Regulating guns in the home: how far to go?

The New Neo Posted on by

I wrote about the Colin Gray case yesterday in this post, and a discussion ensued about gun rights and laws requiring a person to lock up guns in the home.

Commenter “Brian E” commented by describing a local school shooting and the tragedy that ensued, and added: “Having seen the aftermath relatively close up, it’s hard to have infringement of personal liberty as the hill to die on.”

Later, he added:

I agree with Neo, he [the killer’s father, Colin Gray] should have been charged with negligence, not homicide– but I do think the sentence needs to be serious enough that people change their behavior on how they store their firearms.

Many or perhaps most laws that restrict liberty are rationalized as being necessary and/or desirable in order to protect the innocent. The problem is how far to go, because at a certain point the infringements become unconscionable, and perhaps they don’t even prevent the behavior. These are constant issues, and not just in the field of gun control.

Arguments about the protective benefit of a restrictive law are nearly always used to justify infringements of personal liberty . There are terrible tragedies that appear to be preventable through restrictions on personal liberty. In the case of Colt Gray (the 14-year-old murderer) and his father Colin (who failed to lock up weapons), however, there was no law in Georgia that required such a locking-up. I see the harsh verdict in the Colin Gray trial as an attempt to rectify that, ex post facto, without actually passing such a law. In the service of this effort, another law – one I see as inappropriate to the facts of the case – was pulled into service in order to label one person, the father, as responsible.

The desire to turn back the clock and undo what happened – an impossibility, of course – is part of the motive behind this. The other desire is the one stated by Brian E, which is for the sentence “to be serious enough that people change their behavior on how they store their firearms.” But I doubt that will happen; people think they’re safe and their family is safe, and they don’t foresee what is an extremely unlikely act: that of their child committing mass murder with a gun found around the house. Or, for many who do foresee or at least imagine such possibilities, they either are already locking up their weapons or not owning them in the first place.

In addition: where does this assigning of responsibility stop? In the Colt Gray case, why not the mother, the school, the police? They all had roles and all failed to fulfill them effectively enough to prevent the murders; some were even arguably negligent (the school, for example). And one could argue that the school authorities possessed more training than Colt’s father Colin had, more resources than he had, and supposedly more objectivity about Colt than he had. For that matter, why not blame the school for not using metal detectors?

There’s also an assumption that if the guns had been locked up Colt couldn’t or wouldn’t have killed people. I agree that it almost certainly would have been more difficult for him to do so, but it still could have been accomplished. He could have used a knife. He could have used explosives. He could have bought a gun on the black market or stolen one. Where there’s a will …

If a state or city wants to require people to lock up their guns, it can do so. If someone fails to follow the law, impose the penalty for violation of that law rather than twisting another law around in order to punish someone you have designated as the one to blame even though everyone is to blame.

SCOTUS has ruled on how much can be required of homeowners regarding gun storage – that is, it has ruled on what cannot be required. The case was District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) (see this):

Provisions of the District of Columbia Code made it illegal to carry an unregistered firearm … The Code also contained provisions that required owners of lawfully registered firearms to keep them unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock or other similar device unless the firearms were located in a place of business or being used for legal recreational activities. …

[Heller] sought an injunction against the enforcement of the relevant parts of the Code and argued that they violated his Second Amendment right to keep a functional firearm in his home without a license. The district court dismissed the complaint. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed and held that the Second Amendment protects the right to keep firearms in the home for the purpose of self-defense, and the District of Columbia’s requirement that firearms kept in the home be nonfunctional violated that right.

So the appeals court ruled that the requirements were too strict and effectively disarmed people, making it impossible to use their guns for self-defense. The case ultimately went to SCOTUS and its ruling was 5-4, which is about as close as it can be. The ruling divided along the usual political lines. The majority basically agreed with the need for self-defense and claimed the 2nd Amendment protected that right, whereas the dissenting minority went with the “militia” interpretation and did not think this case unduly limited the right to bear arms because that right only applied to militias or militia-equivalents. SCOTUS has since declined to rule further on the issue of laws about gun locks in the home, which leaves those laws standing. I believe the idea at present is that some restrictions are okay as long as they preserve the right to self-defense.

NOTE: Once again I am reminded of the chilling poem by A. E. Housman, “The Culprit.” Regarding the Gray case, the poem is somewhat ironic, because Colin the father is being punished (15 years), although the son Colt still drew the harsher sentence (life without parole):

THE CULPRIT

The night my father got me
His mind was not on me;
He did not plague his fancy
To muse if I should be
The son you see.

