Eliza Fletcher Murder: Memphis Kidnapping Suspect Cleotha Abston Held Without Bond (VIDEO)

This is a must-watched segment with Tucker Carson below.

An at Fox News, "Eliza Fletcher was jogging in the early morning when she was abducted. Memphis police announce they have located and positively identified Eliza Fletcher's body."

Father Leaves Baby Kyler Parrott, 1-Year-Old, in Hot Car, Where Temperatures Inside the Vehicle Likely Hit 130 Degrees (VIDEO)

This makes me cry. 

Baby Kyler's obituary is here. 

At ABC News 5 Cleveland, "Father, 19, charged with murder after allegedly confessing to leaving 1-year-old son in hot car deliberately."

And at the New York Post, "Ohio dad, 19, admits he left his infant son to die in 130-degree car":

An Ohio dad reportedly confessed to leaving his baby son to die in a blazing-hot car as outside temperatures soared, after initially claiming the 14-month-old was alone just briefly.

Landon Parrott, 19 — who first said he’d left the infant alone during a short bathroom trip — allegedly copped to the heinous move after cops showed footage of him leaving the boy in the car at 8:30 a.m. and not returning until 1:50 p.m., more than five hours later.

“The child passed away after being left in the car unattended for approximately 5 hours, with an outside temperature of 87 degrees,” New Philadelphia Police Chief Michael Goodwin said in a statement posted on Facebook.

“It appears that this was not a matter of forgetting the child but was a deliberate act so as the child would not be a disturbance while in the house.”

Temperatures reached into the upper 80s on Thursday when the incident occurred. Police official Ty Norris told Fox affiliate WJW the car was likely as hot as 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

Norris said Parrott had admitted to cops he knew about the dangers of hot cars for kids.

“We estimate that would’ve made the interior of the car about 130 degrees and this child was in there strapped into a car seat with no fluids, no air conditioning, nothing,” Norris told the station. “It’s heartbreaking to see this unfold before your eyes.”

Parrott has been charged with murder, involuntary manslaughter and two counts of endangering children, police said. He is being held in custody on $250,000 bond...

 

U.S. Teacher Shortage: How Bad Is It?

Well, there seems to be no shortage of purple magenta-haired woke elementary school teachers grooming children across the country, but heh, I'm sure it's a problem. I mean, with the low pay, lousy benefits, anger at bureaucratic idiot bosses, the leftist ideological takeover of the schools, and everything else FUBAR with the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, who can blame them? 

At the New York Times, "How Bad Is the Teacher Shortage? Depends Where You Live":

Urgently needed: teachers in struggling districts, certified in math or special education. Perks: maybe a pay raise, or how about a four-day week?

The new fall semester has just begun in Mesa, Ariz., and Westwood High School is short on math teachers.

A public school that serves more than 3,000 students in the populous desert city east of Phoenix, Westwood still has three unfilled positions in that subject. The principal, Christopher Gilmore, has never started the year there with so many math positions open.

“It’s a little bit unnerving,” he said, “going into a school year knowing that we don’t have a full staff.”

Westwood, where most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, is one of many public schools across the United States that are opening their doors with fewer teachers than they had hoped for. According to one national survey by Education Week, nearly three-fourths of principals and district officials said this summer that the number of teaching applicants was not enough to fill their open positions. Other surveys released this year have suggested that parents are deeply concerned about staffing and that many more teachers are eyeing the exits.

But while the pandemic has created an urgent search for teachers in some areas, not every district is suffering from shortages. The need for teachers is driven by a complicated interplay of demand and supply in a tight job market. Salary matters, and so does location: Well-paying suburban schools can usually attract more candidates.

If anything, experts say, the recent pandemic turmoil can be expected to worsen old inequities.

“It’s complex, and it does go back before the pandemic,” said Desiree Carver-Thomas, an analyst with the Learning Policy Institute. “Schools serving more students of color and students from low-income families bear the brunt of teacher shortages, oftentimes.”

For many years, it has also been particularly hard to find teachers for subjects like math and special education, or to fill spots at rural schools. And there has always been a dire need for more teachers of color in the United States. According to federal data collected during the school year ending in 2018, nearly 80 percent of public schoolteachers were white. Most of their students were not.

In Arizona, where starting salaries for teachers are lower than the national average, the shortages are “severe” across the board, said Justin Wing, an assistant superintendent of human resources for Mesa Public Schools, the district where Mr. Gilmore works.

“I feel like it’s been that way for probably at least 10 years,” said Mr. Wing, who is also an analyst for the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association. But this year, he added, seems even worse.

He attributes the problem in part to low pay, and he has watched districts in neighboring states, like Texas and Nevada, rub salt in the wound by advertising their teaching salaries on social media and on billboards along Arizona highways.

According to Mr. Wing’s data from the last school year, nearly four-fifths of teaching positions (measured in terms of full-time equivalencies) in Arizona schools had to be covered in less-than-ideal ways — by support staff, for example, or teachers in training.

