he has no legal say in this. His function is to uphold the law as it pertains to parental responsibility and involuntary manslaughter, and as it is judged in the courts of the judicial branch. If he ignores the law or misinterprets it (intentionally or not) he is subject to legal action against him.
“If a parent owns a gun, it is his responsibility to keep it out of the hands of their teenagers”
Yes, and not just “hidden”, but locked in an approved gun safe. Unfortunately, if there’s a violation, we probably won’t know about it until it’s too late.
“Don’t excuse the parents as “clueless”. Call them what they are — parents who intentionally deceived the school because they enjoyed knowing their kid had an automatic weapon in his possession.”
Yes, I agree completely. I did not use “clueless” to excuse their behavior, I intended it to mean “ignorant of their responsibilities to their son, their school, and their community.”
“I have mixed feelings about the metal detectors and pat downs you suggest but if we have them, they need to be for every person in the school, not just students. Teachers, aides, administrators, custodians — no one enters the school without being searched for a weapon.”
Yes, definitely everyone. I was thinking of metal detectors and inspection of bags, music cases etc. I’m not comfortable with pat downs and would like to hear some expert advice on that.
I, Mark, made the above post..and hit the wrong key so “m” came up.
Mark,
I think we basically agree on general points.
But – to reiterate where I am coming from – I find it depressing and absurd that we are talking about having TSA-style bag check staff and metal detectors in every single school building and how to accomplish that, while we dismiss the fight for gun control as unwinnable.
Despite the fact that the majority of Americans support more gun control and most parents don’t want their kids having to walk through metal detectors and have TSA-style bag checks before they are allowed to enter school each day.
Why are the popular things off the table but the unpopular things are what we should be fighting for?
People who support gun control have lost the narrative. So when I see people normalizing and admiring a pro-gun sheriff bloviating about how he could have prevented this if the school had only called him in, I see the amplification of the far right’s propaganda that there are lots of other reasonable, easy to enact policies that would solve this problem and just haven’t been done “the right way”.
My suggestion for getting gun control enacted is to seize the narrative back. When this shooting happened, it would have helped gun control get enacted if the media and every sane person in America was pointing out that this school did everything proactive they should have done, and it STILL wasn’t enough because pro-gun parents gifted their kid with an automatic weapon and lied about it.
This school shooting should have been the most clear and convincing example that not having gun control is the problem, not inept school administrators. This shooting happened with proactive officials responding IMMEDIATELY to a kid with no previous discipline problems who draw a picture. And it still wasn’t enough.
Instead of saying that acting proactively wasn’t enough because parents are giving their kids access to guns, we legitimize a pro-gun sheriff’s right wing propaganda that this happened because of inept school officials, not pro-gun parents.
Why do I care? Because as a parent, I am not stupid enough to think that all the metal detectors and TSA bag checks in the world can stop a kid whose parents just bought him an automatic hand gun from standing outside and mowing down students as they exit the school building. It only takes 2 minutes to kill more than 4 kids.
How did we lose the narrative when gun control is popular and TSA checks and metal detectors are not?
The first thing we have to do is stop already with all the circular horizontal finger pointing and never cease from pointing upward to the real cause of the Second Dementment mania, to wit, the whole Stench on the Bench of the Supreme Court and the forces that now prostitute it. Maybe that sounds futile to some folks in hurry to just do something, anything, but some times the best you can do is just keep pointing in the right direction till Whoreton the GOP-NRA Elephant stops crapping bullets on Whoville.
I have found all of the comments on this blog site to be highly informative.
As a Canadian, who is more than willing to live with gun laws, I find it difficult to understand with all of these comments why on earth everyone is not screaming for gun reform.
It is very sad to what extent mentally ill people will go to for no reason whatsoever, or because they were raised in a hostile environment and it is their only way to try to take back some kind of control.
We, like the USA, do not have sufficient services available for the mentally ill or the addicted persons. This too is very sad. It is something that is being pushed for and I know, in time, things will change here and those services will be available.