The day my mother bore me
She was a fool and glad,
For all the pain I cost her,
That she had borne the lad
That borne she had.

My mother and my father
Out of the light they lie;
The warrant would not find them,
And here ’tis only I
Shall hang so high.

Oh let not man remember
The soul that God forgot,
But fetch the county kerchief
And noose me in the knot,
And I will rot.

For so the game is ended
That should not have begun.
My father and my mother
They had a likely son,
And I have none.

The left isn’t changing its mind on Fauci

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course not.

A mind – even a collective hive mind – is a difficult thing to change. Cognitive dissonance is very uncomfortable; people usually will turn themselves into pretzels to justify the position they already hold.

What’s more, it’s easy to avoid the current coverage that condemns Fauci, and concentrate on coverage that continues to praise him. See this:

[The recent] Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing with Anthony Fauci revealed one thing: the Democrats and their media allies will stop at nothing to protect Anthony Fauci. Despite his lies, his corruption, and the indescribable harm Fauci inflicted on the American people during COVID—all proven with his diary—the Democrats and media still hail him as a hero.

Last night, watch how CNN’s Abby Phillip shut down conversations about the diary, which also made CNN’s Jake Tapper look really bad.

They’ve had an awful lot of practice in this sort of thing.

On parental responsibility: Colin Gray, father of teen murderer Colt Gray, sentenced to 15 years

The New Neo Posted on by

Colin Gray is the father of Colt Gray, who in 2014 at the age of 14 killed four people in a school shooting in Georgia. This case is the second one in which a teenage son committed murder at a school and a parent or parents have been convicted not just of negligence but of being guilty of either manslaughter or murder for failing to prevent the crime despite warning signs. It resembles its predecessor the Crumbley case in many respects.

I’ve written about the Crumbley case quite a few times; please see this. And I wrote about the Gray case before, too; see this post. I haven’t changed my mind, either. My position remains that although the parents could have been charged with negligence of some kind, manslaughter or murder should not have been charged.

Colt’s father Colin Gray was found guilty by a jury, however, and now has been sentenced to fifteen years (one of the charges was second-degree murder, defined in Georgia as “causing a child’s death through cruelty to children”). His son, Colt – despite having been 14 when the crime was committed, was nevertheless charged as an adult and has been sentenced to life without parole in a separate procedure before the same court. His having been charged as an adult doesn’t seem to have affected the jury’s decision on his father, however.

More:

[Judge] Primm’s sentence [of the father, Colin] was far closer to the defense’s request than the prosecution’s.

Prosecutors had asked the court to sentence Colin Gray to 80 years in prison.

“He is the reason four people are dead, seven were injured and countless others were traumatized, and he is the reason a 16-year-old boy was sentenced two days ago to the rest of his life in prison,” Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith said in court Thursday morning.

The father is the reason? Certainly, he is a contributing reason, but hardly the reason.

More:

Hobbs, the defense attorney, asked for a 20-year sentence, with 10 years served in prison and the rest on probation. Gray has already served just under two years in custody since his arrest a day after the shooting.

“Was it enough, what Colin did? Obviously not. The jury has said so and Colin accepts that,” Hobbs said. “But it was not nothing, and it was not indifference.” …

Ismael Angulo, whose brother Christian was killed, called the defendant a “complete failure of a father.”

“He made a choice to buy that rifle, he made a choice to ignore every red flag, and because of his choices, my little brother Christian and three others … are gone, and so many others will carry permanent scars for the rest of their lives,” he said.

Terry McElhannon, the grandfather of Taylor Jones, who was wounded in the attack, pointed an accusatory finger directly at Colin Gray while speaking.

“Why are we here today? It’s because of him,” he said, his arm extended. “His action and his neglect are responsible for what happened here. Though he did not shoot the gun, he bought the bullets.”

Victims and their families are very sympathetic and their stories are tragic. Of course they are extremely angry at Colin Gray and want him punished. But that doesn’t mean he is guilty of either murder or manslaughter, although a jury agreed that he was. The idea seems to be that it should be possible to prevent acts such as this if a parent is smart enough, aware enough, good enough, and has enough foresight to know that his son will kill. It’s a judgment call, and Colin Gray showed poor judgment.