And nearly one-third of positions remained vacant altogether, which often meant that existing teachers had to take on more classes.

The challenge for struggling districts is to cover positions in a way that not only fills seats but also serves students, said Tequilla Brownie, the chief executive of TNTP, a nonprofit that provides consulting services for districts on staffing and student achievement.

“Everybody right now is just talking about, frankly, warm bodies,” she said. “The quality of teachers still matters. You never will get to quality if you don’t get to quantity first.”

Over the past two years, several states including New Mexico, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi have tried to address or pre-empt shortages by raising teacher salaries.

Others have loosened certification requirements. In Arizona, a new law makes it easier for aspiring teachers without bachelor’s degrees to gain work experience in the classroom. In Florida, where state officials last year reported more than 4,000 teacher vacancies, some military veterans can be granted temporary teaching certificates.

And in some rural districts, where raises may be out of reach, school officials are putting entire school days on the chopping block.

In Missouri, where teachers receive among the lowest salaries on average in the country, John Downs, the superintendent of the rural Hallsville School District, said that the pool of qualified applicants has all but dried up in recent years. A few days before the start of the school year, positions in speech language pathology and math were still unfilled.

This year, Hallsville schools are trying to entice educators with a four-day workweek. “We’re competing against more affluent districts who can offer more lucrative salary benefit packages,” Mr. Downs said. “So we decided we needed to think outside of the box.”

Hallsville is not alone. In Missouri, 25 percent of all districts will be on a four-day schedule this fall. The condensed week is common in New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon, Idaho and South Dakota, and is beginning to emerge in other states like Texas...

Still more.

Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home

At Amazon, Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration.

Albert Woodfox, Survivor of 42 Years in Solitary Confinement, Dies at 75

Following-up, "Solitary: A Biography (National Book Award Finalist; Pulitzer Prize Finalist)."

At NYT, "His term in solitary was perhaps the longest in American history. He described how he kept his sanity, and dignity, in an acclaimed memoir":

Albert Woodfox, who spent 42 years in solitary confinement — possibly more time than any other prisoner in all of American history — yet emerged to win acclaim with a memoir that declared his spirit unbroken, died on Thursday in New Orleans. He was 75.

His lead lawyer, George Kendall, said the cause was Covid-19. Mr. Kendall added that Mr. Woodfox also had a number of pre-existing organ conditions.

Mr. Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement in 1972 after being accused of murdering Brent Miller, a 23-year-old corrections officer. A tangled legal ordeal ensued, including two convictions, both overturned, and three indictments stretching over four decades.

The case struck most commentators as problematic. No forensic evidence linked Mr. Woodfox to the crime, so the authorities’ argument depended on witnesses, who over time were discredited or proved unreliable.

“The facts of the case were on his side,” The New York Times editorial board wrote in a 2014 opinion piece about Mr. Woodfox.

But Louisiana’s attorney general, Buddy Caldwell, saw things differently. “This is the most dangerous person on the planet,” he told NPR in 2008.

Mr. Woodfox’s punishment defied imagination, not only for its monotony — he was alone 23 hours a day in a six-by-nine-foot cell — but also for its agonies and humiliations. He was gassed and beaten, he wrote in a memoir, “Solitary” (2019), in which he described how he had kept his sanity, and dignity, while locked up alone. He was strip-searched with needless, brutal frequency.

His plight first received national attention when he became known as one of the “Angola Three,” men held continuously in solitary confinement for decades at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which is commonly called Angola, after a slave plantation that once occupied the site.

In 2005, a federal judge wrote that the length of time the men had spent in solitary confinement went “so far beyond the pale” that there seemed not to be “anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American jurisprudence.”

Mr. Woodfox would spend more than another decade in solitary before becoming, in 2016, the last of the three men to be released from prison.

His first stint at Angola came in 1965, after he was convicted of a series of minor crimes committed as a teenager. The prison was notoriously harsh, even to the point of conjuring the days of slavery. Black prisoners, like Mr. Woodfox, did field work by hand, overseen by white prison guards on horseback, shotguns across their laps. New inmates were often inducted into a regime of sexual slavery that was encouraged by guards.

Released after eight months, he was soon charged with car theft, leading to another eight months at Angola. After that, he embarked on a darker criminal career, beating and robbing people.

In 1969, Mr. Woodfox was convicted again, this time for armed robbery, and sentenced to 50 years. By then a seasoned lawbreaker, he managed to sneak a gun into the courthouse where he was being sentenced and escape. He fled to New York City, landing in Harlem.

A few months later he was incarcerated again, this time in the Tombs, the Manhattan jail, where he spent about a year and a half.

It proved to be a turning point, he wrote in his memoir. At the Tombs, he met members of the Black Panther Party, who governed his tier of cells not by force but by sharing food. They held discussions, treating people respectfully and intelligently, he wrote. They argued that racism was an institutional phenomenon, infecting police departments, banks, universities and juries.

“It was as if a light went on in a room inside me that I hadn’t known existed,” Mr. Woodfox wrote. “I had morals, principles and values I never had before.”

