School shootings

Friday

Jenna Stocker

How Democrats failed Minneapolis

What happens after an unspeakable tragedy? One that comes on an idyllic late August day in Minneapolis that signaled the end of a barefoot summer and the beginning of back-to-school activities, reacquainting with friends, and easing back into a school schedule? For two families, it is the end of any normal life they had known. For countless other families whose children attended Annunciation Catholic School in a peaceful, leafy-treed neighborhood of the city, it marks a new life of contradiction: of being blessed that they are reunited with their loved ones and overwhelming grief at an inhuman, violent targeting of innocent life at its most sacred – within the walls of a church while at prayer.

Thursday

Katherine Dee

Natalie Rupnow and the blight of ‘virtual molestation’

This Monday, a fifteen-year-old named Natalie Rupnow murdered Erin M. West, a substitute teacher, and fourteen-year-old Rubi P. Vergara, a fellow student, injuring six others — two critically — at her school in Madison, Wisconsin. Before the police could intervene, Rupnow shot herself. It is not a bold prediction to say that this tragedy will not meaningfully shift our national conversation. These events blur together in the American psyche, like car crashes, their horror dulled by repetition. That Rupnow was female and younger than the median age of school shooters does not disrupt the pattern. It is — to my increasing horror, every time I write an article like this one — another story in our endless churn of violence.

natalie rupnow

Tuesday

Stephen L. Miller

The Nashville school shooting brings out the worst in our media

The ugliness of the American media is on full show in the aftermath of a tragic mass shooting at a Nashville Presbyterian school, which left three staffers, including the head of the school, and three children, all nine years old, dead. Police identified Audrey Hale, a twenty-eight-year-old woman and alleged former student, as the shooter. Late yesterday, police chief John Drake confirmed that the biological female identified as a trans male.

nashville

Wednesday

Cockburn

Mr. McConaughey goes to Washington

Matthew McConaughey came to Cockburn’s hometown of Washington, DC on Tuesday. It was not to say hi, of course, but to advocate for “commonsense gun control” at the White House. McConaughey is a Uvalde native and wanted to speak about the victims, as well as how the government might better regulate firearms. McConaughey spoke about going back to Uvalde and talking to the families of the victims. He said, “We need background checks, we need to raise the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 rifle to 21, we need a waiting period for those rifles, we need red flag laws and consequences for those who abuse them.” He went on Bret Baier’s Fox News show that night to continue opining.

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Hollywood has a school violence problem

Streaming services have a school violence problem. For all the hand-wringing and anti-gun stances actors love to indulge on social media, their industry has no problem glorifying the very terror they claim to condemn. Two such cases came last week, right after the Uvalde school shooting that left twenty-one people dead, nineteen of which were schoolchildren. On Friday May 27, three days after Uvalde, the fourth season of Stranger Things premiered on Netflix with an opening scene of mass child death, apparently at the hands of the show’s protagonist, Eleven, in a flashback. Several kids' corpses lie on the floor with smears and pools of blood around them. The streaming service added a disclaimer at the beginning of the season specifically referencing the incident in Texas.

stranger things school

Tuesday

Peter Van Buren

The case for a federal red flag law

Americans aged eighteen to twenty account for only four percent of the population but 17 percent of murderers, almost always male. School shootings get the most attention. The problem is not just the guns. It is the young men who wield them. That means any possible solution rests with the shooter, not the firearm. There’s a pattern inside those sordid statistics, with some 70 percent of school shootings since 1999 having been carried out by people under eighteen. The median age of school shooters is sixteen. It’s kids shooting kids; whether because they are left out, bullied, teased or angry at some slight or teacher’s offense, it is kids killing kids.

red flag