More from the judge in Gray’s sentencing, explaining why he gave the number of years he did:

“Mr. Gray committed crimes, but his crimes are tethered to the crimes committed by his son, and that makes the situation a little unique,” Judge Nicholas Primm said in announcing the sentence.

“It matters that you didn’t have actual knowledge that Colt was going to school to do that. It matters that you didn’t intentionally commit a crime. It matters that you didn’t plan an attack. It matters that you didn’t seek to harm anyone. It matters that you didn’t pull a trigger,” he said.

There are actually some internal family issues here that I think were absolutely key in this man’s conviction, but should not have been:

In a two-week trial in February and March, Barrow County prosecutors argued the boy’s father acted with “criminal negligence” and was a proximate cause of the shooting. His defense team argued he was unaware of his son’s violent plans and had taken steps to get him help for his mental health struggles.

The state’s case included emotional testimony from students and teachers, police interviews with Colin Gray, photos showing unsecured firearms and ammunition in a bedroom closet, and testimony from the teen’s mother, grandmother and sister about Colt’s spiraling mental health.

It’s that last sentence I’m talking about. The father didn’t think the son was in so much trouble, and failed to properly secure the weapons. But the rest of the family differed, either back then and/or certainly now. What’s more, there’s no love lost between the two sides of the family:

Marcee Gray, the defendant’s estranged wife, testified their son had anxiety, was easily agitated and suffered panic attacks. She said it was “very obvious” he needed professional help, but her husband “just didn’t want to deal with it.”

Here’s what Colin Gray said:

The defense called just one witness: Colin Gray himself. He said he had scheduled counseling at school for Colt’s mental health issues and did not ever perceive his son as a threat.

“He’s a good kid,” the father said through tears. “He wasn’t perfect, nor was I, but to do something that heinous, I don’t know that anybody can see that kind of evil. The Colt I knew, the relationship I had, there was this whole other side of Colt I didn’t know existed.”

In a tense cross-examination, he acknowledged multiple firearms were stored in a closet, unsecured and unlocked, and he said Colt sometimes kept the rifle in his bedroom. He struggled to explain why Colt did not attend school for his entire eighth-grade year, according to school records. Colt attended Apalachee High School for only a few days before the attack.

I repeat that this sort of thing makes him negligent in leaving the firearms unlocked. But it’s easy to shrug off what a teen says, or teen angst, which is rather common. I believe the father when he says it never occurred to him that his son was capable of murder despite the warning signs. And I don’t think most parents of 14-year-olds can conceptualize their children as being capable of “that kind of evil.”

Colin Gray was certainly guilty of bad judgment:

Colin Gray also admitted he was aware that his son had been physically violent, had a photo of a school shooter on his bedroom wall and had texted a few weeks before the attack, “Whenever something happens, just know the blood is on your hands.”

But the police had interviewed Colt regarding a report of a previous threat, he denied making it, and the police were unable to prove anything.

But what of the mother’s contribution?:

Marcee Gray, the teen’s mother, was not charged in the case. She had lost custody of Colt because of her struggles with drugs and alcohol and did not possess the firearms, Smith said.

“We found what she did to be morally reprehensible. We do not believe she is a good mother, in my opinion,” he said. “But at the end of the day, she did not have custody of Colt, she did not have proximity to Colt, and she was not the one that provided him the firearms.”

Hey, why not charge her with murder anyway, for creating a disruptive family environment through her drug and alcohol abuse and her separation from the child, setting the scene for her son’s violent outburst and obvious anger control problems? I don’t really mean that seriously; but where does the finger-pointing stop?

Colin Gray’s attorney had argued that she bore some responsibility, too:

Brian Hobbs, one of his attorneys, argued his client should not be severely sentenced for his son’s crimes, and asked that he receive 10 years in prison.

“That is not lenience,” Hobbs said. “Ten years in a Georgia prison for a man who never intended to harm a single human being is among the most severe sentences ever imposed on a parent in American history for the act of the child.”

Hobbs also suggested that the teenager’s mother, Marcee Gray, bore more responsibility than his client for fostering his obsession with school shooters. Marcee Gray has not been charged in connection with the shooting.

“Fostering his obsession with school shooters?” Not sure what the evidence was for that, but it’s certainly of interest.