He added, “I would never be a criminal again.”

He was sent back to Angola in 1971 thinking himself a reformed man. But his most serious criminal conviction — for murdering the Angola corrections officer in 1972, which he denied — still lay ahead of him, and with it four decades in solitary, a term broken for only about a year and a half in the 1990s while he awaited retrial.

The other two members of the Angola Three, Robert King and Herman Wallace, were also Panthers and began their solitary confinement at Angola the same year as Mr. Woodfox. The three became friends by shouting to one another from their cells. They were “our own means of inspiration to one another,” Mr. Woodfox wrote. In his spare time, he added, “I turned my cell into a university, a hall of debate, a law school.”

He taught one inmate how to read, he said, by instructing him in how to sound out words in a dictionary. He told him to shout to him at any hour of the day or night if he could not understand something...

Escape From C.A.? Los Angeles and San Francisco Lead the Way (VIDEO)

I love my state but Democrats have destroyed it. It's tragic.

I can't leave. I'm locked down career-wise at my college, teaching until I retire. In a decade or so I'll be able to, though. I'll have plenty of time to consider my options. Nevada or Wyoming? Idaho or Tennessee? Florida or Texas?

Who knows? 

Maybe California will be red state by then, with California's plurality Hispanic population following South Texas's lead? Never say never. Stranger things have happened. 

But as you can see, people who are free to flee, leave. It's a thing and getting bigger.

At the Los Angeles Times, "California exodus continues, with L.A., San Francisco leading the way: ‘Why are we here?’":

After living in the Bay Area for nearly seven years, Hari Raghavan and his wife decided to leave for the East Coast late last year.

They were both working remotely and wanted to leave California because of the high cost of living and urban crime. So they made a list of potential relocation cities before choosing Miami for its sunny weather and what they perceived was a better sense of safety.

Raghavan said that their Oakland house had been broken into four times and that prior to the pandemic, his wife called him every day during her seven-minute walk home from the BART station because she felt safer with someone on the phone. After moving to Miami, Raghavan said they accidentally left their garage door open one day and were floored when they returned home and found nothing had been stolen.

“We moved to the Bay Area because we had to be there if you want to work in tech and start-ups, and now that that’s no longer a tether, we took a long hard look and said, ‘Wait, why are we here again?’ ” Raghavan said.

He said there wasn’t much draw in California’s quality of life, local or social policies, or cost of living. “That forced us to question where we actually wanted to live,” he said.

An acceleration of people leaving coastal California began during the first year of the pandemic. But new data show it continued even after lockdowns and other COVID restrictions eased.

California ranks second in the country for outbound moves — a phenomenon that has snowballed during the pandemic, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which tracked data from moving company United Van Lines. Between 2018 and 2019, California had an outbound move rate of 56%. That rate rose to nearly 60% in 2020-21.

Citing changes in work-life balance, opportunities for remote work and more people deciding to quit their jobs, the report found that droves of Californians are leaving for states like Texas, Virginia, Washington and Florida. California lost more than 352,000 residents between April 2020 and January 2022, according to California Department of Finance statistics.

San Francisco and Los Angeles rank first and second in the country, respectively, for outbound moves as the cost of living and housing prices continue to balloon and homeowners flee to less expensive cities, according to a report from Redfin released this month.

Angelenos, in particular, are flocking to places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, San Antonio and Dallas. The number of Los Angeles residents leaving the city jumped from around 33,000 in the second quarter of 2021 to nearly 41,000 in the same span of 2022, according to the report.

California has grappled with extremely high housing prices compared with other states, according to USC economics professor Matthew Kahn. Combined with the pandemic and the rise in remote work, privileged households relocated when they had the opportunity.

“People want to live here, but an unintended consequence of the state’s environmentalism is we’re not building enough housing in desirable downtown areas,” Kahn said. “That prices out middle-class people to the suburbs [and creates] long commutes. We don’t have road pricing to help the traffic congestion, and these headaches add up. So when you create the possibility of work from home, many of these people ... they say ‘enough’ and they move to a cheaper metropolitan area.”

Kahn also pointed out that urban crime, a growing unhoused population, public school quality and overall quality of life are driving out residents.

“In New York City, but also in San Francisco, there are all these fights about which kids get into which elite public schools,” he said. “The rich are always able to hide in their bubble, but if the middle class looks at this quality of life declining, that’s a push factor to leave.”

Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather cited a June report that tracked the change in spending power of a homebuyer on a $2,500 monthly budget. While 11.2% of homes in Los Angeles were affordable on that budget, using a 3% interest rate, that amount swelled to about 72% in Houston and about 50% in Phoenix.

“It’s really an affordability problem,” Fairweather said. “California for the longest time has prioritized single-family zoning, which makes it so people stay in their homes longer because their property taxes don’t reflect the true value. California is the epicenter of where the housing shortage is so people have no choice but to move elsewhere.”

