Why would telling your children not to be aggressive towards their teacher be a problem?
I mean, sure, he's implying that an armed teacher might be tempted to shoot his kids in self defense because they are being aggressive. But if that happened -- and has it ever actually happened? Of course not, it's a hypothetical just like blood running in the streets from concealed carry not too long ago -- and the teachers were not armed, but would have shot his kids if they had been armed, then haven't his kids just committed assault and battery with deadly force? Is the answer to that really to just let the kids assault teachers with impunity?
Yes, tell your children not to be aggressive towards their teacher. Whether or not your teacher is armed to defend himself and his students from mass murder should have no bearing on that. You should tell your children not to be aggressive towards their teachers because their teachers are human beings due reasonable respect rather than aggression, in positions of authority as staff of the educational institution, and acting in loco parentis to the students. So the students should be treating their teachers with roughly the same amount of respect they treat their own parents, whether or not those teachers are armed.
Ideally, the students would never know if their teacher was armed or not, and wouldn't care one way or the other -- until their lives were saved by a gun they never realized was present.
I'd guess we'll have a Supreme Court case about whether 18 year olds can have their fundamental rights limited until they are 21. (Alcohol is a trickier case because the amendment that repealed prohibition also allowed for regulation; and state law is different from federal law, though the 2nd Amendment has now been incorporated against the states). It's likely to take a while to get there, though.
Arming teachers can take effect much faster, and may have some beneficial effects. Mass spree killings are so rare that it's hard to really measure the effects of legislation like this.
Is it a good compromise? No, I don't think so. Not when police ignore the warning signs for someone like the killer in this case. Fix the problem: identifying those with mental health problems and who are prone to violence, make sure they are on the NICS list, and confined if necessary. At the very least, if they are making threats, prosecute them for those threats.
This is just a committee vote, not a final vote, so if you live in Florida you still have time to get involved.
Broward County Sheriffs given orders to stay out of the building?
If your choice is to go in without body cameras, or let kids die, and you choose to let kids die... if you choose to let kids bleed out in their classrooms after the shooter has left the building... then you are a despicable human being who has no business working as a police officer. And that applies to the people giving the orders as well as the people obeying them.
Trump in positive approval rating and beating Obama
Remember when the media treated Obama with kid gloves and was very careful to shield him from basically anything negative? Remember how the current Press spends all day attacking Trump over things as silly as a typo in a tweet?
That Trump is in positive territory with likely voters despite all that is amazing. That Trump's ratings are better than Obama's (at this point in Obama's presidency) despite the press attacking Trump and boosting Obama ... well, I don't even know a good term to describe it.
Mueller certainly won't investigate any of the crimes described here that were openly committed and not part of the public record by the Democrats. Someone else might -- a special counsel who was not a participant in those crimes, for example. But I think the core problem here is simple: when Clinton lost, all those who had committed crimes to support her candidacy had a sudden epiphany.
They realized that if Trump remained in office, he would inevitably discover what they had done, and just as inevitably expose them publicly and prosecute them. At best they would lose their jobs and their power.
At that point it became a matter of survival for those involved.
A "massive sweep" is 145 arrests? That doesn't seem very massive. But, regardless, it's progress. And with most of the people arrested having prior criminal records or prior deportations, it's fair to say that they aren't upstanding members of the community.
Is this Trump's way of increasing pressure on the Democrats to make an immigration deal that funds his wall, or just business as usual in an America where immigration laws are enforced? Either way I'm glad to see it, because this will mean some 145 criminals are no longer in the US, and 86 of them were criminals for reasons in addition to their immigration status.
Democrats introduce ban on semi-automatic firearms
150 Democrats on the day he introduces the thing? In an election year? Ok, this is serious.
And the legislation is not as bad as the first Assault Weapons Ban... it's worse. More below the fold, including links to the full legislation, the author's press release, and my hot-take analysis of what's banned. Short version? Ban all the things.
Florida House Speaker calls on Governor Scott to suspend Dem Sheriff Israel
Letter on twitter. The more we learn about this sheriff, the worse he looks. And his frantic calls for gun control seem more and more like a self-serving attempt at deflection.
