MAGA got itself a martyr when Charlie Kirk was killed. The “violent left,” etc. as they say. One of it’s own practiced what he preached and his life was ended prematurely by someone practicing what Kirk preached.
Kirk argued that the benefits of having guns in many American hands outweighed the costs. Gun deaths were inevitable in such a heavily armed society, he admitted, but the prevalence of firearms allowed citizens to “defend yourself against a tyrannical government”.
“I think it’s worth it,” he said. “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It’s rational.”
The most charitable reading of this quote suggests that Kirk has embraced Thomas Jefferson — “”The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” — but decided the “patriots” and/or “tyrants” must be, occasionally, innocent people, including elementary school students.
The least charitable reading is this: Charlie Kirk doesn’t care how many of your kids are killed so long as he (and his fellow debate me bro grifters) still have access to firearms. And as for the “second amendment protects the other God-given rights), get the fuck out of here. The last time any of these God, Guns, and Gadsden flag motherfuckers ever went after the government, they did it to fully embrace tyranny while attempting to destroy democracy.
So, when someone says something pointed to say about Charlie Kirk’s live-by-the-gun, die-by-the-gun philosophy, they’re in the right (as in “correct,” rather than being part of the “right”).
Late last year, someone not sufficiently supportive of Kirk’s martyrdom got arrested. Somewhat surprisingly, this person was a former law enforcement officer, which didn’t put him beyond the reach of a current law enforcement official who was a big fan of Charlie Kirk. Perry County (Tennessee) sheriff Nick Weems took it upon himself to take offense on behalf of everyone in his jurisdiction and arrested former cop Larry Bushart for simply quoting Donald Trump in response to Charlie Kirk’s shooting:
One of his posts was a photo of President Donald Trump, along with the quote “We have to get over it,” drawing from his response to a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, in 2024.
Weems pretended that this post caused mass hysteria in Perry County, Tennessee. First, he claimed he was justified in arresting Larry Bushart because Bushart refused to take the post down. “What kind of person just says he don’t care?” asked the sheriff, who apparently thinks the First Amendment only applies to people who care what law enforcement officers say when they’re in the process of violating people’s rights.
Then he lied to everyone — something exposed by none other than Lexington PD officers. He later admitted investigators knew Bushart wasn’t referring to Perry County or its schools in his Facebook post, which meant the post couldn’t possibly hope to satisfy even the vague and expansive contours of a local law that’s supposed to curb school shootings by punishing online threats.
Sheriff Weems claimed “mass hysteria” was the result of Bushart’s post. A public records request to the Perry County School District for documents by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which represented Bushart in this case) pertaining to this post was met with a “no related records” response, which strongly suggests no parent, student, teacher, or administrator thought Bushart’s post was some sort of threat against local schools or students.
A Tennessee man who was jailed for 37 days over a Facebook post he shared after the killing of Charlie Kirk has agreed to a $835,000 settlement with the sheriff who detained him, his lawyers said on Wednesday.
[…]
In the posts, he shared memes that accused Mr. Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, of perpetrating hate and another that included past comments from President Trump about moving past a school shooting. The sheriff’s office in Perry County, Tenn., claimed that with those posts, he had threatened violence.
His bail was set at $2 million, and he remained in jail until the charge against him was dropped.
Check out that last sentence. Voters might also want to keep this in mind the next time local judges are up for election (or, if appointed, the people who appoint these judges are up for election).
Look, even if I didn’t think Charlie Kirk was a terrible person with reprehensible ideas/ideals, I’d still speak up for everyone’s right to treat his death with whatever level of respect they thought it deserved. “Too soon” is in the eye of the beholder, which definitely isn’t the objective approach needed to address cases involving personal expression.
Even if I thought Larry Bushart was extremely careless in his wording or was perhaps trying to tease out an inference that could conceivably be seen as “threatening,” there’s no excuse for what happened here.
“No one should be hauled off to jail in the dark of night over a harmless meme just because the authorities disagree with its message,” Adam Steinbaugh, a senior attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech legal advocacy group that represents Mr. Bushart, said in a statement. “We’re pleased that Larry has been compensated for this injustice, but local law enforcement never should have forced him to endure this ordeal in the first place.”
No law enforcement officer worth their paycheck would have engaged in this arrest. (And, indeed, it looks as though the first officers on the scene from the Lexington PD saw this as an unconstitutional attack on someone’s protected rights.) And no judge should have signed off on a $2 million bail request over a post only one person — that being Sheriff Weems — seemed to feel was illegal.
