The hapless Gresham High School principal unable to perceive, and respond to, the carnage over which she presides has resigned. (Background here.) Certes, whoever replaces her faces the same appalling violence and gunplay; but almost any form of leadership is better than Blanche DuBois sashaying around, spraying perfume, throwing paper shades on bulbs, and insisting everything is peachy.

Although Scathing Online Schoolmarm is eager to introduce the Toscano Law Group, Newport News, to the semi-colon (there’s no problem with the sentence I’ve quoted in my headline, but throughout the letter the absence of the semi-colon is a problem), she nonetheless acknowledges that, effective-exposition-wise, its extended letter about the public elementary school system, to which you entrust your little ones every day, rocks.

You begin to understand homeschooling when you read about daily life at Richneck Elementary School. When your six year old tyke’s classmates aren’t smacking at/spitting on the teacher, they’re on the playground fingering their Glocks. Put aside curricular questions; your family definitely stands a better chance of not being reduced to multiple quivering mounds of blood if you stay locked in your house.

The key to transforming your school to Lord of the Flies With Firearms is the school’s administrative team. Without a strong shared commitment to violence among the principals and vice-principals you are getting nowhere in terms of mass slaughter.

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

Violent cultures make violent toddlers, so for optimal school slaughter you also need a critical mass of parents who leave loaded guns lying all over the house, the way the Richneck shooter’s parents did.

Do you think, knowing all too well they had a psychotic would-be killer on their hands, these parents were “negligent”? How many guns do you think they had at home — again, knowing their kid wanted to kill? Ten? Twenty?

Babe, it’s not negligence, is it? Nor is it negligence when an assistant principal rejects desperate begging from multiple teachers and students that she check a psychotically violent student for weapons.

Let’s call it what it is.

Large swathes of the country are shooting off guns all the time. They like to. It’s exciting and satisfying, as America’s finest news source reminds us. American flag pins in Congress have been replaced by AR-15 pins. From the highest to the lowest forms of civic life in this country, guns are everything. They are everywhere. You’re a bloody fool (literally) if you don’t know this and begin to act accordingly.

Ready?

1. Neighbors and the rest of us are not allowed to know who the would-be killer is. Police refuse to release his name. Or the names of his parents. So a lot of people remain at risk. Why are the police doing this?
2. The school claims someone there checked the child’s backpack the morning he almost killed his teacher but they found no gun. They checked the backpack because the child is a known psychotic about whom teachers have been desperately complaining for a long time. A six year old’s backpack is very small. How do you open such a backpack and find no gun?
3. The child is so sick that an arrangement had apparently been worked out that every day he’s in school one of his parents will be physically with him at all times. Can this be true? If so, did one of the parents hand him the gun? As, you know, a form of therapy? Now hon here’s a gun I want you to show me that I can trust you with it…
4. Teachers and parents describe an endemically violent school system in Newport News Virginia. They say principals and the superintendent don’t care, and in fact care only about maintaining their enrollment numbers, which would decrease if they removed all the students carrying guns and trying to kill everyone.
5. Where is the massacrist-to-be? Back in class? Tracking a six year old killer would seem a good thing to do, but we’re not allowed to know where he is.
6. Why haven’t charges been filed against the parents? They let the kid have a loaded gun, and judging by his marksmanship they’ve been letting that happen quite a lot. Doesn’t America have laws against that?

Parents who produce gun-bearing eleven year olds; school principals who lie about armed attacks on elementary school children: The USA has quite the perfect storm, yes? The principal’s original version was all about what a big strong man he is, the hero of his own myth… ie, he found the gun on one of his regular security sweeps. But no – A babe brought it from home and shot at a classmate, but the gun failed to go off. The almost-killed student told her teacher, who took the gun to the big strong man. The teacher was supposed to report the gun to the police, but look at that. Although one of her students was practically killed, she didn’t.

Neither did the principal, who handed down NO discipline against the shooter (I guess in order to protect his big strong man story) but did eventually show up at police headquarters with the gun and with his lie.

He doesn’t work at the school anymore, and the shooter (who bragged he’ll bring another gun and do it again) has been expelled. UD does wonder what other public school now has charge of this person; she also wonders why she’s not reading about his gunny parents and their liability.

Think it’s a one-off? Silly you.

A New York high school does absolutely nothing about a violent student brandishing guns.

In an email to Principal Paul Wilbur, Forest Hills teacher Adam Bergstein described [Moshe] Khaimov as “a clear and present danger” who has struck and threatened students and staff, and brought other weapons to school.

Bergstein faulted the city Department of Education for a system of lax discipline.