While we’re at it, how about charging the school, which was also negligent? Or the police who could not substantiate that the son made the threat? Here’s the part I’m referring to about the school’s negligence:

Colin Gray’s trial also revealed the shooting was nearly prevented. The morning of the shooting, school officials and resource officers went to intercept Colt after he made several concerning comments. But in a stranger-than-fiction mix-up, they confused him with another student named Kolton Gray.

Negligence on the part of the school?

I believe that one problem in this case is that Gerogia lacks a child access prevention law, so Colin Gray couldn’t be charged with violating one.

More about the actions of the school and of the family on the fateful day:

On the morning of the shooting, a call was made to Apalachee High School threatening to target five schools, of which Apalachee would be the first. The source of the threat was never determined.

During his first period class, Colt Gray asked his teacher how the school would respond to an active shooter. The teacher additionally noticed his backpack was “unusually heavy”. The teacher reported these concerns to administrators and other school staff via email. Gray’s second period algebra teacher, in whose class the shooting would later begin, was not informed about the email from his first period teacher.

At 9:42 a.m., Colt Gray texted his father Colin Gray, “I’m sorry, it’s not ur fault … ur not to blame for any of it. [sic]”. Upon receiving Colt’s texts, Colin called Colt’s maternal grandmother, who was with Colt’s mother at the time. Colt’s mother then attempted to reach Colt by phone and text message, but failed to do so.

Sometime after the second period algebra began at 9:45 a.m., Colt Gray left the classroom after requesting and obtaining a pass to see the school counselor. Around that same time, a different student in the class with the surname Gray and a similar first name also asked for permission to leave. Both Colt and the similarly-named student headed towards the same bathroom. …

At 9:50 a.m., Colt’s mother called the school, warning of an “extreme emergency”, and urged the school counselor to check in on her son. The school counselor told her that Colt had talked about a school shooting that morning.

School resource officers, alerted to Colt Gray’s comments during his first period class, began looking for him. They found the bathroom Colt was hiding in, but incorrectly escorted the similarly-named student to the front office instead. While Colt continued to hide in one of the bathroom stalls, school staff continued to search for him for twenty minutes.

Colt Gray allegedly exited the bathroom wearing yellow gloves, carrying a backpack and holding a white posterboard around his torso. A rolled-up poster, poster tube, or posterboard was used by Colt Gray that morning to conceal his rifle, which he carried in his backpack.

At 10:02 a.m., Colt Gray texted his mother, “I’m sorry”. At 10:18 am, she texted Colin Gray, suggesting he leave work and saying: “They’re going to need you at the school”.

The shooting followed.

[NOTE: This seems relevant, too:

Social-emotional learning and anti-bullying programs don’t reduce the risk of school violence, says a leading researcher. What’s remarkable, writes Hechinger’s Jill Barshay, is that Ron Avi Astor, a UCLA professor, spent years advocating for policies he now thinks are ineffective, and is willing to say so. “We were wrong,” he said at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

On the advice of Astor and others, schools have invested heavily “in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, counseling and other efforts to make schools safer and more welcoming,” Barshay writes. …

School shooters aren’t responding to bullying or trauma, Astor told Barshay. They crave notoriety. “Most of them are suicidal, and they decided to be homicidal so that they would be remembered,” he said.

Initially the story on the Columbine shooters was that the two teenage perps had been cruelly bullied in school, and that that was their motivation. That was not the case; their intent was to kill as many people as possible (many many hundreds), and there was also suicidal intent involved but it was very secondary. They actually had plans to get away, but killed themselves instead.]

Moroccans invade Spain

The New Neo Posted on by

Am I exaggerating with that headline? Perhaps a bit; perhaps not:

An unprecedented wave of 60,000 illegal migrants from Africa has flooded the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, prompting Spain to deploy its military – as locals liken the invasion to an “apocalypse.”

Harrowing local media reports reveal residents and business owners in Ceuta – a Spanish territory located on the north African coast – are terrified to open their doors amid the rush of migrants, many of whom arrived wearing nothing but swimwear without a penny or possession to their name.

“Businesses closed. Shops shut because if you open a business, it gets overrun … We’re scared. The streets are packed. There are no measures in place. It’s every man for himself. They’re not giving us any help,” a terrified downtown restaurant owner who didn’t want to give their name told state-owned Spanish media outlet RTVE.

Why Spain? Look at a map – it’s very close.

