Shooter incident at elementary school in Uvalde, Texas - 19 children and 2 adults dead (7 Viewers)

[showtimesaints]

Not sure is this has been posted. I’m not familiar with schools in the US and didn’t even know this was happening in the schools.
Very emotional video.

 

[sfidc3]

Not sure is this has been posted. I’m not familiar with schools in the US and didn’t even know this was happening in the schools.
Very emotional video.

That scumbag Abbott and his cronies should be in a jail cell watching this on a constant loop IMO.....

 

[porculator]

Maybe I missed it in that article, but the Texas Legislature just passed a bill that will make it mandatory that every public school in Texas has an armed security office on campus. It's just waiting for the governor to sign it. I didn't read the entire bill, so I wonder if the armed security office mandate means someone meeting those qualifications must be on the same campus all day, or if they are allowed to make rounds between other schools? It's common for School Resource Officers to make the rounds to a few campuses during the day.

I'm at the point where we just need to let each state be as stupid as it wants and suffer the consequences. It's tough to say that since it means that Louisiana would cease to exist soon, but we spend too much energy worrying about what is happening in other parts of the country.

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

I'm at the point where we just need to let each state be as stupid as it wants and suffer the consequences. It's tough to say that since it means that Louisiana would cease to exist soon, but we spend too much energy worrying about what is happening in other parts of the country.

NNOOOOOO!!
But I would be down for turning urban areas into a networked collective and letting rural voters fend for themselves- not sure what to do with suburbs yet - maybe each can vote on which they want to attach to

 

[Sailorsaint]

NNOOOOOO!!
But I would be down for turning urban areas into a networked collective and letting rural voters fend for themselves- not sure what to do with suburbs yet - maybe each can vote on which they want to attach to

That's a whole new level of isolationism....

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

That's a whole new level of isolationism....

Cities Rights!!

Just trying to find a way to allow the heterogeneous to live safe from the harassment of the homogeneous

 

[Optimus Prime]

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — The Florida judge who oversaw the penalty trial of Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz should be publicly reprimanded for showing bias toward the prosecution, failing to curtail “vitriolic statements” directed at Cruz’s attorneys by the victims’families and sometimes allowing “her emotions to overcome her judgement,” a state commission concluded Monday.

The Judicial Qualifications Commission found that Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer violated several rules governing judicial conduct during last year’s trial in her actions toward Cruz’s public defenders. The six-month trial ended with Cruz receiving a receiving a life sentence for the 2018 murder of 14 students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after the jury could not unanimously agree that he deserved a death sentence.

The 15-member commission found that Scherer “unduly chastised” lead public defender Melisa McNeill and her team, wrongly accused one Cruz attorney of threatening her child, and improperly embraced members of the prosecution in the courtroom after the trial’s conclusion.
The commission, composed of judges, lawyers and citizens, acknowledged that “the worldwide publicity surrounding the case created stress and tension for all participants.“……..

Commission: Florida judge should be reprimanded for conduct during Parkland school shooting trial

A Florida commission says the judge who oversaw the penalty trial of Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz should be publicly reprimanded for showing bias toward the prosecution. The Judicial Qualifications Commission said Monday that Circuity Judge Elizabeth Scherer sometimes allowed her...

apnews.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

sad read
========

.............I know, of course, that her elementary school has done such drills. In 2023, all schools do them, as we did fire drills growing up at my suburban central-Jersey high school.

Those fire drills, though, were more often than not a cause for celebration and levity. Whatever we were doing in class we could stop doing, pour joyfully into the halls, out onto the vast expanse of lawns that served as athletic fields behind the gym, scanning for our friends, hands over our eyes to block the sun. Now and then, we sniffed the air for smoke, listened for the rustle of rumor: Could it be real this time? Our teachers might try to enforce solemnity, marching us out the door, but if we had even the faintest sense it was a drill, all bets were off.

What I didn’t know—and maybe what I didn’t want to know, what I never in my wildest dreams wanted to know—was what my children experienced during their drills.

Active shooter. When I grew up, this was the guard on the basketball team, cutting through the lane, sneaking baseline for a backdoor pass.

“The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes,” writes novelist Robert Olen Butler, a line I always quote to my own writing students. “And that’s the hardest thing, because we want to flinch …”

I close the hardcover book, holding my finger to mark the page.

“What happened?” I ask her.

“We locked the door and turned out the lights,” my daughter begins. “Since our class is big”—27 students, each of them filled with wonder and words, containing multitudes—“we had to make a snake against the wall and snake around the corner.”

