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Newport News shooter’s backpack had been searched

January 14, 2023 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

The six-year-old school shooter in Newport News has made a lot of people very nervous. That’s understandable, really. Such a young child not just getting a gun, but taking it to school and shooting his teacher? That’s really pretty disturbing.

As a result of the shooting, people are desperately trying to find something to blame for it.

We have reason to believe the mother, whose gun was used, hadn’t properly secured the weapon. This seems to be pretty obvious, really. Yet it also seems she wasn’t the only one who dropped the ball.

New details are revealing more about the hours leading up to the shooting at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News. A 6-year-old boy is accused of intentionally shooting his first-grade teacher, Abby Zwerner.
…
Superintendent Dr. George Parker III said the boy accused in the shooting arrived to school late that morning, and that his backpack was searched after someone reported he may have had a weapon.
The person who searched the child’s bag didn’t find a weapon. A few hours later, Zwerner had been shot. The school division did not say say who searched the boy’s bag.

Well, whoever searched the backpack apparently sucked at it.

See, they’d been told the kid had a gun. They took the threat seriously enough to conduct a search. They found nothing.

A short time later, a teacher had been shot and a six-year-old shooter had pulled the trigger.

I can’t make this stuff up, folks. They searched the backpack of a six-year-old kid and didn’t find a gun.

Now, it’s theoretically possible he had it somewhere else on his person, but that’s unlikely based on what we know. For example, officials have said the shooter carried the gun in his backpack, so it seems like they don’t think he had it tucked in his waistband.

Let’s just call it a hunch.

Anyway, what happened is all kinds of awful, but it’s curious just how often these awful events that supposedly illustrate the need for gun control also seem to have a component of someone in authority dropping the ball.

Sure, there are times when we can find shootings similar to this happening with no one necessarily missing anything or screwing up, but there is an alarming number of them where someone screwed up. Despite those mistakes, though, people expect others to forfeit their right to keep and bear arms to some degree as a way to cover up for those mistakes.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not remotely interested in doing any such thing. Especially not when all of this could have been avoided with someone managing to spot a firearm in a kid’s backpack.

Frankly, I think we all know this “search” was nothing more than a cursory inspection of a potentially cluttered backpack that figured since a gun wasn’t clearly visible, there was no point in digging any further.

Well, there was.

Look, if you get a tip that a kid has a gun, maybe you should actually look a little deeper.

I get why the individual who conducted the search isn’t being named. That would probably be bad for him or her. But I also hope they receive some kind of discipline for failing to spot, you know, a freaking gun.

“Screen violence,” access to guns blamed for school shooting

January 13, 2023 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

The shooting at a Newport News elementary school has rattled the community and, to some extent, the nation. While we don’t have wall-to-wall reporting on this, there are a lot of people reading and following this story.

What many are wondering is just how something like this happened. How did a six-year-old kid come to shoot his teacher?

When there are people asking questions, there will always be people ready to provide answers. And according to some supposed experts, they know what happened in Virginia.

Many other aspects of the incident have yet to be established — not least, the likely many factors that resulted in the boy shooting his teacher. But as experts in media use and its connections to violence, we have reported some disturbing findings about how children are influenced by gun violence depicted in media like television, movies and video games. What makes this more troubling is the fact that millions of children in the U.S. have easy access to firearms in their homes, increasing the risk of gun deaths, including suicides.
The effect of media violence on children
Research has shown that the depiction of gun violence is increasing in both movies and on TV. Our research found that acts of gun violence in PG-13 movies has nearly tripled in the 30 years since the rating was introduced in 1984. And PG-13 movies are not exclusively watched by teens and above. A survey of adults in 2019 found that 12% said they were allowed to watch PG-13 movies between the ages of 6 and 9, with 6% saying they watched such films aged even younger.
Although some skeptics say violent media do not lead children to become more aggressive, a large survey conducted in 2015 found that most pediatricians and media scholars agree that there is a link.

Except that this supposed consensus ignores the fact that over the period in question, we saw a decrease in violent crime up until the very strange 2020 hit.