Why now? The Spanish Supreme Court recently seemed to give the green light:

The shocking surge comes after a ruling by Spain’s Supreme Court earlier this month, which said migrants intercepted at sea while attempting to reach Ceuta or Melilla, another Spanish autonomous city in northern Morocco, cannot be immediately kicked out.

Also, the government has recently been engaged in an amnesty program of sorts:

Meanwhile, the socialist Spanish government — which just months ago launched a program to give legal status to some 500,000 illegal immigrants in the country — said it deployed 200 specialized police officers and 60 troops from the mainland to assist Ceuta’s own forces on Friday.

Two hundred is just window-dressing, it seems to me.

One more thing: Spain has been a target from the Muslim world for a long time – a target in the sense of its having once been a Muslim land, although that ended in 1492 with the Reconquista. But once a Muslim land, always a Muslim land, according to a large faction of Muslims. Can we call this an attempt at the Re-Reconquista?

The government says the newcomers are being expelled, so perhaps this is just a temporary test:

However, by Friday afternoon the Spanish Interior Minister said the country was expelling migrants at a rate of 150 per minute, and that 25,000 had already returned home after the sudden influx triggered a humanitarian crisis.

Many had also returned voluntarily, the government said.

The leadership of Spain has blamed human traffickers, and the government of Morocco is said to be cooperating with the return.

Here’s an interesting comment:

Carmen Gonzalez Bermudez who was in the city to see her parents told the BBC that the past day had been “very overwhelming”.

She said she saw “thousands and thousands and thousands of people in swimming costumes and all wet, just coming from the sea”, adding that “I know most of them are nice people just looking for a better future for themselves. But we cannot give that to them”.

ADDENDUM:

Italy has noticed, and has suspended its Schengen Agreement with Spain and has closed its “sea and air borders” with that country. The EU head says this:

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, said: “The images coming from Ceuta are unacceptable. We cannot allow anyone to come to our Union without abiding by our rules. Dangerous crossings must stop immediately. Smuggling networks must be dismantled. And returns must be swift, as our rules allow.”

Well, what are you actually going to do about it?

The territory of Spain that was invaded is not Spain proper, by the way – it’s described this way:

The city of Ceuta, a peninsular region covering 19.9 sq. km (7.7 sq. mi) on Africa’s northern coast, is one of two Spanish exclaves on the continent, along with Melilla, which is about 220 km (140 mi) southeast.

The two Spanish autonomous cities represent the European Union’s only land borders with Africa. Spain has possessed Ceuta, which is separated from mainland Spain by the Strait of Gibraltar, since 1580.

Ceuta has a population of more than 83,000, a mix of Christians and Muslims, including residents and day workers from Morocco and Spain. Ceuta’s population has generally lived harmoniously.

But Morocco, which largely surrounds the two exclaves, still treats them as occupied lands and challenges Spain’s sovereignty, citing history dating back to the Islamic conquests during the 8th century.

So Morocco actually claims the territory officially. You can find a map and some history in this article. So if Ceuta is part of the African continent, why did many of these “migrants” come by water? Because the land border sports a big fence built in 1193-1995:

The fence consists of parallel 6 metre (20-foot) high fences topped with barbed wire, with regular watchposts and a road running between them to accommodate police patrols or ambulance service in case of need. Underground cables connect spotlights, noise and movement sensors, and video cameras to a central control booth; dozens of guard ships and patrol boats check the coast, while 621 Guardia Civil officers and 548 police officers control the shore.

Also see this commentary from Brendan O’Neill:

Yet even if the Spanish manage to tame this searing crisis of sovereign rule – and that’s a big ‘if’ – the lessons of it should reverberate not only across Spain but all of Europe. For the fall of Ceuta exposes the lethal strain in globalism. It speaks – screams in fact – to the chaotic trashing of sovereignty, democracy and our very way of life that globalism and its gold-collared acolytes have brought about.

The storming of Ceuta shatters the falsehoods of the left. …

The whole world can see there are virtually no women and children in those mobs. The whole world knows Morocco is not ravaged by war or hunger. From now on, every utterance of the phrase ‘asylum seeker’ should invoke noisy, angry scepticism.

The Ceuta crisis also confirms that the moral cowardice of the modern state is like a red rag to hostile actors.

I can’t say I agree with O’Neill about what “the whole world knows.” There’s always suicidal empathy.

