First, a teacher found Ethan Crumbley searching online for ammunition. The next day, there was an alarming note on his desk: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” School officials met with Mr. Crumbley, 15, and his parents, informing them that he needed to begin counseling within 48 hours. After his parents resisted bringing him home, administrators allowed him to stay in school....
The parents have been arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter. Isn't the school more responsible?
Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and expert on student rights, said she found the school’s reaction “truly astounding.”... If the parents refused to take Mr. Crumbley home, it was the legal and ethical responsibility of the school, Professor Ross said, to “remove the student from the classroom and put them in a safe place — safe for other people and safe for themselves.”
By "put them in a safe place," I think Ross means put Ethan Crumbley in custody. He apparently begged "help me." It sounds as though he struggled with an uncontrollable impulse. I understand the school wanting to defend itself after the fact, but what's more important is for schools to take action to protect the students who are trapped there and endangered by other students.
This is part of a larger issue of government declining to keep the peace and attempting to convince us that it cannot keep the peace, something I wrote about last month, after the Rittenhouse verdict and the Waukesha massacre, here:
None of the shootings by Kyle Rittenhouse would have occurred if Joseph Rosenbaum hadn't behaved in a deranged manner.... They released a mentally ill man into a chaotic city with a prescription for medication that he could not fill. A suicidal man proceeded to get himself killed at the hands of Rittenhouse and to unleash the ill-fated rush to stop Rittenhouse. There are immense and unknowable costs to letting a city decline into chaos....
More government responsibility for chaos in Wisconsin: "Milwaukee County DA admits it was a mistake to grant $1,000 bail to SUV-driving felon days before he smashed into Xmas parade: Darrell Brooks was freed after running over mother of his child and is now charged with homicide after killing five" (Daily Mail).
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138 comments:
Big Government wants to control us - but refuse to take responsibility when they fail.
#yep
The Virginia Tech shooter was another who should have been stopped by professionals, but the counselors wouldn't pass judgement on his psyche, and the professors wouldn't determine that his writing was out of bounds.
Interesting to see all the investigative journalism conducted upon the (apparently cis-het-married co-habiting) parents of this troubled young man.
Pity not one tenth of the effort has been invested in the (mmm, let's just say, residentially distributed) adults nominally responsible for raising Timothy George Simpkins.
We now pause to allow many here to say, "Who?"
"None of the shootings by Kyle Rittenhouse would have occurred if Joseph Rosenbaum hadn't behaved in a deranged manner.... They released a mentally ill man into a chaotic city with a prescription for medication that he could not fill. A suicidal man proceeded to get himself killed at the hands of Rittenhouse and to unleash the ill-fated rush to stop Rittenhouse. There are immense and unknowable costs to letting a city decline into chaos.... "
Be careful here.
You're describing a convicted child rapist (I know I know, that's considered a "plus" on Team Dem's/CIA's side), serial sexual assaulter, deranged lunatic requiring medication attacker, and that's going to run counter to Howard's and gadfly's and Left Banks claims that Rosenbaum was, in fact, a real American "hero"! Probably deserving of a statue and military retirement pay, which Howard once argued was due to all the antifa rioters in 2020 for their Normandy-like "courage".....right up until the moment Howard finally, FINALLY, got the message from Dem Central and proceeded to pretend his Normandy-like "heroes" never really existed at all.
Mrs. Stoughton Sconnie and I had a similar conversation on our morning walk. It feels a lot like the school is engaging in a little “we f***ed up, now someone has to pay the price and it sure ain’t us” here. I believe I heard the local sheriff was hacked off because the school did nothing to let them know about a potential threat.
There may also be a bit of a Hail Mary by the prosecutor here. They want something besides a lone nut to go after. Lone nuts are only allowed for one variant of violence. This is more like where I think the anti-2a people want to get to. “Sure it’s legal to have a gun, but it’s irresponsible. You don’t want to be an irresponsible person, right?”
Sure glad Althouse found a way to spin this tragedy as to not to offend her Trump deplorable snowflake customers.
In a just world, the Kid would be placed in a nuthouse for life and both parents drawn and quartered.
The school = Alec Baldwin
They were the last line of defense and should have searched the back pack or at very least suspend the boy and tell parents to take him home. Instead after the very predictable (in fact he explicitly said he would do this) outcome NOW the prosecutor is putting responsibility on the people who left campus after meeting with admin. But admin had a moral and legal responsibility to protect the other students and they completely failed to take prudent steps AFTER identifying an immediate threat. Why isn’t the DA putting the spineless lazy admin on trial too?
Following on to Rory's comment, you can add Major Nidal Hasan to the list. In his case, the response to his "red flags" was to promote him.
Society only functions because of suppression of the incompatible.
Society is the result of the pressures placed on individuals.
It is obvious what type of society Democrats and their Republican allies are trying to form.
"put them in a safe place,"
is This the new journalistic plan? replace ALL pronouns with "them"?
Timothy George Simpkins. We now pause to allow many here to say, "Who?"
WHO? was he some Texan minority, that the WHITES forced to react to their Oppression?
Wasn't there a Parade Protester a while back? In Waukesha or some place? i forget where
WHY do WHITES continue to force minorities to react to their Oppression?
"This is part of a larger issue of government declining to keep the peace and attempting to convince us that it cannot keep the peace."
You mean, Dem government. Dems want the disorder. They like looting. They think discipline is racist. They believe the "rights" of the insane prevail over the interests of the community.
As long as nice liberal women vote Dem, or abstain, the disorder will continue. Only by authorizing the GOP, consistently, to protect public order and safety can things change. But so far, most nice liberal women care more about not being associated with uncouth racist Republicans.
I actually have some sympathy for the school(s) and teacher(s)--if they do take action and come down hard on the crazies, they may be hounded by Dem lawyers, politicians, and media.
Also
School in MI = Parkland in FL
The only people who comported themselves impressively under pressure were the surviving students. You know we did “duck and cover” and earthquake drills in which we also ducked and covered. But we never had to actually use the anti-nuke drill or even the earthquake one for real. It’s strange to see kids practice lockdown “active shooter” drills but freaking awesome how well the Michigan high schoolers reacted and kept safe. Good for them. It saved their lives.
Look at that famous photograph of Adam Lanza. That boy was tortured by madness. He should have been confined and helped, not left to his own devices.
"After his parents resisted bringing him home, administrators allowed him to stay in school...."
This is the truly disturbing part of the story.
In another related story, the Milwaukee County courts released on $1000 bail a career criminal who had attempted to murder his child's mother by running her over. Maybe you heard about it.
Who is the child at your child's school who is a suffering time bomb?
It seems that you are leaving out the important fact that his parents had just bought him a handgun and did not share that information with the school staff.
oh Hey?
Since Ethan Crumbly is only 15....
No Death Penalty, right?
No Life Imprisonment, right?
In fact; won't be tried as an adult, right?
Will be scot free in about 2 years right?
what's more important is for schools to take action to protect the students who are trapped there and endangered by other students
The problem with that approach is that you end up with a lot of kids getting arrested who have no plans for committing violence, because who wants to take a chance? It’s easy, after the fact, to say “they should have known,” but there’s no bright line before the fact.