Bushart wins. Tennessee residents also win, but they’re stuck with the bill. Sheriff Weems loses, but unless he’s ousted from office, he’ll learn nothing from this experience, since this won’t be coming out of his own pocket. The First Amendment has been vindicated, but Sheriff Weems (and the people who support him) made it clear it will always be under attack so long as MAGA acolytes remain in positions of power.
It was just a week or so ago that we were talking about the absurd situation in Knox County, Tennessee, where local government used Tennessee’s book-banning laws to remove the book Roots from school libraries. Yes, this is the book by Alex Haley that spawned the 1970s miniseries of the same name and served as a cultural touchpoint for the understanding of American history and race relations across the country. Haley lived in Knox County himself. He even has a bronze statue placed in his honor in Morningside Park in Knoxville. Yet the book that earned him that statue was being banned in public schools.
The backlash to this occurring was swift and severe. It came from both local politicians and from the public around the country. The purity of just how bad and wrong this was hit a nerve. And, now, the county has caved to that pressure and have immediately reinstated Roots back onto public school bookshelves.
Knox County Schools Superintendent Jon Rysewyk said the district will return the 1976 novel to school library shelves, walking back a decision that had added Roots to a growing list of banned books and ignited debate about race, history and the reach of state law into public school libraries.
In a memo to the Knox County Board of Education dated May 26, 2026, Rysewyk said the decision to return Roots to shelves was effective immediately and that the initial removal “was in no way a commentary on the historical, cultural, or literary value of the novel.
And that’s bullshit, of course. Many of the other quotes from Rysewyk are very carefully lawyered, but this one stands out as obvious nonsense. Removing a book, any book, from school shelves is absolutely a commentary on the historical, cultural, and literary value of that book. You’re making a decision to hide away a literary work from children. If the work had value to those children, you wouldn’t be banning it.
Rysewyk goes on to note that he consulted with many lawyers on the passage that led to the book being banned and that there was no consensus whether that passage actually violated Tennessee’s law or not and that that’s why he reinstated it. Then he dropped this gem.
“Removing any book from circulation is, and should be, an immense decision. Our intent will always be to err on the side of access, which is the decision I have made with regard to “Roots,”” Rysewyk said.
No. No it won’t. Because last week was part of “always” and the initial decision was to err on the side of not pissing off racist goobers and removing access. Nice try, though. It was only when the revolt started coming from within the school board itself that Rysewyk was forced to walk this all back.
Knox County School board member Katherine Bike sent a memo to her colleagues demanding the book’s return.
“Removing Roots is not a neutral act,” Bike wrote. “It sends a message to our students, particularly our Black students, about whose history is worth protecting. I don’t believe that is the message any of us intends to send. Intent and impact are two different things.”
On Tuesday after the reversal was announced, State Rep. Sam McKenzie, whose district includes the Haley statue, called the ban a grave injustice and said he was disappointed but not surprised.
“’Roots’ won a Pulitzer Prize and became a cultural touchstone that inspired and united millions of Americans,” McKenzie said. “I knew that taking it out of the hands of thousands of schoolchildren in Knox County would be a grave injustice.”
Now, what this should immediately result in is a recognition that public backlash can reverse bad policy. There are over 120 other books that are currently on the Knox County banned book list, not to mention similar anti-literature lists from the state’s other counties. Every one of them should get similar backlash. Banning Roots failed to work because of the name recognition of the book, the local interest in its author, and its obvious value to children. I have no reason to believe that there aren’t plenty of other works of literature in the other 120-plus books on the list worthy of defending.
That’s where the work actually needs to be done, now. Because the only thing we should be banning is the banning of books.
When I was in high school, part of the mandatory social studies curriculum included watching the miniseries Roots in class over the course of several days. I remember it fondly, though I did get myself into a bit of trouble in the process. Apparently shouting things like “Hey, where is Geordi La Forge’s visor?” and “Oh, look, it’s the owner of McDowell’s!” is not appropriate fodder when watching what is indeed an important cultural touchstone for American history.
The miniseries was based on a book by Alex Haley, which follows generations of African slaves descending from slave Kunta Kinte, and highlights parts of what slave life was like in that shameful part of American history. The book won a Pulitzer in 1977, while the miniseries collected 9 Emmys and a Peabody award. And one county in the state of Tennessee just banned the book in public schools.
“Roots,” the renowned 1976 novel by Alex Haley that spurred a broad awakening in African American genealogy and history, has been banned by Knox County Schools.
“Prior to its release, the impact of slavery was easy to diminish or deny by those that benefited the most from that system,” said Annastasia Williams, bookshop director at The Bottom bookstore and cultural organization.