The viral video of an ocean rescue

The New Neo Posted on by

You may already have seen this; it’s really quite impressive:

And here’s the father of the 10-year-old who was saved:

When you think about it, the difference between 10 years old and 16 years old isn’t really so great – not in years, anyway. But it can make all the difference in the world.

The lifeguard was very very determined:

A 16-year-old rookie lifeguard hailed by President Trump after a dramatic California beach rescue says he made one decision as towering waves crashed around him: “I wasn’t going to let go of that kid.”

“He was going to drown, and I wasn’t going to let that happen,” Ryder Williams later told his father, retired firefighter Shane Williams, after rescuing 10-year-old Nathaniel Rai from violent surf at Seabright State Beach in Santa Cruz on Saturday. …

“I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to return the child to his family safely,” Williams said. “This is my job and I love what I do.”

This is my job and I love what I do. As I said, impressive.

Fauci and the Fifth

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not going to go into all the ins and outs of Fauci’s taking the Fifth right now, although I plan to write more about Fauci. In the legal sense, however, I think that his taking the Fifth can be justified in terms of protecting himself from self-incrimination for any future state prosecution. After all, his pardon – if it holds up despite its autopen aspects – only applies to federal prosecutions.

I also defer to Alan Dershowitz on the subject of Fauci’s taking the Fifth even regarding possible federal crimes, as described in this comment (the actual article by Dershowitz is behind a paywall). I’m not sure about this part, though:

Fauci almost certainly has useful information that would help in this process. The best thing for our nation and for the world, would be to give Fauci total immunity and question him about everything he knows without giving him the right to refuse to answer questions on the ground that his answers might tend to incriminate him.

Can Congress give immunity against state prosecution? I wouldn’t think so. Perhaps, however, it can give immunity for anything said during a Congressional investigation, even if a state decides to prosecute?

The DSA plan for NYC schools

The New Neo Posted on by

As bad as the public school system in New York City already is, there are plans to make it worse. And I’ll reiterate that, although you may not care about NYC, as these ascendant leftists get more power it will be the plan elsewhere.

The article describes a meeting of radical DSA educators in New York City, mostly connected with CUNY (The City University of New York):

“We need to overhaul the curriculum in a class consciousness frame. . . . The curriculum as a whole needs to be relooked at, revisioned and reframed,” the CUNY Kingsborough Community College professor [Maureen Fadem] said.

The meeting, titled “Planning for Socialist School Governance,” was led by NYC DSA Labor Working Group co-chair Nina Bruckenthal, a math teacher at NEST+m, a public science-oriented K-12 school on the Lower East Side, and Amanda Vender, an ESL teacher at the International High School of Sciences in Elmhurst, Queens. …

The DSA educators vowed to use their connections to fellow socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani to get their agenda through, and also conspired to use upcoming contract negotiations to realize their far-left goals. …

The UFT contract for Gotham teachers is set to expire Nov. 28, 2027 and the DSA has progressively been strengthening its grip on the union.

An especially chilling portion of the article quotes one of the teachers acknowledging that the idea of indoctrinating children in this way isn’t popular with the public. The solution? To further oppose school choice and charter schools and make such schools even more difficult to access. The New York City public school system is already shunned by parents who can afford to do so and to send their children to private or parochial schools. But for those less affluent, there is at least the possibility of securing a place for their children in charter schools. The rest – about 75% of the children in NYC – are in the public school system, and the statistics look like this:

In 2024-25, there were 906,248 students in the NYC school system, the largest school district in the United States. Of those students:

16.8 percent of students were English Language Learners
22.4 percent were students with disabilities
75.3 percent were economically disadvantaged
Race or ethnicity:
42.3 percent Hispanic
19.3 percent Black
18.7 percent Asian and Pacific Islander
16.1 percent White
2.0 percent Multi-Racial
1.2 percent Native American

Note the large number of students whose native language is not English and who need extra help with English (“English Language Learners”), the large number who are coded with disabilities, and the absolutely enormous number who are considered “economically disadvantaged.” The latter designation means the child is getting some sort of welfare and/or is in foster care. Note also that white students are among the smallest ethnic groups in the system.

Therefore it’s quite clear that, if these DSA teachers get their way, they’ll be ramming this far-left propaganda down the throats of the children who are very much in need of basic instruction in traditional school subjects, and who have little access to alternatives to the regular public schools. These children will be used as guinea pigs by teachers who could not care less what the children or their families actually need or actually want.