“Isn't the school more responsible?”
You had me at “isn’t” but lost me at “more.” The school didn’t give him access to a gun. But that’s a very troubling timeline for the school officials, especially if he already had the gun in his locker or backpack before the morning meeting with school officials where the parents wouldn’t take him home to get counseling.
“Howard's and gadfly's and Left Banks claims that Rosenbaum was, in fact, a real American "hero"!
I never claimed that. If he had not been shot and killed, he should have gone to jail for fighting with Rittenhouse.
Note that the The Party's narrative police, the FBI, declared one of these incidents an "act of terrorism," and not the one that closely echoed a terror attack that happened in Nice a couple of years back.
"Timothy George Simpkins." is a black kid who took a gun to school and shot some other students. I read yesterday that a Brooklyn school put a metal detector at a school entrance and found 21 guns being carried by students.
Your point ?
I am thinking this is a combination of things that ultimately led to the deaths of the students. When I was in a public high school in the 1970’s, the school administration and teachers were more proactive in school discipline. If a student was disruptive, they were pulled out of class and if necessary, sent home. I recall that they searched lockers for weapons and drugs when they were alerted to a potential issue (not many kids had backpacks back then as decent ones were only becoming available when I left school but that would have been searched as well). Local law enforcement was called in as necessary if the situation was deemed high risk. Today, as we have seen from news reports in some districts like Madison’s, schools are loathe to take action against students who are threats. As seen in Madison last couple of months, two teens walked into a classroom, beat the crap out of a student, and walked out with the teacher doing nothing (and the administration didn’t even call the victim’s parents to tell them their child was assaulted and injured!). Public schools are more concerned about not bothering students of concern than in maintaining a safe learning zone for our kids. Mrs. Scott and I sent our son to a private school K-12 because of these concerns in today’s world as we didn’t trust the local public school district to keep him safe. That cost us a lot of money but it was well worth it.
If the school had any kind of security they should have called them to come and sit with the kid. Meanwhile the parents, once they thought about the gun, should have mentioned it to the school AND checked to see if he had it with him!!!
Now one did any of that.. just let the kid sit there while the parents bugged out.
Here in Texas I can assure you the local high school here as ARMED guards... we once had this kid walk past the high school with a pump up air rifle on his back (he was wearing all black.)
I saw him and turned around and went to the front door of the high school. There were there armed guards with bullet proof vest and they had been apparently been warned about the kid walking there.
I told them I was pretty sure it was an air rifle so one of the guards went out there, as the boy walked by, and told him to hit the road.. as in leave the area... turns out the kid was going to shoot the air rifle at some critters way down the road were a creek went under a bridge.
BTW.. I was armed myself (CCW) but there were more cops armed, and better armed, than me!
At the press conference, the prosecutor had some potentially harsh things to say about the school's actions. Not check the backpack? Was that an oversight or was there some kind of privacy penumbra wafting around the room?
In the ed biz, one is exposed to various psychological concepts. This presumes everybody from part-time janitor on up is a stand-in shrink, capable of making massive changes in a kid's life path based on a say-so. Not many people are comfortable with taking proactive action in this field, nor should they be.
I was born in 1945, which meant among other things that pretty every schoolmate and neighbor within, maybe, ten years of my age had a WW II vet as a father. Our interest in WWW II--which we won every third recess, plus the implements thereof, would make today's stand-in shrinks jump behind a sofa. Anybody heard a bunch of kids today get together to "play war"? Not individually on the computer, but running around with, in some cases, uncomfortably realistic weapons. Which we got for Christmas and birthdays, accompanied by caps to make the bang and smoke. And our fathers talked about it a lot.
We turned out okay. Being taught to be polite and respectful, we agreed to do things the Army way, seeing as they set such store by it, and were paying us into the bargain.
Point is, one should be careful about making a judgment.
That said, young Crumbley's notes to self/anybody who finds them, should have been taken seriously.
Also, it's time for Tate Myer's name to join Kendrick Castillo and Riley Howell in the memory hole while more montages of George Floyd are installed.
Ann Althouse said...
Look at that famous photograph of Adam Lanza. That boy was tortured by madness. He should have been confined and helped, not left to his own devices.
Lanza had been pulled out of public school and was being home schooled. Different situation. Also, a great deal of Lanza's problems were due to his mother's attempts to keep him emotionally stable by shielding him from having to deal with difficult situations. This is bery common with Asperger's kids, I've watched my wife do this with her son, though not to the extent that Lanza's mother did.
Honestly, I can see why schools behave like this. The Loudoun County Bathroom Rapist's mother has publicly stated that her son's victim was asking for it because she agreed to have sex with him, just not the anal sex he forced her into. Who would want to deal with a person that would come in screaming threats every time somebody looked cross-eyed at their kid?
Schools have had their ability to deal with behavioral issues hampered by politics. Removing a child from the classroom and isolating him from the rest of the kids isn't done all that easily anymore. The school met with his parents and asked them to take him home. When they refused, the school couldn't open the door and put the child out on the sidewalk. To isolate the child from the rest of the kids, but keep him in school would be an in-house suspension if it lasted more than a class period or so. If the child has been designated a special education student, his IEP will have specific guidelines governing how and for how long a child might be "removed from his learning environment". The school is bound by it. The police will only interfere if the child is physically a danger right then. Not a potential harm in the future even if the future is only an hour or so away. A school has prescribed policies they need to follow to have a child removed from school. The meeting with his parents suggests to me the school had begun the process. His parents' refusal meant the process wasn't instantaneous.
The parents seem pretty clearly guilty of negligent homicide, involuntary manslaughter sounds right, for leaving the gun unlocked. It's one thing to give a boy a gun for Christmas, if it can only be used under adult supervision, though buying a boy a handgun seems outrageous to me, a .22 or a .410 shotgun, sure. The parents look to me as guilty as Alec Baldwin in this case. The boy was another Rosembaum.
This is a pretty rotten, tragic thing, but how it amounts to "terrorism" and the Waukesha mass murder doesn't can only be accounted for by understanding that the FBI is a political organization. When did the combination of a boy's mental problems and horrible parenting become 'terrorism'? When it became politically convenient.
It seems that you are leaving out the important fact that his parents had just bought him a handgun and did not share that information with the school staff.
Morpheus: You think this is about a gun?
Hmm.
Who is the child at your child's school who is a suffering time bomb?
The administration at every school knows.
And the administration doesn't want to be responsible for knowing.
"It seems that you are leaving out the important fact that his parents had just bought him a handgun and did not share that information with the school staff."
I'm not examining the entire incident but the school's responsibility. Since the school didn't know this fact, its responsibility should be judged without including it. The school certainly would have known that it is possible to acquire guns. It is also possible to kill a lot of people with a car or in some other way. The topic here is the school's responsibility. The parents, as I've noted, have been arrested and charged with a very serious crime.
The FBI was supposedly watching the Boulder super market killer.