While California experienced a major population boom in the late 20th century — reaching 37 million people by 2000 — it’s been losing residents since, with new growth lagging behind the rest of the country, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. The state’s population increased by 5.8% from 2010 to 2020, below the national growth rate of 6.8%, and resulting in the loss of a congressional seat in 2021 for the first time in the state’s history.

Although California has relied on immigration to offset its population decline for the past two decades, that flow has also shrunk, according to UCLA economics professor Lee Ohanian.

Delays in processing migration requests to the U.S. were compounded during the pandemic, resulting in the lowest levels of immigration in decades, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Estimates showed a net increase of 244,000 new immigrants between 2020 and 2021 — roughly half the 477,000 new immigrant residents recorded between 2019 and 2020 and a drastic reduction from more than 1 million reported from 2015 to 2016.

The state is also seeing a dwindling middle class...

The "middle class"? Ha! 

How about the Medieval class? The so-called middle class in California is now our postmodern neo-feudal peerage for the metaversal-future.

See Joel Kotkin, at City Journal (interview), "California’s Neo-Feudal Future."

Emily Bazelon, Charged

At Amazon, Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, His Name Is George Floyd

At Amazon, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. 

Murder Charges Dropped Against Bodega Owner Jose Alba

Following up from the other day, "Social Justice Warriors Turn Victims Into Killers."

From Dana Loesch, "A good development to this story — but the charges should never have existed in the first place."

Amid Hunter's Scandals, President Biden's Going Soft on China

It's Miranda Devine, at the New York Post, "It took a certain bloodless chutzpah for the president to place his scandal-ridden son front and center at a White House function last week."

She literally wrote the book on this. See, Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.

Social Justice Warriors Turn Victims Into Killers

It's Batya Ungar-Sargon, at London's Daily Mail, "Social justice warriors turn victims into killers and criminals into saints as progressive NYC charges a 61-year-old bodega worker with murder for the crime of fighting for his life."

This is the Jose Alba story, the man who was charged with murder after defending himself against "a 35-year-old career criminal named Austin Simon."

Neo-Neocon posted on this earlier, here and here.

George Gascón's Policies May Have Directly Led to the Murder of Two El Monte Police Officers (VIDEO)

Gascón's recall can't come soon enough.

At the Los Angles Times, "L.A. Dist. Atty. Gascón’s policy may have led to reduced prison time for man who killed El Monte officers":

The man who shot and killed two El Monte police officers Tuesday could have faced significantly more time in prison when he was last charged with a crime. But one of Dist. Atty. George Gascón’s most heavily criticized policies probably resulted in a lower sentence, according to documents reviewed by The Times.

Justin Flores, 35, who also died in Tuesday’s confrontation, was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm and methamphetamine when he was arrested by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies in 2020.

Flores had been convicted of burglary in 2011. Burglaries are strike offenses, which make suspects charged with later crimes eligible for harsher sentences. Flores’ earlier conviction means he had one strike against him when he was charged in 2020.

But the prosecutor assigned to the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Holcomb, said he had to revoke the strike allegation after Gascón took office, according to a disposition report reviewed by The Times. That’s because the new D.A. had issued a “special directive” that barred prosecutors from filing strike allegations on his first day in office.

Gascón’s policy regarding strikes was later deemed illegal by a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge, after the union representing rank-and-file prosecutors sued, seeking an injunction. In February 2021, Judge James Chalfant ruled Gascón’s policy violated California’s “three strikes” law, which requires prosecutors to file strike allegations whenever a defendant has a previous serious or violent felony conviction.

An appellate judge upheld Chalfant’s ruling earlier this year.

Flores pleaded no contest to being a felon in possession of a firearm in 2021, and prosecutors agreed to drop all other charges, records show.

Though the gun conviction alone could have sent him to prison for up to three years, by pleading no contest, Flores was instead sentenced to two years’ probation and 20 days in jail.

There is no guarantee Flores would have still been in jail Tuesday, when he shot and killed El Monte Police Cpl. Michael Paredes and Officer Joseph Santana as they responded to a reported stabbing at the Siesta Inn.

But the removal of the strike allegation certainly cost prosecutors leverage when negotiating a plea, according to criminal justice experts.

Laurie Levenson, a professor of criminal law at Loyola Law School, said the blanket policy to disregard strike allegations was always going to run into trouble.

“If you are going to implement a blanket policy, you are always in danger of having a Willie Horton moment,” she said, “where that decision applied to one case results in a horrible outcome.”

Horton was convicted of first-degree murder in Massachusetts and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He escaped while on a weekend furlough program in 1986, then brutally raped a woman and assaulted her boyfriend.

The Horton case was used in an infamous attack ad against then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who was running for president in 1988 against George H.W. Bush.

Gascón has moved away from such blanket policies in recent months. Prosecutors can now request approval from a committee to either try juveniles as adults or pursue special circumstances allegations in murder cases, tactics Gascón had initially outlawed when he took office.

At least two such cases are now being reviewed by committees...

Still more.

 

The Chesa Boudin Recall Election in San Franciso (VIDEO)

A good overview of the recall election at the Los Angeles Times, and I love the lamentations of the article.