I narrow my eyes. Around the corner … to a place where they might be visible from the other side of the door? “Does your classroom door have a window?” I ask.

She nods. “You can kind of see in, but the lights are out, and we are all squatting down, not standing up.”

In my mind’s eye, I placed my own daughter in the shadows, safely shy of the bend, out of eyeshot.

“But the lights are out, right?” I need to confirm.

She may have rolled her eyes. “If it was a real person coming into the school and the lights weren’t out, we would be making it clear that we were learning,” she says, matter-of-factly. “That would be so bad. We would be in serious danger.”

I shift my jaw. I ask her if the teachers put other things in front of the door. Tables. Chairs. Books. I wanted them to. I want them to push desks, slide cabinets, throw every single thing they have in their classroom in front of that two-inch-wide wooden door with the slim vertical window. The fish bowl. The pencil cases. My daughter’s pink zip-around lunch box with the sliced apples and peanut butter, and even the gi she will don for karate practice after school.

Throw it, I want to say. Throw it—now!

On the bed, I hold myself still. “The murderer wouldn’t be able to get in,” she reassures me, “because he doesn’t have a key.”

I nod. This word—murderer—dropping from her sweet lips in the middle of a bedtime story in spring … it ricocheted around my brain like something that could split atoms............

I Finally Asked My Second-Grader What Happens in Her Lockdown Drills. It Broke My Heart.

 

[Optimus Prime]

About a year ago, in November 2022, Patricia Oliver addressed a courtroom during the sentencing hearing for the mass shooter who killed her son, Joaquin. “It is not anger or revenge that put me in this position,” she told the court. “I want you to listen very well. I am far beyond those feelings. I have emptiness, I have sadness, and I have grief. I am broken. I am broken. I am broken. I am broken. I am broken, and I am broken.”

Joaquin Oliver was 17 years old when a mass shooter opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on 14 February 2018, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others. During the shooter’s trial, which ended with his conviction and sentencing to life in prison, Ms Oliver learned the details of her son’s death. “When I heard what happened to Joaquin in detail, my life changed forever,” she tells The Independent in a phone call at the end of May this year. “I can’t handle that Joaquin suffered that much. I suffered with him when I was listening to that.”

Ms Oliver has been an advocate for gun control. She co-founded the Change the Ref campaign, which has worked to end gun violence. And, as of late, Ms Oliver has been using an unusual tool in her efforts to urge lawmakers to act: a picture book titled Joaquin’s First School Shooting.

The book uses the kind of images and language usually seen in children’s books, but its contents are purposely harrowing. In eight pages of text — and eight pages of illustrations — the book follows a group of children who become the victims of a school shooting...............

Her son was killed in Parkland. She hopes a picture book will finally spark change

‘Joaquin’s First School Shooting’ borrows the aesthetics and language of children’s book, but its contents are purposely chilling. Patricia Oliver, whose son Joaquin was 17 when he died in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, tells Clémence Michallon how lawmakers are responding...

www.independent.co.uk

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

Has any reporter ever asked a pro open carry governor if the reporter is allowed to pull out a gun?

 

[DaveXA]

Has any reporter ever asked a pro open carry governor if the reporter is allowed to pull out a gun?

Ask? They should just go ahead and do it. Lol.

And yeah, I'm just kidding, but the look on their face is almost worth the risk, heh.

 

[gboudx]

Has any reporter ever asked a pro open carry governor if the reporter is allowed to pull out a gun?

Without knowing for certain, Im going to assume any place Gov Abbott may be available to the press will have firearm restrictions signage posted. You know, to keep him safe from his own policies. The signage answers the question that it is not allowed, so the question should be more, why is the reporter not allowed to pull out a gun? Why does the governor need protections from his own policies?

 

[DaveXA]

Without knowing for certain, Im going to assume any place Gov Abbott may be available to the press will have firearm restrictions signage posted. You know, to keep him safe from his own policies. The signage answers the question that it is not allowed, so the question should be more, why is the reporter not allowed to pull out a gun? Why does the governor need protections from his own policies?

They did that with DeSantis in Florida as well, lol.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Sad read
=======
It was just before 11am on a Friday and the hallways of Stege elementary school in Richmond, California, were quiet save for the muffled sound of children’s voices coming through the classroom doors.

Behind the heavy doors of Hannah Geitner’s fifth-grade classroom, 26 students were seated at small tables and on a cozy green rug. It was sunny and warm out, but inside, it was impossible to tell; the room’s windows had yellowed over the years.