Remember him? NO? oh that's because that killer doesn't fit the narrative(D)
[His facebook page revealed that he wanted a girlfriend and he hated Trump] ooops - no narrative mining to exploit there.
The Boulder super market killer - who killed ten people. 10 PEOPLE. His family immigrated here during the Obama years. The boy went to Arvada West High School and had a history of explosive anger and rage - Including cold-cocking another student in the parking lot of the school. why? He lost a wrestling match and had zero skills to deal with losing.
Now - he was no longer a High school student when he drove to Boulder to shoot and kill innocent people. But - the FBI certainly failed. right?
Right? fail. FBI. Fail.
"Who is the child at your child's school who is a suffering time bomb?"
My children are home-schooled. No one who cared about his children's welfare would send them to a modern American public school. Getting shot is the least of it.
Imagine your child at a school with this incipient problem. What do you want schools to do? Wait until parents volunteer information proactively. I say that's not good enough.
"The parents, as I've noted, have been arrested and charged with a very serious crime."
Yeah. Living while Republican. Has Darell Brooks' mother, who bailed him out and loaned him her car, been charged? Of course not. That prosecutor is a filthy, grandstanding whore.
"I say that's not good enough."
Well, we're on the same page there.
Why do they always publish the picture of the white juvenile kid, but never the black kid??
Notice how much more we're learning about the Crumbley timeline and family than we have about Darrell Brooks.
There must have been other indications.
I've been operating firearms since I was five. I've NEVER had an impulse to shoot-up the school.
Seems to me that this horrible event is another perfect illustration of our species' talent for blame-shifting.
School administration has probably huddled with its lawyers and insurance carriers and decided to put up a thick cloud of CYA that darkens everyone else: parents particularly but probably LEO and every caregiver back to this kid's first pediatrician. Causality will be smeared everywhere except on those who, in the moment, could have acted. When you see a lit match next to your living room drapes, do you shrug and turn away? Call the fire department? Or grab a bucket of water and deal with it?
Whether this tactic protects them from lawsuits by the victims and their families, is to me doubtful.
Let me guess that this will fuel strong demands for child social workers and mental screening programs K-12 and beyond, plus mandated family interrogations. Because the more widely we can attribute the potential danger, the less culpable we will individually seem.
Even at five, girls were much more interesting than guns.
Look at that famous photograph of Adam Lanza. That boy was tortured by madness. He should have been confined and helped, not left to his own devices.
Maybe it was a bad hair day......???
Why do I think you are grasping for all the solutions you abhor??
The 2nd amendment works. If you are concerned, then carry!!!
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of all discussions of violent crime is the lack of a transparent database of the history of such violence with all related variables for the American public to view and if so inclined to slice and dice. instead, we are not allowed to show the details of most violent perpetrators even after convicted. We are also not allowed to see just how many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders.
As a history buff, we cannot learn the lessons of the past without spending time to review the past from multiple perspectives. In America today, we only get biased summaries of violent crimes from the likes of the FBI (9/11 perps classified as white men) and other left-wing advocacy groups. And they blame inanimate objects (guns, systemic racism, etc.) as if they don't want to solve the problem.
I'm not advocating this, but I just learned of a historical example of a way to stop intransigent crime. In the 1600's in the border areas between Scotland and England, reivers were stealing (cattle and other goods), killing and kidnapping for ransom people from un-aligned families/clans. King James sent a man named Crawford to stop it. he tried various measures including beefing up the sheriffs, sending some offenders to Ireland, and enforcing laws without mercy. None worked. So, Crawford swept in on the reiver clans and summarily imprisoned some, killed some, and intimidated some to stand down. It only took about 2,000 people being imprisoned or killed, but the criminality stopped. We would not do this in America, but if we could, it would only take about the same number of people in the 10 cities with the worst violent crime to put a stop to it. King James explained it medically, as incising a small point of a cancer to end the threat of deadly cancer for all of society. The lesson is that fear is a great motivator to behave.
"This is part of a larger issue of government declining to keep the peace and attempting to convince us that it cannot keep the peace, something I wrote about last month . . ."
I think government is trying to convince us that we no longer deserve peace, because fill in the blank - racism, wealth inequality, imperialism, AGW, whatever.
"More government responsibility for chaos in Wisconsin: "Milwaukee County DA admits it was a mistake to grant $1,000 bail to SUV-driving felon days before he smashed into Xmas parade: Darrell Brooks was freed after running over mother of his child and is now charged with homicide after killing five" (Daily Mail)."
This same DA said earlier that his bail policies would result in released criminals killing people. Its the price we pay for his interpretation of social justice. Society has agreed to that bargain. Hopefully its not me or you who gets murdered.
Prof A: "Imagine your child at a school with this incipient problem. What do you want schools to do? Wait until parents volunteer information proactively. I say that's not good enough."
Maybe we could borrow from the English public school tradition, where the faculty selected students to manage their classmates. These prefects had a strong incentive to know their fellow students and learn who the troublemakers were, and who was starting to lose his or her s***. Pushing the task of unit cohesion down from officers to enlisted men may not be easy but it should provide a somewhat-less-crazy-because-atomized social process.
I have not made a study of the Brit system or other versions --that must be obvious-- but given our sorry state maybe it's worth a look.
In my time on earth, I have never known a school shooter or, for that matter, anyone who has even known a school shooter. This seems to be a recent phenomenon, and I don't think mass murder is one of the typical problems of adolescence. Perhaps the dynamics of how we handle school shooters is to some degree responsible for engendering school shootings.....Back in high school, I was afflicted with poverty and pimples and many dark, brooding thoughts. For all that, I never once contemplated mass murder. It just wasn't an available thought. Perhaps the practice lock downs and enormous publicity these shooters receive have created a dry river bed into which troubled adolescents now channel their flash floods....I understand that they suppress news of teen age suicides, because apparently suicidal thoughts are contagious....Maybe they should do the same with news of these high school shooters. I don't doubt that the school, the parents, maybe some of the classmates, and, of course, the shooter himself are to some extent responsible for this latest tragedy,but all this publicity and blame apportioning cast a dark glamour about the act. And this dark glamour will inspire the next shooter.
The parents are in lose lose situation with their children and their children are insane. The kid who shot Gabby Giffords should have been long committed to an institution, but was functional enough to be out and about. What do parents do?
They found some parents worse than the Laundries. Took a while.
A regime media is already skipping past the Christmas parade massacre. And Good God, read that quote from the Daily Mail about Darrell Brooks. "Blah, blah, blah, oh by the way, he ran over 6 people".
Darrell Brooks hated whites, he was a BLM extremist, and there's every reason to believe his murder of six was a hate crime. But lets not talk about that, says the NYT, lets skip over to a run-of-the-mill crazy kid shooting. And where was the NYT when some character was raping a girl in Loundon VA, and the school board, was like "How dare you bring this up?"
If the Regime media AND JOE BIDEN hadn't lied and made Rittenhouse into a "White Supremist" who "Killed BLM Supporters", then Darrell Brooks wouldn't have killed six white poeple in a Christmas Parade. Its not just that the Government isn't protecting people, its that the media is deliberately stoking hatred against those it dislikes, and turning a blind eye to crimes committed against those they dislike.
