Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and expert on student rights, said she found the school’s reaction [to abundant evidence of the shooter’s clear and present danger] “truly astounding.”

It was well within the school’s rights to require Mr. Crumbley, who has since pleaded not guilty to murder and terrorism charges, to leave campus, Professor Ross said.

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.”

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Some public school administrators harbor a sort of mulish assumption that public means everyone gets to go there. And stay there.

Or is this about incompetence? Indifference? As charges and lawsuits are brought forward, we will find out.

Once they figured out their son was really seriously mentally ill, Kip Kinkel’s parents started buying him guns. Not long after, he mowed both of them down as they came home from work. Then he drove to his high school and mowed down students.

Nancy Lanza had written a check for a CZ 83 handgun for her son Adam’s Christmas present, but before she could give it to him he blasted her to kingdom come with another of the home’s many firearms. Then it was off to Sandy Hook Elementary. She knew Adam was extremely disturbed, but figured a personal weapon would be therapeutic.

The Michigan mass shooter’s Sig Sauer SP 2022 was also a Christmas present from his parents, who also had scads of evidence that he was right round the bend.

It is one of the crowning post-Trump achievements of this country that the dangerously mentally ill are more than encouraged to buy serious firepower. If they’re too young to buy guns for themselves, their loving parents, as we see from these three famous examples, can always buy guns for them.

A Michigan prosecutor on Friday filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents of the 15-year-old suspect in the Oxford High School shooting.

Jennifer and James Crumbley were each charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter after their son, Ethan, was accused of fatally shooting four students at the suburban Detroit school on Tuesday.

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When ordinary Americans can’t send their psychotic fifteen year old to school with a Sig Sauer 9 mm, things have taken a truly ominous turn.

… in America.

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“It is insane that this is somewhat normal.”

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“If the incident yesterday, with four children being murdered and multiple kids being injured is not enough to revisit our gun laws, I don’t know what is,” [Oakland County Prosecutor Karen] McDonald said.

Hello? Sandy Hook?

Guns are creating an America in perfect harmony.

[P]ublic defenders argue that, historically, permits have been issued unevenly, and that still today, in many places, it is easier for whites and members of the middle class to get permits than it is for people of color and the poor. And they argue their clients should have guns just like other Americans do. In other words, the progressive left has met [the] far right in describing dangerous streets and the need to be armed on them.

… [This] nihilism … echoes the far right champions of the men we have seen on trial. Instead of taking guns out of the hands of the Rittenhouses and McMichaels of the world, these progressive public defenders want to level “up”— to make guns more readily available to their clients, to all of us. Their vision, if realized, would make the self-defense claims of Mr. Rittenhouse and Mr. McMichael unremarkable, not only in red states, but across the country.

The audacious position taken by these New York public defenders should give pause to anyone tempted to understand, and maybe even discount, the Rittenhouse and McMichael defenses as essentially conservative arguments playing to conservative juries in conservative states…

… [U]nregulated guns escalate violence across ideological lines.

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‘All of us,’ by the way, needs to include America’s youngest shooters. As our headline has it, it’s a small world, after all; and the smallest among us, whose gun play is increasingly part of the country’s media landscape, also deserve self-defense in what’s coming to be called the Tot-on-Tot-Shot scenario. The only thing that stops a bad three year old with a gun is a good five year old with a gun.

… à l’Américaine.

[The] gun lobby [has grown] more powerful and darker… The N.R.A. … has worked hard to leave the impression that the ideology of gun ownership has been constant, emphasizing a Second Amendment politics that flattens the distinction between the eighteenth century and the present, and marketing AR-15s as if they were made for hunting. [By] the time of Sandy Hook, the gun culture … was all new: the treatment of lobbyists as charismatic leaders, the black-rifle influencers, the military weapons in the stores, and the military imagery used to market them. [This is] the world that the N.R.A. built…

The allegations against [Wayne] LaPierre may weaken the N.R.A., but the tactical culture that consolidated under his watch appears more durable. The sort of people who, not long ago, [one] might have characterized as “couch commandos” are everywhere on the American right — in power, and also on the fringe. Kyle Rittenhouse, … at the age of seventeen, got an AR-15-style rifle from a friend and brought it to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he killed two men and wounded another … Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, … owns a gun-themed restaurant in Rifle, Colorado; supported the storming of the Capitol; and has posed frequently with AR-15-style rifles.

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Adam Lanza was twenty.

Alex Jones that is, whose vileness has finally bumped up against a court of law. He has been successfully sued for defamation by the parents of the slaughtered children whom he dismissed as actors in a government plot.

How to assess a money penalty for the pain this monstrous man has inflicted on the Sandy Hook families?

Whatever the juries decide, UD hopes it ruins him.

[Brett] Kavanaugh theorized that a left-leaning state could offer a $1 million bounty against those who sell an assault rifle, like an AR-15, then claim it wasn’t using state power because only private parties could bring the suits.