I've read the "rebuttal"; it doesn't rebut anything. It contradicts a few things that it claims the Republican memo said that weren't actually said. It actually admits most of the damaging points. It provides little or no new information (I didn't notice anything new). It does highlight the Dem side of some points; to pick an example, the Dem memo emphasizes that the FBI did not pay Steele for his dossier work. It does not mention that they planned to pay him for it, and indeed had already authorized the payment, before it came to light that he was talking to the press and they had to fire him... but they kept using the dossier before the FISA court.
If anything, the Dem memo is damning. They're admitting the Republican memo got the facts correct and they are claiming that surveillance of political opponents is routine and acceptable. I don't think that will fly in America.
Broward County deputy offers arms training to muslims but opposes arming teachers
It's an interesting contrast. Between the two groups, I'm sure everyone would agree that armed muslims are more likely to be a threat than armed teachers. (At least, before the communist revolution starts). And teachers have whole classrooms full of children to protect.
That doesn't mean that muslims, here legally and with a clean background, don't have the same self-defense and 2nd Amendment rights as other citizens. Of course they do. But it's an interesting contrast when the sheriff of a county thinks teachers should not be armed while his deputy is teaching muslims to be armed.
Read the whole thing. Sebastian has good points, especially in the last paragraph where he points out that if the Republican party wants to lose support from gun owners, this is exactly how they should do it.
I will only add that I saw this proposal coming from Jeff Flake, who has already announced he won't be facing the voters in November anyway, and Marko Rubio, who pretends to be a conservative but is reliably squishy despite being photogenic. That's two Senators we've already lost on this.
Four armed officers hid behind cars instead of confronting school shooter
I could understand, sort of, one officer for a few minutes. You figure he's got to call his dispatcher and make sure help is on the way first thing. That takes a few minutes if you're generous. And then a minute or two to work your courage up is also fine. Not ideal, but realistically. But four officers, all armed, hiding behind their cars while kids died and letting deputies from another county enter the building first? Seriously?
They all need to find another line of work pronto. Clearly, "protecting" isn't in their DNA. That said, I don't consider this necessarily a personal failure on their part. That kind of life or death situation isn't common and is hard to train for. Not everyone can react well. But once you know that you aren't going to, it's time to look for other work so you don't cost another 17 high school students their lives.
A common turn of phrase for this situation would be "There's no shame in it." But that's not quite right here. There's no shame in knowing your limitations, and there's no shame in knowing you're not cut out to be a hero or a warrior. But if you take the job as a cop -- if you take the first responder bonus pay, the hero worship, the union protection, and every other privilege that comes with the job -- then there absolutely is shame in it. You made a deal with society to put your life on the line should it be necessary, and you failed to keep your end.
CNN is making a full court press on gun control, and I think I can guess why. They want to put pressure on Trump to give in on gun control, convincing the Republican base of gun owners to feel betrayed and leading to an election loss in November.
Trump may be wavering on this point, specifically on bump stocks, but so far no permanent damage has been done. Hopefully we can keep it that way, and reminding everyone that CNN is scripting their coverage of this murder spree to a political focus is one way to do that.
McCain associate pleads 5th to avoid dossier tesitmony
Not much to say about this one. Pleading the 5th to avoid testifying to Congress is embarrassing, but we already knew McCain had sent this guy on a mission to the UK to meet with Steele. I'm not sure we know what Congress hoped to get from him except, possibly, names of sources for the document.
Thanks, Jim, for standing up for the right thing. The gun control side should get nothing for free. That said...
... you can't fix that problem by adding concealed carry reciprocity. We don't compromise away fundamental rights. You need to fix the background check legislation too. Americans have a second amendment right to own guns, and a separate right to due process before a court can limit their ownership of guns. Yes, we need to make sure people who belong on the NICS list get added. We also need to make sure we ONLY add people to that list after a due process hearing, including the chance to defend yourself in court with proper notice that your gun ownership rights are on the line.
This shouldn't be that hard, but apparently it is.
Bill Quick is worn out. Honestly, so I am, at least on the gun control topic. I've said pretty much all I have to say and it gets tiresome refuting the same media myths over and over again.