"But so far, most nice liberal women care more about not being associated with uncouth racist Republicans."
This is the most pernicious aspect of liberal media bias. I have little doubt they are well aware of it.
As for all these kids shootings, the question has to be why didn't all this occur in the 70s and 80s? Bullies have always been around, along with half-crazy edgy loners. Only now they shoot ups schools. Why?
And its not guns. I went to a school where every family had a gun. Kids got their own guns at 16, so they could hunt and target practice. And number of school shootings? Zero.
Stay Safe: "It seems that you are leaving out the important fact that his parents had just bought him a handgun and did not share that information with the school staff."
You are seeking to establish a requirement for all parents to report all guns in their home to schools?
The pathway to Erich Honecker-ville is made up of many incremental steps.
Who is the child at your child's school who is a suffering time bomb?
The child being bullied who feels and knows no one in authority is there to protect them. Instead of removing or remediating the bullies, the bullied child is removed then ignored. The result is a very angry, vengeful, emotionally empty child with adult weapons and plenty of targets. Students knew he was bullied. School staff knew he was bullied. His family knew he was bullied. Staff and family have denied knowing, but that's a lie. They all knew and did nothing but praise and reward the bullies. My bet, from experience as the bullied kid, is that the sports hero kids, the popular and beloved kids who were killed were among the primary bullies. This problem is not going away until serious action is taken to spot and stop the beautiful mean kids.
This failure of government to act is just an extension of the zero-tolerance policies. These zero-tolerance policies allow the school officials to fall back on "it's policy" excuse and not make any hard decisions about poor conduct of the students. Now, the schools are not acting at all, as it would be "discriminatory" against perp.
The schools and government in general refuses to hold people accountable for their actions. We have District and City Attorney, elected with the help of George Soros, who refuse to prosecute low level crimes. The result is flash-mob robberies and vagrants sleeping anywhere they want and committing crimes to feed their addictions. We can't forget the antifa riots, sorry, I mean mostly peaceful protests. The Multinomah n(Portland) DA says that he's an antifa support, so won't prosecute them, but will prosecute anyone who tries to resist antifa.
It's hard to square this story with those about 2nd graders who bite their pop tarts into the shape of a gun and are immediately removed from the classroom. Sometimes with the assistance of the police.
"This is part of a larger issue of government declining to keep the peace and attempting to convince us that it cannot keep the peace, something I wrote about last month, after the Rittenhouse verdict and the Waukesha massacre"
Yes, we live just outside Portland, OR, we know about government declining to keep the peace, very sobering for Normals, makes you alter so many habits. my politically-mixed group of girlfriends celebrated one's birthday last night, and the question came up "anyone getting back into downtown lately?" None of us. Not one. We all feel we'd have to fend for ourselves if we did, and it would be likely enough to find ourselves under threat.
is this how it ends then? our generation throwing everything away?
Ann Althouse said...
Who is the child at your child's school who is a suffering time bomb?
You will never be made aware of another child's problems unless your kid comes home and tells you.
Asking questions like “who is the child at your child’s school who is a suffering time bomb?” feeds the hysteria over school shootings.
With about 27,000 high schools in the US and about 220 school shootings, the chance that one’s child is in a school with a “time bomb” would be less than one in one hundred even if all shootings were by high school students.
Exaggerating the risks is no more responsible than pretending that police hunt black people, or thinking that 50% of people with COVID19 are hospitalized. (Per the WaPo data base about 4 unarmed black people (one in ten million, roughly) have been shot to death by US cops (though the races of some decedents are listed as “unknown”)).
By "put them in a safe place," I think Ross means put Ethan Crumbley in custody.
As it stands Ross's comment implies actions toward at least three parties -- Ethan Crumbley and at least two others, the ambiguous "them". You'd think a law professor would be smart enough and sane enough to use grammatically correct and logically precise language. Use him, or her, or him or her, or it if you're stupid enough to worry about "misgendering" a fucked up pervert who is already so fucked up that a "misgendered" pronoun sent his or her way is a feather of an afront compared to the self-inflicted avalanche of psychopathologies that person is already buried beneath.
In loco parentis, the authority of the school to act in this case is clear. If the Crimbleys refused to commit their son to a psychiatric hospital ("counseling" sounds far too weak to me) the Oxford High School administration had every legal tool required to act to protect Ethan Crumbley and everyone else present that day when Crumbley went berserk. Why did Principal Steven Wolf neglect his duty? Was he afraid of offending the parents? Or was he simply a brain-dead functionary obliviously shifting forms and documents from his IN tray to his OUT tray? A bit of both is likely. The criminal complaints against the Crumbleys are an obvious smokescreen intended to distract the parents of the slain Oxford students from contemplating filing civil complaints against everyone empowered to act in loco parentis to avert the brewing disaster.
The moral: Don't be afraid to offend people occasionally, sometimes a two-by-four briskly swung is the only way to get the attention of a jackass.
Ann Althouse said...
Imagine your child at a school with this incipient problem. What do you want schools to do? Wait until parents volunteer information proactively. I say that's not good enough.
They should have called the police to document the behavior, called in a counselor, social worker, child psychologist and the parents for a meeting and isolated the kid from the rest of the school.
There was just a brouhaha in VA over whether parents or educators know best. Now there is a brouhaha in MI over whether parents or educators know best.
So you're saying that schools are responsible for incarcerating people against their will if they exhibit sociopathic behavior?
Too bad we can't apply that principle to the deranged homeless ...
The mom was given the chance to abort her time bomb pregnancy and she failed. However the school did have a chance to deactivate the time bomb and they also failed. It was a cascade of failures all the way down.
The Google algorithms must be lit up like a Christmas tree with all the talk of time bonds.
I really want a few more facts here.
One problem is that, having watched the prosecuting attorney at the press conference, I was left with the distinct impression that she wants to springboard off this case into higher office by breaking new prosecutorial ground. She seemed to be making the prosecution of the parents into a personal crusade. Also, she was very reluctant to respond to questions about the school's potential responsibility. Was she steering clear of a fight with the Michigan teachers' union? She might need those votes.
Also, it appears that would be difficult to out-Karen Prosecuting Attorney Karen McDonald. Does she ask to speak to the manager often?
Or maybe the parents really are the irresponsible clods that she portrayed in her presser.
I want further development of the facts. I thought that her presser raised a lot of questions and that she was grandstanding. She certainly has taken the spotlight off little Ethan, the killer. She didn't appear to want any searchlights on the school, either.
Many communities now have mobile crisis teams -- with real psychiatric social workers ATTACHED TO real psychiatrists. Some police departments have something similar. Both types of teams are in and out of the emergency room constantly. So why do we continue to hear that the adolescent will be "referred for counseling"? Most of these school shooters appear to have serious -- not minor -- psychiatric illness.
Althouse writes, "Imagine your child at a school with this incipient problem. What do you want schools to do?"