If this uptick in violent content was so damaging, why didn’t we see a significant uptick in violent crime over that same period? Correlation isn’t causation, but causation should lead to correlation. We simply don’t see any such correlation, which suggests that this claim is more a case of wishful thinking.

Plus, let’s be honest, that linked study just found that media researchers think there’s an issue. It’s not evidence that such an issue exists.

Then, of course, they claim access to guns is an issue.

Children are naturally curious, and adults often underestimate their ability to find guns hidden in the home. As one firearms expert noted, “Their brains are developing. That same curiosity that can inspire them to pick up a book and want to learn how to read can inspire them to go looking for a parent’s gun.”

Of course, the “firearms expert” is Cassandra Crifasi, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, an anti-gun effort funded in part by Michael Bloomberg.

So pardon me if I’m a bit skeptical of the claim.

Now, that said, I am an advocate for locking one’s guns up. Especially if you have kids. Kids explore and yes, kids are curious. However, this is really just trying to put the onus for this shooting on gun owners in general, rather than acknowledge that one parent managed to completely screw the pooch.

One thing they failed to say anything about was efforts to demystify guns.

Kids are often intrigued by firearms not because they’re available, but because they’re forbidden. We tend to be fascinated with things we can’t have or shouldn’t do. If you demystify them by educating them and giving them supervised access to guns, they’re less likely to see them that way. Then, if they come across a firearm, they’re not likely to see it as something enticing.

Funny how that never makes it into the discussion.

Anti-gun mom reacts to 6-year-old shooting teacher

January 9, 2023 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

A young child should never gain access to a firearm.

That’s easy for me to say, but we’ve seen it happen time and time again. When it does happen, anti-gunners lose their minds. They continue to remain convinced that some kind of gun control should be applied.

In Virginia, that debate is kicking into high gear after a 6-year-old student shot their teacher with a gun he brought to school.

And one mother is drawing a lot of attention because of her reaction to it.

A British mother gave a furious reaction after a six-year-old student at her child’s school in Newport News, Virgina, shot and critically injured a teacher on Friday.
A Richneck Elementary School teacher identified by local news reports as Abby Zwerner was intentionally shot by the young student after an alleged “altercation” in the classroom, police said.
Ms Zwerner, whose condition had improved to stable on Saturday, was praised by parents for warning her students to flee as she lay bleeding on the classroom floor.
Speaking outside the school on Friday, the unnamed parent told WTKR she was furious at the lack of gun regulations in the United States.
Speaking in an English accent, she told WTKR: “Guns, OK, that’s the biggest problem in this country,.
“Why is it so bad. Why is there a seven-year-old with a bloody gun?” she said, speaking before police revealed the alleged shooter’s age was six.
“Come on, think about it. Let’s do something. We’ve got a new Governor now, let’s do something, let’s change it.”

Now, understand that what happened here isn’t a case of a 6-year-old going out to buy a gun and then taking it to school.

At its base, it looks like poor parenting permitted a small child to obtain a firearm and take it with them.

The anti-gun parent is understandably upset–it could have been her kid, after all–but she also needs to calm down and look at this rationally. Nothing about what happened was particularly legal in the first place.

In the coming days, I expect we’ll find out a lot more about what transpired in Newport News, but right now, there’s no reason to scream for gun control.

Of course, some will point to this as some kind of evidence that I’m wrong, but just what laws would have prevented this? Mandatory storage, maybe? I’m sorry, but if the parent didn’t have it secured with a child that young running around the house, what makes you think a law would change that?

What else? This wasn’t a kid with an AR-15, so an assault weapon ban wouldn’t cut it. You can’t put an age cap on who can possess a firearm because there are already age caps on who can buy one. So just what laws would she have?

Or, is she like so many other anti-gunners and just wants to restrict all guns in every single way?

Hell, it sounds like she’s British. If she wants those laws, she can always go back to her native nation and “enjoy” all the restrictions she wants.

Then again, she thinks guns are somehow the biggest problem our nation faces, not understanding that we’ve had tons of guns for decades and continually lowering violent crime rates until just recently. Guns aren’t the problem. People are.