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.”

*****************

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.

Or aren’t allowed to see.

La vidéo – in which far-rightist Eric Zemmour announces his presidential candidacy to the French people – is burning up the airwaves; not only does the New Yorker give it a good once-over (“one of the most bizarre videos ever offered by a would-be leader to his nation”), but theocrat Adrian Vermeule has risen to its defense as Youtube slaps an age-restriction on it.

The age-restriction is the bizarre thing; the NYer writer is wrong that the video itself is bizarre. It’s a soppy chauvinistic rendering of La France, familiar from scads of such renderings from hyper-nationalist movements around the world. There’s no dead-in-the-water patriotic trope the video doesn’t use, re-use, and then re-use one more time. The only thing mildly unusual about it is the French sourcing. France used to be so secure in its cultural superiority that it didn’t have to sink to self-pleasuring.

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.

******************

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.

She's Fox News's new shogun
She shouts out her slogans
With every vile breath
Their Angel of Death
Choke on her name: Lara Logan

“They confused the metaphysical with science.” Oh whoops.

Ah, but Rand Paul is also an asshole supreme, with whom Oz could never hope to compete.

Thanks, Professor something or other at some school in Idaho. Here goes.

… in America.

*****************

“It is insane that this is somewhat normal.”

*****************

“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?

In a remarkable ten-minute propaganda clip, Eric Zemmour chooses the Seventh for his presidential announcement. Given the SUPER-chauvinistic, SUPER-French nature of his announcement, it’s head-scratching that he chooses a German composer for his soundtrack, non?

I mean, yes, the heavy-meaning-bearing second movement gets trotted out constantly — background music for The King’s Speech, background music for the end of the world — but what’s it doing in a hyper-nationalistic French politician’s presidential statement?

Obviously the haunting major/minor of this movement conveys seriousness and sorrow, gravity and dignity. It is both foreboding and, in its tenacious maintenance of its waltz-like tempo, somehow resolute. And since Zemmour’s whole thing is that France is dying – practically dead – it makes sense that this anxious sorrowing resoluteness would appeal to him. Joshua Bell comments:

I’d call the second movement the ultimate expression of despair, … especially as it reaches its peak. It’s the ultimate crying of lament. The slow movement even ends with an unresolved chord with no root, just as it begins. It leaves you feeling a kind of longing right from the beginning and it leaves you with that same feeling as it ends with an unstable chord.

Yet Beethoven is so un-French; Zemmour spends the entire ten minutes trumpeting the unique brilliance of French culture, and can’t come up with a French composer whose work adequately conveys his message?

It is not too late for the Zemmour campaign to align its values with its soundtrack. With no trouble at all, UD has come up with an equally famous and celebrated French composition that conveys, as does Beethoven’s, growing anxiety/intensity in the context of a beautiful melody. A piece that “has a pulsation that … is very close to that of, you know, the heartbeat. And … it grows in that sort of inevitable manner – something that, you know, cannot be stopped. It sort of unfolds and sweeps you away with it.”

Yes. Ravel’s Bolero.

********************

PS: To render Zemmour’s entire announcement totally French, we’d also need to remove his reference to Johnny Hallyday (half Belgian), and have him quote from someone other than Abraham Lincoln (“by the people,” etc.).

An April 2021 Bloomberg article says he remains a $300,000 a year tenured professor there, though he hasn’t taught or published research since 2018.

And he was just found guilty of enough fraud to send him to prison for 25 years.

Wow. Bill Cosby, Moshe Porat. Temple really knows how to pick ’em.

As a big fancy Reb yada yada
I declare you persona non grata.
Dare not darken the door
Of my prayer room no more
Or I'll curse you forever to Yahweh. 

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.

*********************

‘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.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted. 

DR. FAUCI: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?