See, "San Francisco’s bitter D.A. recall could set back national justice reform movement."

If Boudin's recall --- which is apparently a near sure-thing --- sets back the "national justice reform movement," then that'll be one of the most significant electoral victories of 2022. 

And Nancy Rommelman, who, according to Reason Magazine, is "a journalist and author based in New York City," has a new on-the-ground report on Substack, here: "Time's Arrow: The Chesa Boudin Recall." 

RTWT. 

Especially good is her email exchange with San Francisco Police Department Patrol Sergeant Adam Plantinga, who in reply listed the reasons he supports Boudin's ouster:

Let me front-load that I'm not a political animal and I'm not an SF voter, so what I say doesn't matter as much as folks who live in the city or who are more plugged in to such matters. But as a San Francisco cop, I am, of course, invested in the outcome.

1. He implemented a policy prohibiting his office (with very few exceptions) from charging cases where the police find contraband during pretextual stops. His reasoning for this was to reduce racial disparities. I believe, as do most working cops, that pretextual stops, when done right (you don't have to treat everyone like John Dillinger), are essential to smart proactive policing and get a lot of bad actors off the street. Criminals don't tend to turn themselves in to you. You have to go find them. And pretextual stops are one of the very best ways to do that. I believe his policy is harmful to public safety.

2. He campaigned on not charging quality-of-life crimes and as far as I know, has been true to his word. I'm not for nickel-and-diming every hobo, for Illegal Lodging, who sets up camp on a public sidewalk, but if there are no teeth to the law, it eliminates an important tool from the cop's tool belt. Wondering if Boudin would feel differently if a transient set up camp in front of Boudin's garage, blocking him from driving to work every day. Maybe he'd just shrug and take the bus. At least then, he'd have the courage of his convictions.

3. His refusal to charge gang enhancements and three strikes. It's no secret that street gangs are behind much of the violent crime in the city and repeat violent felons have proven, time and time again, that they should not be among people. They should be spending their criminally productive years in jail. So let's put them there. An old-fashioned view, to be sure, but I work one of the most violent sections of the city and you see enough blood and brains on the sidewalk, it can get a fella to thinking this way.

4. He has made some highly questionable decisions in charging officers on Use of Force cases (to be fair, he's made some other decisions in charging cops that I don't find unreasonable). On a related note, I am an officer who has over two decades of experience, doesn't rattle much under pressure, and tends to make good decisions in the field, but I have little hope that I would receive a fair shake from Chesa Boudin's office if I were to be involved in a serious Use of Force that resulted in serious injury or death to a suspect. Maybe that's not fair--maybe my case would have a just outcome. But that's how I feel and that's a pretty shitty feeling to be walking around with at work with a gun on your hip and continually having to enter volatile situations to take on people with weapons. I'm not alone in feeling that way.

5. He is a former Public Defender and still clearly has a Public Defender mentality (examples of this abound, including a recent interview where he talked about how a high percentage of drug dealers in SF are being trafficked from Honduras). This makes him the classic fox in the henhouse. What if we flipped things around? I don't imagine the Public Defender's office would be overjoyed in having a former DA head up their office who still had a tough-on-crime DA's attitude. It's a lousy fit in our adversarial criminal justice system.

6. I don't claim to have the insider's view on the DA's office. I know they are understaffed and overworked and plea bargains are essential to making the system go. Cops will probably always feel like the DA's office isn't doing enough and tends to be soft on crime. Many of us felt that way about the last few DAs. But ADAs under Boudin have been leaving in droves, which I find telling, and folks who do have an insider's view, Assistant District Attorneys that I've worked on cases with and respect, including Brooke Jenkins*, Thomas Ostly*, and Shirin Oloumi, have strongly spoken out against Boudin. Their words carry a lot of weight with me.

7. I have yet to meet another police officer who thinks Boudin is the right person for DA. Maybe we're all wrong and Boudin alone is right, the lone prophet in the wilderness, whose genius will not be known in our time. But maybe not.

School District Police Captain's 'Wrong Decision' Likely Left More Children Dead (VIDEO)

It's so heartbreaking. 

They stood in the hallway for more than an hour, in a situation where literally every second counts. It's no wonder there're calls for *less* gun control after this heinous attack, as folks are rightly saying you cannot rely on the police to save your life; you have to protect yourself, be armed. 

As CNN reports, "The Uvalde School District police chief is Pedro 'Pete' Arredondo."

And at the Los Angeles Times, "Police delays may have deprived Texas schoolchildren of lifesaving care, experts say":

UVALDE, Texas — As the nation struggles to comprehend the horrors that unfolded Tuesday inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, one of the biggest unanswered questions is whether anyone could have been saved.

Authorities have left the public with more questions than answers about the mass shooting that left 21 dead, and their timeline has shifted multiple times. At least 17 children were hospitalized with injuries, though it’s unclear how many of those survived.

The latest update provided Friday by the Texas Department of Public Safety found that more than an hour elapsed between the time the shooter entered the school at 11:33 a.m. and the time law enforcement officers breached a locked classroom and killed him at 12:50 p.m.