The situation is probably no different than the hypothetical case of a school with rotten floorboards. The chief administrative officer of that school has a clear duty to act in the interest of the students -- they cannot be allowed to continue to walk on the rotten floor. Furthermore, every officer of that school, teachers and other staff members, have the same in loco parents responsibility. If the principal is a malicious idiot who refuses to act in the best interest of the students in his charge, the duty devolves upon his subordinates. The principal's negligence in no way absolves the faculty of responsibility in the case of a clear and present danger.
In the case of Oxford High School, there may be mitigating circumstances. Whereas a rotten floor is obvious to a reasonably intelligent person a rotten mind is not so obvious. According to news reports (and we all know how reliable and unbiased news reporters are) "school officials" met with Ethan Crumbley's parents and advised them to seek "counseling" for their son. If those unnamed officials had reasonable suspicions about Crumbley's capacity for violence, they had a clear duty to act in the interests of the other students regardless of the actions or inactions of Crumbley's parents.
Perhaps, the "officials" did not say or strongly imply that Crumbley was dangerous.. Though they could not make such a determination medically, there was probable cause to insist on an immediate psychiatric evaluation. However, those news reports are frustratingly vague on that point. It's likely that that crucial meeting was also frustratingly vague, perhaps the "school officials" were so equivocating that the parents misconstrued the whole thing as a tempest in a teapot, such miniature disturbances and microaggressions being the substance of about 90% of the conflict that hobbles and pollutes American public education. On the other hand, perhaps the "school officials" were positive and forthright regarding Crumbley's homicidal urges but the parents distrusted their advice -- god knows Governor Gretchen Whitmer has been beavering away at sowing distrust in Michigan's public institutions since her inauguration.
For justice to prevail we must hope that some sort of unambiguous record of that meeting was kept and preserved.
Howard writes, "In a just world, the Kid would be placed in a nuthouse for life and both parents drawn and quartered.
Says our resident nut between Thorazine doses.
Talked to a high school teacher--Michigan--earlier today. Checking a kid's backpack is not allowed without permission.
Now, either they asked and Crumbley refused, or they didn't take their professional careers in their hands and....search the backpack. Or it never occurred to ANY of them in that room.
Once in a while you have to say, screw the rules they can fire me if they want, but I'm going to do what seems like a good idea. If somebody had.
Asked the teacher mentioned above about danger signs. Turns out a half-hour presentation at Professional Development is supposed to turn them all into forensic psychologists. She thought the parents need to take respoinsibility. Agreed but didn't say--she knows some of the victims--that somebody else might have to if said parents don't.
It seems like the media and the prosecutor and the law enforcement were very quick to jump on the parents. I do not know how true the facts reported about them are, but they had them labeled as fugitives publicly the same day they charged them. The sheriff put out an award, right away. Yet the sheriff says he learned about the charges from the media. They were arrested the same day they were charged. Their lawyer says they were not hiding from the law but from the media. Their lawyers said that instead of contacting them to notify their clients and help bring them in, the prosecutor called a news conference. Is it customary to label someone a fugitive if you don’t find them in the first place you look? It looks to me as if the state (prosecutor, law enforcement, schools) are using everything within their power to make sure the blame lands anywhere but on them.
Maybe I'm alone in thinking the school did a good job, and that the parents are horrible people.
>>Big Government wants to control us - but refuse to take responsibility when they fail.
When government fails, the solution is always... more government.
>>In a just world, the Kid would be placed in a nuthouse for life and both parents drawn and quartered.
So far, so good (minus the torture, of course). But what about the school administrators? Do they get a free pass here? They had the authority to say "He has to go, right now. And can't come back until we are satisfied he's not a danger to others."
They failed.
Nothing will happen to the school administrators.
Wait, that's not fair. They will likely get merit raises and promotions, for dealing with the terrible suffering they have endured. Like Alec Baldwin, they will be the real victims soon.
>>Maybe I'm alone in thinking the school did a good job, and that the parents are horrible people.
A good job? They let a school shooter back on campus.
If that's a "good job", what would failure look like?
The parents *may* be horrible, but for certain they are stupid and irresponsible.
If he’d only chosen to rape a girl in the bathroom the school would have covered for him.
Sydney- When the police showed up where the parents were hiding, the parents ran. They were hiding from the police, not the media.
Drago is right. Second Amendment uber alles: "A completely unregulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free Trumpite, the right of the retarted and insane to keep and bare arms shall not be infringed"
After his parents resisted bringing him home, administrators allowed him to stay in school
The government allowing the student to remain, that is, the school allowing him to remain, signaled to the parents that the government did not consider him to be a grave danger. The government school's failure to take safety measures DESTROYED any alleged negligence, reckless or culpable intent on the part of the parents.
Let's say someone comes into your place of business and credibly threatens to kill someone there. What would you do, Howard? Would you call the person's parents or spouse to come take him home, or would you call the fucking police and have the person arrested?
The parents aren't blameless here, especially if it can be shown they purchased the gun for their son. I would have taken the boy home with me and gotten him help immediately, but should it be a manslaughter charge if I didn't? And let's say the parents did take him home, but he went back on his own and killed some students- are they still charged or not?
The question is what is the school allowed to do with a student it suspects has mental problems/violence tendencies?
Indigo Red- it is not the fault of the victims that they were killed. What a gross accusation,. We don't know if this kid was "bullied". That's a really broad category. But it's not ever an excuse to kill people. Perhaps he felt like an outcast....but yeah, he's the kind of person who will bring a gun to school and shoot teenagers in the face. Maybe being that kind of person made him a tad unlikeable.
Howard: "In a just world, the Kid would be placed in a nuthouse for life and both parents drawn and quartered."
Additional context: Howard strongly advocated for convicted child rapist and child sodomizer and assaulter of women and psychotic dementoid, Rosenbaum, to be treated as a national hero.
Literally.
Not figuratively.
Why stop with the school? This is the sort of thing that doesn’t happen very often so a particular school official may not have any prior experience. Does the State of Michigan have a resource that school officials can call for advice and help in these situations? Given its not-so-well-regulated militia, the Michigan legislature should get on that.
I'm pretty sure my school would have suspended the kid pending a psych evaluation, more as a suicide risk than a homicide. That would have been my first thought if I was the teacher.
Enough with the Public sharing of your favorite snuff porn, Drago.
If I’d seen a drawing that I took a picture of- it disturbed me so- I would have called the cops, job security be damned.
The parents were stupid to run- so stupid. It shouldn’t matter the denomination, the color, the political affiliation- they should have taken their kid home.
It’s all senseless- and a rage of the times, b/c:
those smash&$grab baddies reacting to the pandemic? All being released if arrested at all. No consequences for bad actions.
Until judgement day…
Every time a white kid shoots some people we are going to hear about it for weeks.
And it reflects on all people who do not support the Regime who should have their guns taken away.
Who is Timothy Simkins?
Howard isn't concerned about him for some reason or calling for his parents to be drawn and quartered. The media sure doesn't care about him.
The only thing Democrats care about is power. They are happy a white kid shot someone because they can flog this story.