I was there to talk to the 10- and 11-year-olds about gun violence, a topic I suspected many of them had been personally affected by.

“How many of you have heard a real gunshot by your house?” I asked. Twenty-four arms went up in the air.

“How many of you know someone – a family member or friend – who has been shot?” Eighteen students raised their hands.

For more than six months, I had been researching gun violence near elementary schools in my hometown of Richmond.

By analyzing police department data, I found that 41% of the 2,300 shots fired in the city over the past decade happened within a half-mile, or about a 10-minute walk, of one of the city’s 33 K-12 public schools.

More than 80% of the shootings that took place near schools occurred within a half-mile of an elementary school. Stege elementary has seen an average of six shootings nearby each year since the beginning of 2013.

Some of those shootings were homicides, some were armed robberies, some happened during the school day and some outside of it.

The campuses with the most incidents nearby were those in neighborhoods with lower median incomes than the rest of the city, census data showed.

This means that for the past decade, thousands of Richmond kids, many of whom are Black and Latino, were exposed to a violent incident before they turned 13.

Chronic exposure to gun violence like what some young kids in Richmond face can create a “war-zone” mentality among affected youth, James Garbarino, a psychology professor at Loyola University Chicago who specializes in child and adolescent development, argues in a 2022 New England journal of medicine article, resulting in a world view in which community violence is normal.

Yet few American school districts, including Richmond’s, have consistent programming for K-12 students to help them navigate the emotions, stress and anxiety that come with being exposed to day-to-day gun violence.

Most efforts in schools are centered on mass shootings, and the few initiatives focused on community gun violence that do exist are tailored towards high schoolers.

When I asked Geitner’s fifth graders how many had had someone at school – other than Geitner herself – talk to them about guns and violence, some of the kids raised their hands and began pointing to their peers.

But when I clarified that I meant teachers and school staff, all of the hands came down.….

‘Just putting a bandage on it’: one American classroom’s struggle with daily gun violence

Thousands of kids in my home town hear, see or witness shootings near their schools each year. Why aren’t we doing more to help them cope?

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Texas schoolchildren as young as four years old are being given Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon books, teaching them to “run, hide, fight” if a gunman enters their building.

Parents and teachers in the Dallas area have expressed alarm and concern that the Stay Safe book, produced by a law enforcement consulting firm in Houston, has been sent home in the backpacks of children in pre-kindergarten and elementary classes.

The book features the honey-loving bear created by AA Milne and illustrator EH Shepard instructing kids about how to react to a mass shooting. It is not an official production, Winnie-the-Pooh has been in the public domain in the US since 1 January 2022.

The subtitle to the Stay Safe book is: “If there is danger, let Winnie-the-Pooh and his Crew show you what to do: Run Hide Fight.”

Run, hide, fight are the tactics advised by the FBI “should the unthinkable occur”.

Inside pages of the book, featuring other characters from the Hundred Acre Wood, tell kids: “If it is safe to get away, we should RUN like Rabbit instead of stay … If danger is near, do not fear, HIDE like Pooh does until the police appear.”.

The “hide” page has a drawing of Pooh burying his head in a pot of honey.

On the following page, Kanga and baby Roo are shown wearing boxing gloves. The text says: “If danger finds us, don’t stay, run away. If we can’t get away, we have to FIGHT with all our might.”

The book was given to children in Dallas-area schools on Monday without discussion or comment either with teachers or the families who received it. The move came on the week of the first anniversary of Uvalde, the mass shooting in a Texas elementary school in which 19 children and two teachers were killed.

A teacher from a Dallas elementary school of about 500 students told the Guardian she found the book “terribly disturbing”. She had been given a stack of copies, she said, to give to each child in her class.

“I found it extremely disturbing, and was very uncomfortable with the whole contents of the book,” the teacher said, requesting anonymity.

The teacher added that she was troubled by the distribution of a Winnie-the-Pooh book at a time when Republican politicians in Texas were loosening gun laws.


“The fact that people think it’s a better idea to put out this book to a child rather than actually take any actions to stop shootings from happening in our schools, that really bothers me. It makes me feel so angry, so disappointed.

“It’s a year since Uvalde, and nothing has been done other than this book. That is putting it on the kids.”.............

Winnie-the-Pooh book teaches Texas kids to ‘run, hide, fight’ in a shooting

Stay Safe book, produced by a law enforcement consulting firm in Houston, was sent home in backpacks of children

www.theguardian.com