According to the timeline provided by authorities, a person called 911 from inside Room 112, one of the classrooms where the shooting occurred, at 12:16 p.m. and said there were “eight to nine students alive.”

Though it is not yet known whether those students were ultimately among the victims, the injured or the survivors, police and medical experts said that in most instances, the sooner a patient can get some form of medical attention, the better the chances at pulling through.

According to Dr. Demetrios Demetriades, a professor of surgery and director of trauma at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, the mortality rate of a patient increases by about 10% for every 10 minutes of delayed bleeding control.

L.A. County-USC’s chief of trauma, Dr. Kenji Inaba, said similarly that “bleeding remains the No. 1 preventable cause of death after ballistic injury,” though he said he could not comment on the law enforcement tactics used in Uvalde or the medical care provided at the scene.

“After sustaining a ballistic injury, every second counts, and as soon as it is feasible to do so, victims should be triaged, have any obvious bleeding stopped, and then be transported to the nearest trauma center for definitive care,” he said.

Dr. Marc Eckstein, professor of emergency medicine and chief of the EMS Division at USC, said, “The longer it takes to evacuate patients from the hot zone, the worse their outcome is going to be.”

“When you have a place like [Uvalde] where your nearest Level 1 trauma center, San Antonio, is 80 miles away, the responsibility of law enforcement is to simultaneously try to neutralize the shooter and evacuate the workers and the kids and teachers as quickly as possible,” Eckstein said. “That was a lesson learned in Columbine, and a lesson that wasn’t learned in the Pulse nightclub shooting [in Orlando, Fla.], where patients who were potentially viable bled to death.”

Still, Eckstein said, he didn’t want to give grieving families the sense that their loved ones might have survived had authorities responded differently, particularly since so much depends on the location and type of injury.

The AR-15-type of rifle used in the shooting causes “devastating injuries to the body,” Eckstein said, not because of the size of the rounds but because their high velocity generates immense kinetic energy.

“And then on top of that, you have children,” he said. “The fatality rate of a child getting hit by a round like this is going to be much higher than an adult, and it’s going to be higher than a typical round from a handgun.”

The mother of 8-year-old survivor Adam Pennington said Friday she was troubled by the new timeline released by law enforcement.

“When you’re on scene, you should listen to your gut,” said Laura Pennington, 33. “I think everybody was very afraid and confused, and that causes problems. But there should be a set protocol for all of these situations.”

Pennington, who is also a substitute teacher in the district, said her brother-in-law was among those who rushed to the school to help but were kept outside by law enforcement even as officers refused to enter...

Less Gun Control Likely in Wake of Uvalde, Texas, School Massacre

Gun owners will tell their communities are safer, with less crime, when everyday people are armed and ready to defend their lives and the lives of others. Taking away the basic right to bear arms only empowers  criminals, who flout whatever regulations are in place or those coming down the pike.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court may make it easier for individuals to carry arms in public spaces, which if it turns out that way, will have a very significant effect on California.

At the Los Angeles Times, "U.S. gun laws are getting looser, not stronger, despite more mass shootings":

In recent weeks, a string of devastating shootings — at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., a church in Laguna Woods, and now an elementary school in little Uvalde, Texas — has renewed calls for tighter gun restrictions.

Just hours after a teenage gunman killed at least 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school Tuesday, an emotional President Biden demanded: “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a series of furious tweets Tuesday, asked, “Who the hell are we if we cannot keep our kids safe. This is preventable. Our inaction is a choice. We need nationwide, comprehensive, commonsense gun safety now.”

Experts, however, say the opposite — the loosening of gun laws — is almost certainly coming instead.

That’s despite the 10 shoppers and grocery workers gunned down in a largely Black neighborhood on May 14. The elderly Taiwanese churchgoers terrorized a day later. The elementary school students shot dead Tuesday at Robb Elementary School.

“If your reaction to these kind of atrocities is, ‘Well, where is the political will to move the needle on regulation?’ the truth is that the space for that kind of regulatory move is becoming narrower and narrower, both as a matter of constitutional law but also as a matter of state law,” said Darrell A.H. Miller, a Duke law professor and expert on the 2nd Amendment and other gun laws.

By this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision undoing a long-standing New York law that forbids individuals from carrying guns in public without first demonstrating a “special need” for self-defense.

Depending on how narrowly the court tailors its decision, the ruling could have sweeping implications for similar concealed carry restrictions all across the country and especially in liberal states like California, Miller and other 2nd Amendment scholars said.

If the court issues a broad decision — such as one that implies regulations on guns that aren’t historically based are unconstitutional — even more gun control legislation could become vulnerable to challenges, the scholars said.

“Any day now the Supreme Court could hand down its decision in the New York concealed carry case and make it much harder for states like California to regulate guns in the name of public safety,” said Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor.

Miller said the “trend line is definitely [toward] ever more expansive gun rights,” not gun restrictions, and that there will almost certainly be “a flurry of litigation” from gun rights advocates targeting additional state gun control measures once the Supreme Court issues its decision in the New York case.