“Schools are in a constant state of danger because the DOE refuses to hold students accountable for their behavior until it’s sometimes too late,” Bergstein told The Post.

“They rely on restorative justice circles instead of punishing a child when they are dangerous and clearly pose a risk to everyone in a school.”

Only when students made a fuss did administrators rouse themselves a little from their stupor.

UD gets how you don’t want to admit– smiley-face principal that you are — that the high school you lead is a very violent institution which needs to be militarized (nothing smiley-face there) in order to continue to function without killing people. Vicious fights are common at Oregon’s Gresham High, and now loaded guns stalk the halls, in the possession of sixteen year old sociopaths.

The combination of a doofus who thinks all conflict can be resolved by chats/hugs, and plentiful weaponized assholes, will almost certainly produce beatings/mass shootings galore.

Parents, teachers, and students beg the principal to see their school as the killing field that it is becoming, rather than the Experiment in Loving Co-Learning that her narcissism seems to want it to be.

Guns being what they are in America, this country can no longer afford to assign school leadership positions to feel-gooders who are on their way to enabling the shooting deaths of students and teachers.

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

Today’s walkout.

The suspect was not a danger to other students; police determined there was not an ongoing threat. “It wasn’t an active shooter. There was no other threat to the school community.”

Magruder High sits eight miles away from Les UDs, and in the wake of an almost shot to death student found in one of its bathrooms, the authorities comfort the community with the assurance that a seventeen year old asshole (here’s another one – a few years older) shooting a gun off in the halls of a high school “was not a danger.”

Oh – you mean isn’t a danger now cuz he’s in custody until he gets released to his parents and sent back to Magruder High School? You mean he wasn’t a danger all that time he was packing heat before he decided to use it to shoot someone? You mean all the other fuckers carrying guns at Magruder High School are not a danger?

You mean we should feel okay because he wasn’t an ‘active shooter’ – he wasn’t roaming the halls randomly killing everyone in sight… He was, you know, just after this one guy… Take it easy…

“There was no other threat to the school community.”

Doesn’t everyone else who packs a gun into their backpack every morning constitute a threat? Does Magruder have any idea how many guns are in the school? How do guns get into the school? Does Magruder have Bring Your Guns to School days?

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

UPDATE: That’s more like it. Principal apologizes for saying no threat. There was plenty of threat. And, this being America, I’d say that the threat level at a bad public school like Magruder remains – will always remain? – reasonably high. Apparently there are violent fights rather often there. Who can be surprised that things eventually escalated to attempted murder with a ghost gun? And who – with any choice, any money, or any capacity to get their kid financial aid – would keep their kid in an environment like Magruder’s?

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

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bunch of other people were in the bathroom when the shooting occurred and not one said a word to a teacher, or called the police. Omerta, you know. Far more dangerous to talk than to shut up. Let the kid bleed to death while you go back to class.

And really – you want your kid to go to school there? If you have no options, I understand, and you have my sympathy. But if you have ANY options at all, get the hell out.

The idea that critical race theory is an academic concept that is taught only at colleges or law schools might be technically accurate, but the reality on the ground is a good deal more complicated. Few middle or high schoolers are poring over academic articles written by Richard Delgado or Kimberlé Crenshaw. But across the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about America’s copious historical sins.

In some elementary and middle schools, students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as “perfectionism” or the “worship of the written word” as elements of “white-supremacy culture.” …

For anybody who cares about making sure that Donald Trump does not become the 47th president of the United States, it is crucial that Democrats avoid repeating the mistakes that just put a Republican in Virginia’s governor’s mansion. It is impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. If Democrats keep doing so, they will keep losing.

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

And Brett Stephens:

[N]ote the way in which the controversy over critical race theory is treated by much of the left as either much ado about an obscure scholarly discipline or, alternatively, a beneficent and necessary set of teachings about the past and present of systemic racism in America.

But C.R.T. is neither obscure nor anodyne. It is … a “politically committed movement” that often explicitly rejects notions of merit, objectivity, colorblindness and neutrality of law, among other classically liberal concepts.

That’s no reason to ban teaching it or any other way of looking at the world. But it is dishonest to argue that it is anything less than ideologically radical, intensely racialized and deliberately polarizing. It is even more dishonest to suggest that it exists only in academic cloisters…

No wonder the debate over C.R.T.-influenced pedagogies in public schools — which liberals insist don’t even exist in the state’s public schools – although they clearly do – had such a galvanic effect on the Virginia race. It exposed the myth that the illiberal currents at play in the United States today are solely a Republican phenomenon. They are not.