A father living in Ventura, California, posted a video of a heated confrontation he had with the principal of his son’s school.
The video comes after students nationwide walked out of their schools last Wednesday to advocate for gun control in the wake of the Parkland school shooting that left 17 people dead.
John Gunn confronted principal Barbara Boggio of the Ventura Unified School District and questioned her about allowing 12-year-old students to hold the protest.
This ‘school walkout’ thing is giving me serious ‘1984’ vibes.
Schools are sanctioning it, so it isn’t actually a walkout. It’s actually students conforming to the government authority by speaking a government-approved opinion in a government-approved venue. And that opinion is that they should have their own rights taken away by the government whose opinion they are expressing.
You have students marching with the sanction of the state to demand less freedom from the state… and everyone is pretending that their doing so is somehow brave and rebellious.
David Brooks notes the paradox in which conservative Republican America is able to win at the ballot box, but commonly loses anyway because the Left controls the culture.
Republicans control most legislatures. To get anything passed, I thought, it would be necessary to separate some Republicans from the absolutist N.R.A. position. To do that you have to depolarize the issue: show gun owners some respect, put red state figures at the head and make the gun discussion look more like the opioid discussion. The tribalists in this country have little interest in the opioid issue. As a result, a lot of pragmatic things are being done across partisan lines.
The people pushing for gun restrictions have basically done the exact opposite of what I thought was wise. Instead of depolarizing the issue they have massively polarized it. The students from Parkland are being assisted by all the usual hyper-polarizing left-wing groups: Planned Parenthood, Move On and the Women’s March. The rhetoric has been extreme. Marco Rubio has been likened to a mass murderer while the N.R.A. has been called a terrorist organization.
The early results would seem to completely vindicate my position. The Florida Legislature turned aside gun restrictions. New gun measures in Congress have been quickly shelved. Democrats are more likely to lose House and Senate seats in the key 2018 pro-gun states. The losing streak continues.
Yet I have to admit that something bigger is going on. It could be that progressives understood something I didn’t. It could be that you can win more important victories through an aggressive cultural crusade than you can through legislation. Progressives could be on the verge of delegitimizing their foes, on guns but also much else, rendering them untouchable for anybody who wants to stay in polite society. That would produce social changes far vaster than limiting assault rifles. …
[P]rogressives are getting better and more aggressive at silencing dissenting behavior. All sorts of formerly legitimate opinions have now been deemed beyond the pale on elite campuses. Speakers have been disinvited and careers destroyed. The boundaries are being redrawn across society.
As Andrew Sullivan noted recently, “workplace codes today read like campus speech codes of a few years ago.†There are a number of formerly popular ideas that can now end your career: the belief that men and women have inherent psychological differences, the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman, opposition to affirmative action.
What’s happening today is that certain ideas about gun rights, and maybe gun ownership itself, are being cast in the realm of the morally illegitimate and socially unacceptable.
That’s the importance of the corporate efforts to end N.R.A. affiliations. It’s not about N.R.A. members saving some money when they fly. It’s that they are not morally worthy of being among the affiliated groups. The idea is to stigmatize.
If progressives can cut what’s left of the conservative movement off from mainstream society, they will fundamentally alter the culture war. We think of the culture war as this stagnant thing in which both sides scream at each other. But eventually there could be a winner. Progressives have won on most social issues. They could win on nearly everything else.
There are obviously plenty of conservative intellectuals. Conservatives at universities are, frankly, smarter than liberals. Conservative ideas, conservative critiques of Progressivism are more substantive, more rigorous, and more serious.
The Left always wins, it seems, by a combination of appeals to sentimentality and emotionalism communicated by simplistic, manipulative slogans which obfuscate and commonly totally misrepresent the issue and the facts. Their final victory comes by making their preferred position a class identifier and a fashion statement. Once that happens, the entire elite establishment is committed and on board.
Standing in opposition to the edicts of the God of Fashionable Opinion is undignified, uncomfortable, and has recently become a very possibly career-limiting decision.
Conservatives are perfectly able to win the debate. We can even win elections. But we seem, as David Brooks recognizes, totally impotent at affecting the Culture or having the slightest influence on Fashion.
Why is this the case? How can it be possible that the better ideas consistently lose in the marketplaces of ideas that matter the most? Any thoughts?
My 16-year-old told me some of the kids at school are organizing a ‘protest’ against the shootings, to advocate for the removal of all firearms from this country because ‘who needs guns to kill.’