Pro-gun rights groups have been slowly building toward such an outcome for years, scholars said, and feel that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority — bolstered by former President Trump’s three appointees — shares their interests in scaling back gun restrictions nationwide. At the same time, Miller said, many lawmakers in red states feel emboldened to bolster gun rights now — even in the face of tragedies such as what happened in Uvalde, where a teacher, at least one other adult and 19 elementary school children were killed by a gun-wielding 18-year-old who was later shot to death by a Border Patrol agent.

Before the school massacre, the black-clad gunman allegedly shot and wounded his grandmother.

“Even absent action by the Supreme Court of the United States, the demonstrated reaction of red states in particular to atrocities like what just occurred in Texas and what just occurred in Buffalo — what was it, last week? — is not to actually reconsider or even consider any sort of gun regulations, but ever more expansive gun rights,” Miller said.

Miller was one of several law professors who filed what’s known as an amicus brief with the high court in the New York case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen, in which they argued against a far-reaching decision suggesting that any gun regulation not grounded in early U.S. history is unconstitutional...

 

Victims in Texas Shooting Were Killed in One Classroom

Following-up, "'We do have background checks --- laws are already in place...' (VIDEO)."

God have mercy.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Texas School Shooting Victims Were Killed in One Classroom":

Officials say shooter barricaded himself in a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

All the victims killed in the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school Tuesday were in the same classroom, a law-enforcement official said, as details about both the victims and how the massacre unfolded continued to emerge.

According to law-enforcement officials familiar with the investigation, the gunman barricaded himself in a two-room classroom and fired on law enforcement continually through the windows of the classroom.

The details of the attack were continuing to unfold a day after 19 children and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. this year.

All of the victims have been identified, Lt. Christopher Olivarez, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety told CNN Wednesday.

Police have identified the gunman as Salvador Ramos, a resident of Uvalde, where the school is located. Uvalde, pronounced you-VAL-dee, is a city of around 16,000 located about 80 miles west of San Antonio. The school teaches second- to fourth-grade students.

Members of an elite Border Patrol tactical team known as Bortac responded to the shooting but couldn’t get into the classroom because of a steel door and cinder block construction, according to the officials familiar with the investigation. Meanwhile, the gunman shot at them through the door and walls.

Bortac members were able to enter the room after getting a master key from the principal, according to the officials. One Bortac agent took rounds to their shield upon entering, a second was wounded by shrapnel. A third killed the suspect.

Inside, authorities found dead children in multiple piles, according to the officials.

Agents from Bortac, among the most highly trained federal agents, typically track smugglers, serve high-risk warrants and raid stash houses.

Before the massacre at Robb Elementary, Ramos shot his grandmother, who he lived with, before going to the elementary school, according to police. Mr. Olivarez said the shooter’s grandmother is still alive, and that police are working to understand the motive behind the massacre.

“Everything is still active,” Mr. Olivarez said. “We’re trying to put all the pieces together.”

A law-enforcement official said Ramos legally purchased two assault-style rifles on the same day, within a week of his 18th birthday, from the same local store. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives requires firearms dealers in border states such as Texas to report the purchase of two or more semiautomatic rifles within five days as part of a program that aims to spot gun trafficking across the Mexican border.

Former and current law-enforcement officials said that buying two rifles on the same day or during the same week wouldn’t necessarily trigger further inquiry. An ATF official declined to say whether Ramos’s purchase was flagged to the agency. Officials said they believe Ramos acted alone and aren’t pursuing other suspects, according to Pete Arredondo, chief of police for the local school district. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has determined that there is no known connection to terrorism, a law-enforcement official familiar with the investigation said.

At the current death toll, Tuesday’s shooting in Texas was the deadliest at a U.S. school since the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, where 20 children and six staff members died. In 2018, an attack at a high school in Parkland, Fla., left 17 students and staff dead. Historically, elementary schools haven’t been the sites of mass shootings with as much frequency as high schools or middle schools.

Before Tuesday’s shooting the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket on May 14 in which 10 people were killed was this year’s worst mass shooting in the U.S.

President Biden addressed the shooting Tuesday night from the White House not long after returning from a five-day trip to Asia.

“To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away,” he said in a seven-minute speech from the Roosevelt Room.

As he has before, including in Buffalo earlier this month after the mass shooting there, the Democratic president called for gun-control legislation.

“As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” he said. “I am sick and tired of it. We have to act. And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage.”

The president ordered the flag at the White House and across federal property to be flown at half-staff until sunset Saturday...

 

'We do have background checks --- laws are already in place...' (VIDEO)

Following-up, "President Biden Immediately Exploits Uvalde, Texas, School Massacre for Partisan Political Advantage (VIDEO)."

Katie Pavlich with Bill Hemmer this morning:

.@KatiePavlich: "A lot of the background check legislation...wouldn't have addressed this specific issue and wouldn't have addressed mass shootings in the past...This person passed a background check." pic.twitter.com/NcSRfjIXVi

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) May 25, 2022

President Biden Immediately Exploits Uvalde, Texas, School Massacre for Partisan Political Advantage (VIDEO)

Following-up from last night.