They are just shitty people and they will never leave other people alone. They demand the right to tell everyone else how to live and turning everything they are in control of to shit.
I am certain that we are hearing about 20% of the story and most of what we are hearing is lies based on how accurate the media has been in the past.
The best we can do is to discourage the behavior, recognize the warning signs, and offer counseling to mitigate its progress; but, ultimately, it was his Choice. Demos-cracy is aborted in darkness.
J Melcher said...
Interesting to see all the investigative journalism conducted upon the (apparently cis-het-married co-habiting) parents of this troubled young man.
Please help us old folks (who haven't the slightest idea) with what "cis-het-married co-habiting" parents are and how the limited mentality that Jennifer and James Crumbley demonstrated was affected by this strange description.
"I really want a few more facts here."
That's where I am. I'd be willing to take everything said at face value if narrative warfare hadn't become the national pass time. The parents make too convenient bad guys for the usual suspects, and officialdom seems too eager to ignore what the school did or didn't do. My guess (which isn't any more likely than anyone else's) is that this was a case of collective stupidity. Both the school and the parents didn't have a clue as to how disturbed the young man was.
Gahrie- It does seem to me they saw him as more of a suicide risk. I'm surprised the parents didn't do more based on that alone. They knew something was wrong, they texted him as soon as they heard there'd been a shooting.
Do we know for sure that the parents bought the gun for their kid? I know the kid posted a picture of it but that's not conclusive to me.
Teachers should be able to check a student's backpack. I imagine that rule will change soon.
does the school have duty to protect?
earlier blog and comments indicate that explicitly does not apply to law enforcement personnel?!
The teacher (or teachers) did their job, seeing the threat either to other students or to this one through suicide.
The school administration did not back up the teachers' accurate assessment. Probably because they had some other rule or value besides protecting students from harm governing their choice.
Cash bail. That is all. Cash bail.
School - >>>> legally a fictive person coroporate.
so how come ConLawProfessoraEmerita ascribe all kinds of human/moral attributes to SCHOOL?
is that an educated elite thing?
When we consider the externalities, the extra costs these shooters impose on our society, from the active shooter drills to the injuries and deaths to the mental health counseling for the survivors, shouldn’t there be a tax on firearms and ammunition high enough to bring in the revenue to offset those costs? The tax could be progressive. The type of gun that Althouse owns could be taxed less than an AR-15, for example. For the ammunition tax, reloaders are an obvious loophole, so we could set the tax on reloaders based on how much ammunition could be reloaded over their expected lifetime. Likewise, large magazines could be taxed at a much higher rate than small magazines.
In the case of cars that can injure and kill people, as the not-so-well-regulated militia types often like to remind us, we internalize the costs through insurance, gasoline taxes, and tolls. Why not do the same for firearms?
Ann Althouse said...
Look at that famous photograph of Adam Lanza. That boy was tortured by madness. He should have been confined and helped, not left to his own devices.
Perhaps a review of history is in order. The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 deinstitutionalized mentally-impaired patients; outpatient care replaced asylums; incompetent familial care became the only day-to-day answer - until a major change occurred in psychiatric and psychological treatments (now psychotherapy) as Big Pharma entered the game with SSRI anti-depression drugs (like Prozac), which became the unquestioned treatments for any and all mental conditions. This "one-answer" chemical therapy is something like declaring that "fevers are caused by too little aspirin."
Sadly, drugs shortened episodic depression times among patients that resulted in chronic depression when events now happen far more often.
One proof that mental treatment must change is the increased occurrences of suicides and homicidal mass shooting events that no one will address except to say "take away the guns."
@ Critter said...
thanks for the history lesson about reivers.
there is no King James - USA Reivers HQ is various Agencies in WashingtonDC.
you have only noted branches in various cities.
I remain mystified as to why the public schools don’t adopt the Jesuit high school discipline system. What the public schools are doing sure hasn’t worked.
MayBee writes, "We don't know if this kid was "bullied". That's a really broad category."
What American between the ages 10 and __ (I was about to write 21, but it's more like 46 today.) hasn't fancied himself a bullied outcast? Such feelings and nebulous perceptions have been characteristic of Homo sapiens teenagerius since the species was invented by Nicholas Ray in 1955.
MayBee said...
Indigo Red- it is not the fault of the victims that they were killed. What a gross accusation,. We don't know if this kid was "bullied".
Seriously, have you forgotten what it's like in school, in high school? Were you one of the beautiful, popular, mean kids? Or, just too oblivious to see and hear the bullying? Maybe you believe bullying is being physically pushed around and assaulted. The emotional and psychological games are far crueler than getting beat up.
Let's go back to 1965 through 1970 when I was in school being abused by bullies. I was pushed around, knocked down, and tripped; I was used as the butt of jokes, insults, and putdowns; emotional and psychological slins and arrows were slung my way. A look at my school records would show no problems, no bullying, no damage of any kind. The times I did report bad actors, I was separated while the miscreants went on their merry way. My parents knew of the torment and told me to stay away from those people. My older and younger brothers would say with straight faces that nobody was bbotheringg me. Of course, they wouldn't -- they were among the tormenters. Why because I was different, small, crippled, and smarter than average. I was an easy target with no protection.
Had I taken my father's Winchester 30-30 to school and shot my bullies, people would have said the same things about the victims - they were such good kids that attended church, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, sports stars, cheerleaders, the beautiful and popuular mean kids. And, my motive wouuld have been just as inscrutible even though all the kids on the playground knew exactly what was happening and the school administators ignored it all because such stories are bad for careers. Yeah, it's always the mean kids who say "it is not the fault of the victims that they were killed." Evil doesn't happen in vacuum, especially with kids. There is always a cause and others are involved who should be held accountable, too.
When I attended my 35th high school reunion in 2015 for my Minneapolis public high school, one of the "extras" was that anyone who wished could have a guided tour of the old building, which had undergone a multi-million dollar renovation. We could see what was saved, and what had fallen to remodeling. Very interesting.
But before the tour began, we assembled in a classroom for an intro and a Q&A with, I think, one of the current guidance counselors. Somehow, it emerged that our high school now had a police officer stationed in the school! We alumni were shocked. "Is that really necessary?" we asked. "Seems like overkill."
A crime is committed in this building every day school is in session, was the answer. From thefts of cell phones to minor assaults to more serious things, we were told that the police officer is kept very, very busy.
BTW, this was considered the best public high school in Minneapolis, the equal of the nearby suburban schools. (Intense rivalry.). It still is, but Minneapolis is in steep decline for other reasons.
Of course, after we do the actuarial and regression analysis, we may find that Althouse’s gun should be taxed more than an AR-15.
"anyone getting back into downtown lately?" None of us.
No one has occupied that class-A business space in downtown Portland in over a year. The same is true in Seattle. Everyone is buying more bandwidth for the home. There's a huge sea change coming, and I don't know where it stops.
This is why you can do a flash-mob robbery at Nordstrom's. Nobody is shopping at Nordstrom's. Everything is being delivered to the door after a few clicks on Amazon.
If I were a downtown office space developer, then I would not donate to democrats.
Ammo is tough to find as well.