So first I informed her that there are over 400,000,000 guns in this country, not all owned by nice people who will give their guns up if asked, and that the law already prohibits murder or guns on school property, and that automatic weapons are already illegal, and that the average mass-shooting lasts 3.5 minutes, and then I led her through the FACTS of this case the way I would a witness if I was cross-examining them on the witness stand:
1. The school expelled this kid because he was violent. They did not refer him for mental health counseling or a mandatory 90-day psych evaluation. They continued not to do that when the kid kept showing up at the school 30+ times to cause trouble, but called the police.
…..School = FAIL
2. The police responded to the school the aforementioned 30+ times, plus an ADDITIONAL bunch of times, bringing the total number of calls the local police had to deal with this kid to be 39 times. During at least two of these calls, people reported he’d allegedly ‘waved a gun around’ and ‘threatened to shoot people.’ The kid was not arrested. The kid was not referred for a mandatory 90-day psych evaluation as was within the police’s right.
….. Local police = FAIL
3. Three weeks before the shooting, somebody close to the kid calls the FBI and warns them the kid is nuts, has been amassing ammunition, and threatening to shoot people. The FBI do nothing.
…..Federal police = FAIL
4. Even though this kid was ‘known’ to the school to be mentally unsable, no longer a student, and violent, the kid somehow gained access to the building through their lax security, which in most schools comprises of one of those little grey ‘buzz in’ boxes and then you walk right in to sign in.
….. School building entrance security = FAIL
5. The kid started shooting people. There was a $75,000 per year ARMED security guard who was on-site at that building, but he hunkered down even though he could hear gunshots and kids screaming and did not go in.
…..On-site security guard = FAIL
6. Somebody calls 9-1-1. The police are 8 minutes away.
…..Police response = FACT OF LIFE
7. Three more Broward County deputy sherriff’s arrive. The kid is shooting, other kids are screaming and dying. Rather than storm the building, they hunker down with the first cowardly security guard and wait the full 8 minutes until the local police arrive and storm the building.
….. Police = FAIL
So, I lead my kid through those facts, and then I ask her if she trusts the government to protect her?
She says, ‘Mom? Could you teach me how to use a gun?’ “
Larry Correia differs from most people talking about the Parkland High School shootings in that he actually knows something about guns.
Hear me out. The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened over and over again.
Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. After Colombine law enforcement changed their methods in dealing with active shooters. It used to be that you took up a perimeter and waited for overwhelming force before going in. Now usually as soon as you have two officers on scene you go in to confront the shooter (often one in rural areas or if help is going to take another minute, because there are a lot of very sound tactical reasons for using two, mostly because your success/survival rates jump dramatically when you put two guys through a door at once. The shooter’s brain takes a moment to decide between targets). The reason they go fast is because they know that every second counts. The longer the shooter has to operate, the more innocents die.
However, cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. They simply can’t teleport. So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back.
So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do?
The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.
The teachers are there already. The school staff is there already. Their reaction time is measured in seconds, not minutes. They can serve as your immediate violent response.
The investigation of the New York terrorist attack will find that the Home Depot rental truck used to conduct the mass killing was equipped with an automatic transmission of the same type found upon military assault vehicles. When will we adopt common sense truck control laws with at least a waiting period and background check for truck rentals?
More:
The truck used in NYC to kill eight people was muffled. This is a technology whose only purpose is to prevent people from hearing it coming. Automakers, already with blood on their hands, are now starting to produce almost completely silent electric cars which, at the price of fuel today, serve only the purpose of killing pedestrians silently. How many people will die before we adopt common sense muffler reform?
There is a different kind of 1 percent, and it isn’t people who can afford to buy organic food. It’s Americans who carry a handgun on a daily basis.
It’s not a surprise, given American history and horrific events like a psychopath in Las Vegas wounding or killing 500 people while police waited 70 minutes to attack him. A nearby hotel guest with a gun could have ended that more quickly.
Up to 7 million have concealed carry permits while up to 9 million might carry a handgun on a monthly basis (not all states require a license for a concealed weapon). That is alarming to Northeastern epidemiologist Professor Matthew Miller and colleagues, who published their survey results, funded by two anti-gun groups, and extrapolated figures for the country, in American Journal of Public Health. “We’re talking about several million adult handgun owners carrying a loaded firearm on their person every day,” Miller said. “That’s a sizable number of Americans.”