Now the death toll is up to 19 children and 2 teachers murdered in Uvalde, Texas.

The Washington Post is reporting the gunman, Salvador Rolando Ramos, was bullied at school. See, via Memeorandum, "Gunman was bullied as a child, grew increasingly violent, friends say."

And Glenn Greenwald on Tucker's last night:

18 Children and 1 Teacher Killed in Texas Schoohouse Massacre (VIDEO)

I've been watching this unfold this afternoon. The death toll keeps going up. We're in Sandy Hook territory at this point, and it's devastating. 

At the video, Chris Murphy, far-left Senator from Connecticut, goes off, "What are we doing here?!!" 

He always goes off. Then, nothing changes, because the left can't get over its gun control fetish when state authorities need the power to intervene before people get killed, and that means institutionalizing those with a history of mental illness and a documented propensity toward gun violence. Elliot Rodger, who killed 7 in the 2014 U.C. Santa Barbara attacks, should have been hospitalized beforehand. He'd been under long-term treatment and his parents knew he was not right in the head. 

Mass murderer James Holmes had been under the care of a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. He killed 12 and 70 others survived their wounds. I wrote a lot about it at the time. See, "Neuroscience Ph.D. Program Can Be Isolating, Competitive, and Highly Demanding," and the links therein.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Texas Shooter Kills at Least 18 Children and One Teacher in Elementary School":

An 18-year old man opened fire in a Texas elementary school Tuesday, killing at least 18 students and one teacher before he was killed by police, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Police identified the gunman as Salvador Ramos, a resident of Uvalde, where the school is located. Uvalde is about 80 miles west of San Antonio.

Ramos, a former student at Uvalde High School, shot his grandmother before going to Robb Elementary School, police said. He left his vehicle outside the elementary school in Uvalde and carried a handgun inside, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said.

Two police officers who responded to the scene were shot, but are expected to survive, the governor said.

“What happened in Uvalde is a horrific tragedy that cannot be tolerated in the state of Texas,” said Mr. Abbott, a Republican.

At the current death toll, Tuesday’s shooting in Texas was the deadliest at a U.S. school since the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, where 20 children and six staff members died. In 2018, an attack at a high school in Parkland, Fla., left 17 students and staff dead. Historically, elementary schools haven’t been the sites of mass shootings with as much frequency as high schools or middle schools.

Before Tuesday’s shooting, the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket on May 14 in which 10 people were killed, was this year’s worst mass shooting in the U.S. That record stood for a little more than a week.

The Uvalde school district reported an active shooter at Robb Elementary School just after 11:30 a.m. local time Tuesday. The school, according to the district’s website, teaches second- to fourth-grade students.

All district and campus activities, after-school programs and other events were canceled. The district said parents could pick up students at regular dismissal times at their respective campuses, and officers would be there to escort the students to their parents’ vehicles.

“Parents please be patient as lines will be long,” the school district said in a post on social media.

After the shooting, Uvalde Memorial Hospital said 13 children arrived by ambulance or buses for treatment and two people arrived deceased.

University Health, in San Antonio, said it had received two patients from the shooting, a child and an adult. The hospital said the adult was a 66-year-old woman in critical condition. Hospital authorities didn’t confirm whether the woman was the shooter’s grandmother.

he child, identified as a 10-year-old girl, was also in critical condition.

Late Tuesday, authorities were in the process of notifying victims’ families, said Pete Arredondo, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s chief of police.

Armando Ramos, an uncle of Salvador Ramos, said in an interview that he doesn’t think his nephew intended to target the school, but wound up there after a police chase. Salvador Ramos’s grandmother, whose name he declined to share, is currently in surgery, he said.

President Biden was briefed on the shooting as he flew back to Washington from a trip to Asia and planned to give remarks Tuesday night, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

“His prayers are with the families impacted by this awful event,” she tweeted.

The president ordered the flag at the White House and across federal property to be flown at half-staff until sunset Saturday.

Gov. Abbott said he had instructed the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Rangers to work with local law enforcement to investigate the shooting...

 

New Poll Finds 'Bleak' Prospects for San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin

Screw the polls. I expect the results to mirror the school board recall in February. All three incumbents on the ballot got the boot. Politics in San Francisco is some of the most toxic anywhere, and homelessness, poverty, and the deadly drug epidemic are nightmares. Voters are taking back control. 

At S.F. Gate, "New poll of Chesa Boudin recall shows closer, but still bleak, race for San Francisco DA":

Commissioned by the anti-recall campaign and shared with SFGATE, the new poll from Public Policy Polling (rated as an "A-" pollster by FiveThirtyEight) found that 48% of San Franciscans plan to vote "yes" on recalling Boudin, 38% plan to vote "no" and 14% are undecided. The poll was conducted over the weekend among 697 likely voters and has a margin of error of 4.3%.