Hadn’t thought of that. Ha.

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You and Me Against the World

‘It’s hardly traditional to get injunctions against judges, injunctions against everybody, right?’ [Chief Justice] Roberts said. ‘That’s part of the relief you seek, isn’t it? … So you’re seeking an injunction against the world?’

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Genius Loco

Much of the debate revolved around a 1908 case, Ex Parte Young, where the Supreme Court ruled that state officials could be sued in federal court to prevent  them from trying to enforce unconstitutional laws. 

‘Some geniuses came up with a way to evade the commands of that decision as well as the command [of] the broader principal that states are not to nullify federal constitutional rights,’ Justice Elena Kagan said. ‘To say, ‘Oh, we’ve never seen this before, we can’t do anything about it,’ I guess I just don’t understand that argument.’ 

The mayor seemed entirely unstartled. It never stops; why should it stop for her press conference?

… a group of American universities where gun massacres coincide with their homecoming festivities. We’ve already covered Grambling’s celebrations; only a few days later, Fort Valley State in Georgia struts its stuff.

Stay tuned! It wouldn’t be homecoming without a spray of flowers and a spray of bullets.

Behind this flat descriptive sentence lie the breathtaking, deathtaking statistics of America’s most murderous state, Louisiana, where shooting, especially among the very young, is happening pretty much all the time, pretty much everywhere. Two fatal shootings within a week on one American university campus – Grambling State, with today’s killing at a homecoming party – tells you how normalized it’s all become. Soon this stuff won’t make the news at all.

Grambling’s not far from Shreveport, if you want to get a quick sense of the world we’re talking about here. Shreveport’s already got among the highest gun violence rates in the nation; this year, they’ve gone UP eleven percent from the city’s rate last year.

Today’s Grambling killing happened at two AM…? The shooter wasn’t a student…? You might say there’s not much one can do about this – but there is, actually. Why in the world would you let your kid go to school at a place where they let campus parties go til two AM; and why, given the riot of gun violence in Louisiana, would the school not check i.d.s and weaponry at campus gatherings?

The school claims it had all sorts of security there. And that tells you that not only is it dumb enough to sponsor large late-night parties in a very dangerous neighborhood, but it’s also incompetent.

Don’t let your kid go to Grambling.

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Update: You see the … fatal disconnect in the president’s remarks: “Why would someone come to dear old Grambling and commit an act of violence?” Man seems to think he’s in dear old Arcadia rather than dear old murder capital USA. With that degree of denial at the very top, we shouldn’t be surprised at these outcomes.

“As an alumnus, I’m embarrassed,” said Edmond Davis, who was visiting his alma mater with his wife. “Deeply embarrassed. It saddens me.”

Yes. Your school can’t hold a homecoming without a fatal shooting. You should take the school’s president by the shoulders – firmly – and say as directly as possible Grambling is unfortunately located in the heart of the heart of American homicide. If you want the school to survive, you are going to have to make it as much of an armed camp as possible. And by the way, doesn’t the school have trustees? Do they do anything?

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“We must … accept that the issues we face with gun violence are non-students who come to our great institution and cause harm to students and other non-students who are casually enjoying themselves,” [Grambling’s student government president] wrote. “We must realize that at some point we must stop allowing outside individuals to pass through checkpoints without university clearance.” 

Scandalous that this obvious necessity occurs to students but not university leadership.

She wonders why some people consider this a strange prediction.

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They’re a little slow down south. They’ll get with the program.

Yet another example of the absolute refusal to name the primary reason Wyoming consistently tops national suicide rankings: All them surefire, convenient, guns lying around absolutely everywhere. This editorial in the Casper Star Tribune offers a full plate of cliches and a plea for better education. You betcha, partner.

At least 173 shots fired in 3-hour span in St. Paul, injuring 7, but that was way back in May, and it doesn’t count because it was three separate incidents; whereas last night in St Paul, in one single incident at a bar, multiple shooters fired – and man, I don’t know, they’re not giving out estimates yet, but the shooters killed one person and injured fourteen and apparently the bambambam just went on and on so I’m thinking

multiple shooters

crowded venue

protracted gunfight, chaos

so okay let’s say conservatively that’s 400-500 shots and maybe many more. Not as many as the Vegas shooter – that was a thousand bullets – but he did massive planning and amassed a vast arsenal in his hotel room. It’s not fair to compare the bullet count in St Paul, which was a spontaneous massacre, to Stephen Paddock’s military-precision atrocity; but on the other hand, especially given its unplanned nature, the St Paul shootout is impressive.

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Less impressive, though I guess striking in a way, is St Paul’s sheriff predicting the shooting at the Truck Park bar the night before it happened.

“Quite the gathering here at the Truck Park,” [Bob] Fletcher said on his livestream. “Holy mackerel. This is a lot of folks. We’ve never had any shots fired right here. I hope we never do, but this volume at some point it’s gonna happen, right?”