Transgender dolls for children: what could possibly go wrong?

The New Neo Posted on by

I consider this child abuse:

“First-of-their-kind” transgender dolls — complete with removable genitalia — will debut in some Minnesota classrooms this fall to kids as young as 4 years old.

The paper dolls, with gender-neutral names like “Sam,” “Rory,” “Avery” and “Parker,” have removable internal and external genitals, along with more than 100 interchangeable pieces of clothing, accessories and hairstyles — like a trans Mr./Mrs. Potato Head.

The goal is for kids to “learn about the different options that exist for who they can be,” according to a therapist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, which spent over half a decade developing the controversial project funded by lefty Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

The Medical School’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health research over those six years included paying $20 to $60 for “trans and gender diverse” children and their parents to play with the dolls and “talk about gender and bodies” in groups.

Prototypes of the dolls were shown in a 2024 conference where one named “Sam” can be seen in what appears to be some phase of a gender transition, with a detachable penis off to the side, and a dress and girls’ underwear within reach.

The trans dolls — which promise to “make gender fun” — will be made available to teachers, school counselors, pediatricians and mental health providers …

This is terrible on so many levels. From the article, it seems they will be used with children who already “identify” as trans. But any child young enough to be playing with dolls is too young to be on such a track, and certainly it’s not the school that should be dealing with fostering this.

These dolls are wrong wrong wrong; attempting to become trans is not a game. So-called “bottom” surgery is so far from being a game that it is an obscenity to promote it or even visualize it in this way – for children, with dolls. It is a profoundly serious and disfiguring surgery with lifelong effects and dangers, and it is irreversible. It should never be marketed to children in any way or made into a game using a paper doll with easily detachable genitalia. There is no analogy to bottom surgery or to what human beings who undergo it experience.

And there’s also the problem of mission creep. Do we really think these dolls will be limited to children already saying they are trans? I very much doubt it; that’s not the way such things tend to work. These dolls should absolutely never be shown to children in general. Talk about fostering a little old-fashioned castration anxiety – not to mention just plain old anxiety and confusion of all kinds.

But sowing that sort of confusion is the point, isn’t it?

The jihadi attack on the German gay pride festival

The New Neo Posted on by

The man who plowed his vehicle into a crowd at a gay pride festival in Berlin (and also went at the crowd with a machete) wasn’t just a known wolf – he was a very well-known wolf and there had been plenty of opportunities to prevent this. But the government seemed intent on releasing him in an act of suicidal empathy. Well, he’s dead now, killed by police after having killed one person and injuring many many others.

From Matt Taibbi, as quoted at PJ Media:

In sum, a Berlin-born man of Lebanese descent [the attacker] left Germany last year to join the ISIS militia, failed to reach Mauritania, failed to reach Syria, got arrested and sentenced in his family’s home country of Lebanon for ‘incitement to religious and sectarian conflict,’ then successfully returned to Germany to be arrested again,” Taibbi writes.

“He was convicted for planning a serious act of terrorist violence, but released despite a Prosecutor’s request for a ‘longer, non-probationary sentence for the juvenile’ — the 21-year-old juvenile — and put into ‘deradicalization counseling,’ which was about to report him for being ‘inscrutable,’ evasive, and a threat,” Taibbi continued. …

“Instead of examining border control policies that welcome back terrorist offenders so they can immediately be put into a criminal justice system that bars long sentences for 21-year-old ‘juveniles,’ or a probation policy that thinks it can counsel people out of religious fanaticism, the [New York] Times points the finger at a chancellor who refused to fly a Pride flag over parliament,” writes Taibbi.

So apparently it’s the right’s fault, of course.

Germany is in big trouble if it continues down this path. But Germany is hardly alone.

How was the suspect killed? Here’s the story:

“According to current findings, he is said to have rushed toward our emergency forces with a stabbing weapon, after which police firearms were used,” the Berlin Police said in a post on X, confirming that the confrontation occurred at approximately 6 p.m. local time Sunday. It went on to say that resuscitation efforts at the scene proved unsuccessful.

Is “a stabbing weapon” some sort of circumlocution to avoid naming the forbidden thing?

German authorities seem to think that their locating the suspect in such a timely fashion is something to brag about. But I would think that preventing him from being able to do this in the first place would have been much better. And in this case, this man already had fully demonstrated his dangerousness and should and could have been either deported or imprisoned. But it didn’t happen.