Should the teachers be blamed? What they did was right in terms of the rules so it seems as if the schools have painted themselves into a corner with rules and policies which prevent sensible action. The teachers drew attention to the problem and then administrators and guidance counsellors and violence prevention people took over. They couldn't search this boy's backpack, they couldn't make him leave till he got counseling, they didn't seem to know if he was being bullied which would make him more dangerous, they didn't ask if he had a gun, they couldn't do this, they couldn't ask that. It's systemic brokenness. The state legislature needs to start issuing vouchers for schooling so parents can leave a system that cannot protect their children and will not change. When the public school system shrinks and teachers lose jobs, then there might be change in the public schools.
Left Bank of the Charles said...
When we consider the externalities, the extra costs these shooters impose on our society, from the active shooter drills to the injuries and deaths to the mental health counseling for the survivors, shouldn’t there be a tax on firearms and ammunition high enough to bring in the revenue to offset those costs? The tax could be progressive. The type of gun that Althouse owns could be taxed less than an AR-15, for example. For the ammunition tax, reloaders are an obvious loophole, so we could set the tax on reloaders based on how much ammunition could be reloaded over their expected lifetime. Likewise, large magazines could be taxed at a much higher rate than small magazines.
This is an excellent idea. Left Bank is too stupid to carry this out to a logical conclusion though. Let us begin.
Since there are millions of high cap rifle magazines out there and less than a thousand are used in crimes every year the tax would come out to <.0001 cents per mag and rifle.
Now the fact that 99% of these gun crimes are carried out by democrat voters needs to be taken into account.
We should just tax the crap out of every democrat that owns a gun and throw the democrats that own guns illegally in jail.
The perjurer Grosskreutz who was caught lying in the Rittenhouse trial about his illegally owned gun is still a hero of Left Bank's.
Armed robbery in California is rampant. The costs of that activity are staggering. This is being deliberately supported by democrats in office.
And then we need to talk about Darrel Walker. Clearly a Democrat. Clearly a BLM racist. His little act of terrorism has cost our society in ways that cannot be counted in dollars that go beyond the innocent children and women and men he ran over.
The cost of democrat voters to society needs to be tallied up too.
Give it some time. The dumocrat press has an agenda here, as was mentioned upthread. Accuracy is fragile. Why the police were uninformed is a tell.
Somehow, it emerged that our high school now had a police officer stationed in the school! We alumni were shocked. "Is that really necessary?" we asked. "Seems like overkill."
Now? Just now? We had a school cop in high school and in junior high in Ann Arbor in the 1980s.
We also were all told the story of the kid who got knifed some years before us.
I went to a Catholic school- nuns in habits, Mass on every 1st Friday of the month. And then some.
Morality is no longer modeled or taught- I believe. The absence of any(thing or one) or hierarchy of authority seems like the elephant in the room. The naughty kids are catered to these days- even when the school budget includes hefty salaries for psych counselors. They reward bad behavior- I’ve seen it. The teachers have no leverage &kids (a lot of them)could care less about achieving an education.
If life is defined by repeating lessons we fail to learn- we are caught in a viscous cycle here. How many times does this have to happen?
And don’t blame the guns.
We had a former LAPD security guard at our high school named Buck Savage. He loved showing off his 38 special. Nobody fucked around Buck. He was best friends with all the bad kids, hard guys and sluts. Crater face, greasy stringy hair, obese, chain smoker, wore the same shiny brown polyester suit every day.
JMelcher said:
...adults nominally responsible for raising Timothy George Simpkins.
Damn, had not heard of him. That's a disturbing story.
Boy a lot of people here really don’t appreciate schools’ duty to protect the pupils, given their legal responsibility as en loco parentis.
Drago, do you know what Howard's snuff porn is? He reads the Democide statistics with a bottle of lube in one hand.
'Imagine your child at a school with this incipient problem. What do you want schools to do? Wait until parents volunteer information proactively. I say that's not good enough.'
But schools don't have to reveal if your son wants to cut his dick off, because ???
Maybe the parents wanted the kid to kill (just) himself?
Michael K said...
"Timothy George Simpkins." is a black kid who took a gun to school and shot some other students. I read yesterday that a Brooklyn school put a metal detector at a school entrance and found 21 guns being carried by students.
Wrong! They found 21 "weapons"-9 of which were knives. They did not find any guns. I don't think this is an intentional mis-statement by Michael K-I think he's just a moron.
"I am certain that we are hearing about 20% of the story and most of what we are hearing is lies"
Hopefully when Achiles discovers the truth from reading Breitbart or listening to Alex Jones, he'll let the rest of us know.
Pretty much what we see in Seattle every day. The public good, the peace, and citizens’ duties are scrapped by the anti-authority authorities’ abdication of reality.
If you’re responsible and point out the problems, you’re part of the problem. If you think about restoring any order on your own, they’ll likely use the laws against you.
I figure what can’t last, won’t.
I do worry about what kind of authority comes next. The situation doesn’t reward my most noble impulses without a lot of ignoble impulses arising as well.
No one has occupied that class-A business space in downtown Portland in over a year. The same is true in Seattle. Everyone is buying more bandwidth for the home. There's a huge sea change coming, and I don't know where it stops.
Sounds like Antifa and BLM need to pay some tax to cover the externalities of their frequent 'sporting events.' Even Left Bank will be on board with this one!
""In a just world, the Kid would be placed in a nuthouse for life and both parents drawn and quartered."
Allowing for some rhetorical hyperbole, I actually agree with Howard.
One thing the liberals have learned is that if you call something a tax, the constitution is just so much paper of interest only to antiquities collectors and oddball historians. Why not just tax speech? Here's a good one, let's tax voting, where could that go wrong?
How about this, make the effort to repeal the 2nd amendment. If the people are on your side, it won't be hard.
Howard sneers, "Crater face, greasy stringy hair, obese, chain smoker, wore the same shiny brown polyester suit every day."
How did such a tony upper-class snob find himself attending such a down-market high school? Didn't measure up academically at local country day, did we?
Democrats should hike taxes, then do nothing.
When the media produce a pez pellet for the left's consumption - the left eat it up.
Intellectual curiosity takes a back seat to whatever the lying hack narrative press are administering.
Maybe we could borrow from the English public school tradition, where the faculty selected students to manage their classmates. These prefects had a strong incentive to know their fellow students and learn who the troublemakers were, and who was starting to lose his or her s***. Pushing the task of unit cohesion down from officers to enlisted men may not be easy but it should provide a somewhat-less-crazy-because-atomized social process
My old man was the product of an English boarding school, back in the days when the cane was freely applied to the backside of any troublemakers. At that time it was not just the headmaster and teachers who were granted the privilege of wielding the cane, but also the Head Boy and his prefects. It helped maintain very orderly discipline, and he got a very good education, but he did suffer several unearned canings at the hands of a prefect who turned out to be a sociopathic homosexual sadist. Not long after he left the school, the cane was reserved for the Headmaster’s use only. Probably the best compromise, although I suspect the number of sadistic homosexuals who end up as headmasters at fancy public schools in Britain is not trivial.
See also Clarice Feldman today. Is not all proceeding according to plan?
The school does have the authority to send the kid out of the school no matter how resistant the parents are. No need to search the backpack, just tell the parents their kid is leaving school, either with them or in the back of a squad car after the trespassing arrest.
"Somehow, it emerged that our high school now had a police officer stationed in the school! We alumni were shocked. "Is that really necessary?" we asked. "Seems like overkill."
How old are you? I graduated high school in 1975. We had a school cop. My high school was in Arlington Heights, IL. Upper middle class, low crime, almost all white.
Starting with early 80s and No Child Left Untested, mandatory school attendance has changed. Before students could easily drop out at age 16. Now 18 is the required end. We are forcing unhealthy and unhappy students to stay together longer.
As for that parentis loci crap, it is more like jailers than parents. Schools have a great responsibility for everyone. Why haven't they moved to see through backpacks? The school administration fumbled here. Was anyone in Parkland FL punished for school administration failure, besides the victims?
1. Decriminalize school truancy.
2. Make GED available to students of any age. Pass it or the equivalent and be done.
3. Do as much as possible to shake power from public sector unions.
4. Move school board elections to the fall to get greater voter turnout.
Mutaman: "Hopefully when Achiles discovers the truth from reading Breitbart or listening to Alex Jones, he'll let the rest of us know."
Yes.
Mutaman wrote that. Just now. Unironically.
As if it isnt almost 2022 and the list of previous recent lefty media lies isnt endless.
Bilwick: "Drago, do you know what Howard's snuff porn is? He reads the Democide statistics with a bottle of lube in one hand."
And true to form, while publicly proclaiming those very statistics dont even exist.
News reports paint the parents as irresponsible, but after the Rittenhouse example, we have to wonder how accurate the reports are. The Rittenhouse case also shows how stupid it is for a prosecutor to bring a case forward based on politics and the mood of the public, rather than any laws the parents might have broken. The Post has written a piece about how unusual it is for parents to be charged in these cases (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/12/04/oxford-shooting-crumbley-parents-charges-explainer/).
I graduated HS in 71. Unless I'm more unique than I believe I am, nearly anyone can tell you that schools have always been passive about suppressing violence. In my school, using the bathroom came with a large risk of being in a fist fight. The boys' bathroom was controlled turf. If you hadn't fought your way in you were punched out. Every single boy in the school knew this and assumed it. There's no way every adult didn't know it as well. During my HS years it was, for me, just as if bathrooms didn't exist. I never went in. Ever. There was risk in other unsupervised places as well but it was easier to avoid. I was still forced to fight enough to establish a reputation as someone who would, if forced, fight. It was the reputation that was important, of course, and not anything to do with being likely to inflict damage in a fight.
It need not have been like that. I resented, and still do, the adults who ignored it. There were fewer truly crazy people among the students then and intact families were typical. Lethal craziness was rare. Hatred was still hatred then and not taught as righteous rage. The most dangerous boys in school usually had alcohol soaked parents. Those are the differences between then and now. The number of violent boys has always been small and they're always well known to everyone. The abuse they inflict on other students is different now mostly in that, in the headline making cases, it is totally unrestrained. It's the adults on the ground in these schools who often can, but choose not to, restrain the boys who are out of control who I blame most.
Since a few commenters seem to be missing my point:
I find it odd that many news outlets are intensely scrutinizing the family and school of Ethan Crumbley, while we are not seeing that intensity for the family of, or school attended, by Mr Simpkins. Or, for that matter, Chad Padilla. The available journalism would leave the casual reader open to the impression that Crumbley is the only young man who lived with his own parents; while other similarly troubled students were somehow feral.
tim in vermont said...
"The parents seem pretty clearly guilty of negligent homicide, involuntary manslaughter sounds right, for leaving the gun unlocked."
Right, Tim. But then, don't you also think that anyone who doesn't wear a mask is guilty of reckless endangerment? And anyone who hasn't had three vaccinations for COVID is a mass murderer? You have a pretty firm grasp on the precautionary principle. Not so much on reality.
“The Boulder super market killer - who killed ten people. 10 PEOPLE. His family immigrated here during the Obama years. The boy went to Arvada West High School and had a history of explosive anger and rage - Including cold-cocking another student in the parking lot of the school. why?”
Brings it home to me. My kid and their spouse live in that school district (no kids yet). I can remember when that school was brand new (we all went to the HS just south of there). My kid probably drives much of the route to Boulder this kid did that day to/from work every day. The other claim to fame for the JCPS (Jefferson County Public Schools) system was Columbine. Two bullied kids in an upper middle class high school struck back at their bullies. My kid was slated to go to the HS west of there, but likely would have ended up at Columbine for their IB program. Went to a private prep school instead, which worked out great, but her next door neighborhood was in the Columbine IB program, and got a scholarship to Princeton. Still, the Columbine shooting did factor into our decision. We (5 boys) had all done our K-12 in the JCPS school system, at similar schools, and it was different back then (I started over 65 years ago there). Oh, and apparently the JCPS school board was recaptured by the teachers’ unions last month, when so many swung the other way.
There is so much wrong with the public school system these days, but one of them is that they tend to run huge high schools. That prep school that my kid graduated from had 100 kids in their class. 400 in the HS. Faculty knew everyone, and bullying was aggressively suppressed. Columbine HS, several miles due south of there, at the time of the shootings, had maybe 3,000 kids, twice the size of my HS when I went there. Part of the reason for such massive high schools is that they need the size to compete in sports, and esp in football. Huh? It was the football players at Columbine who were bullying the guys, who ended up as the shooters, by bouncing them against the lockers every day. The bigger the school, the more power the bullies tend to have, the less the bullied do, and the less the faculty can do anything about it.
I find myself wondering not why this happens, but why it doesn’t happen more often. In Science classes the students are told that we are on a one-way collision course with environmental disaster. In English, they are fed a steady diet of hopeless dystopian “literature.” In History, they are told we are living in an irredeemably racist hellscape of a country. Everywhere, there is a lack of respect for others’ humanity as we are treated not as individuals, but as two-dimensional cutouts: background characters in the video game of life. Add to that in many cases a broken unhappy home, and I suspect there’s more than one ticking time bomb at any given school. Then, consider the “broken windows” theory of school administration: where disrespect toward teachers, petty theft (student cash and personal property), and harassment of classmates are tolerated, it’s a vile mix. Yes, schools are at fault. But as a society, we are making some very dangerous mistakes with our young people.
By "put them in a safe place," I think Ross means put Ethan Crumbley in custody
Maybe 'them' was Ethan Crumbley's preferred pronoun?
Who is the child at your child's school who is a suffering time bomb?
The administration at every school knows.
And the administration doesn't want to be responsible for knowing.
In Parkland, the administration, teachers, AND students all knew who the 'time bomb' was. So did the Sherriff. Unfortunately the administration and the Sherriff were focused on not reporting or prosecuting antisocial behavior so they could win more awards from the DOJ and DOE for "reducing the school to prison pipeline."
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