“‘Roots’ created an opening to reengage with how the history of slavery is taught in American schools and to the American public. Haley’s work showcased the violence, brutality, and aftermath of slavery, but it also showcased the resilience and resistance of Black people and families that spans generations. Both the book and subsequent TV miniseries were cultural phenomenons that started conversations, shifted perspectives, and contributed to a collective empathy that the U.S. had not seen or heard before.”
Knox County is apparently up to 119 total book titles banned from school libraries at this point. Nearly all of them are works that in some way engage in conversation about sexual experiences, race relations, or LGBTQ+ content. All of it is ridiculous, of course, as well as an attempt at infantilizing Tennessee children. Children, I’d be willing to wager, who are far more mature about such subjects than the dewy-eyed cretins cosplaying as functioning adults who are banning these books.
And this has to be a jump the shark moment when it comes to banning books. Roots is incredibly important as a major cultural moment in race relations and the historical understanding of slavery in America. Banning it isn’t about protecting children from inappropriate content. It isn’t about saving children from misinformation about American history. I would love to hear from anyone who wants to argue that the content portrayed in Roots is historically inaccurate. Go for it. I always enjoy someone who wants to demonstrate just how wrong they can be about something public.
This is about trying to bury the very real history of our country. Why? Because it makes some people feel bad? It makes it a bit harder to stand for the National Anthem at the University of Tennessee football game? Or maybe because a certain segment of the population would very much like to rewind the clock back to the 1800s?
Haley lived in Tennessee. There is a fucking statue of him in Morningside Park in Knoxville, within Knox County. So Knox County banned a book in schools that was written by an author who is celebrated with a statue in that same county. A statue for what?
It seems that in the future, students in the county won’t be able to tell you the answer to that question.
The patron saint of the “debate me, bro” grift is getting his due as most saints do: posthumously. The best thing that ever could have happened to people perpetrating “violent left” bullshit was Charlie Kirk being shuffled off this mortal coil by the predictable end result of his divisive, racist, bullying speech.
What should have been Exhibit (see appendices: A-ZZZZZZZ) of America’s globally unique gun violence problem instead became a rallying cry for the far right, most of whom were thrilled to see someone other than them sacrificed to the “cause,” rather than being expected to back up their Gadsden Flag bumper stickers by actually raising their AR-15s in the general direction of an autocracy in the making.
Multiple state legislators are pushing bills named after Charlie Kirk in red-coded states. These will be covered in future articles because while all the bills are stupid, each one is stupid in particular ways that deserve specific derision. They’re all predicated on the same lies and intellectual dishonesty Charlie Kirk personified. Like a lot of MAGA acolytes, Charlie Kirk believed the First Amendment not only guaranteed his right to spread his hate (which it does!) but also guaranteed him an audience and protection from the expected repercussions (which it definitely does not).
The Tennessee House of Representatives this week passed legislation by State Rep. Gino Bulso, R-Brentwood, to ensure college campuses remain beacons of free expression.
The Charlie Kirk Act, or House Bill 1476, requires public higher education institutions in Tennessee to adopt a policy on freedom of expression consistent with the University of Chicago’s 2015 policy, which underscores a university’s responsibility to promote “fearless freedom of debate and deliberation.” They will also adopt a policy on political and social action, as in the Kalven Report, that encourages institutional neutrality.
“Beacons of free expression” is in the eye of the beholders/bill sponsors. While this bill does try to limit heckler’s vetoes from determining what speakers colleges can or can’t host, it does so at the expense of the First Amendment with compelled speech. The bill says colleges can’t prevent speakers from speaking even if most students object to the speaker. Fair enough, I guess, but it also compels colleges to allow anyone to speak, even if it’s the sort of thing they would never endorse tacitly, much less deliberately.
But the bill [PDF] travels far beyond the nominal protections against heckler’s vetoes. It compels colleges (and college students!) to provide speakers with unobstructed access to an audience. While it’s one thing to tell publicly-funded state schools not to engage in viewpoint discrimination, it’s another (unconstitutional) thing entirely to tell students they cannot protest speakers they disagree with.
SECTION 2. Tennessee Code Annotated, Section 49-7-2404, is amended by adding the following as a new subdivision: (6) “Substantially obstruct or otherwise substantially interfere” includes, but is not limited to:
(A) Making noises with the intent of drowning out an invited speaker or hindering the audience from hearing the invited speaker; (B) Standing in between an invited speaker and the audience with the intent of blocking or impeding an audience member’s view of the speaker or the speaker’s view of the audience members; (C) Using signs or objects in a way to block or impede an audience member’s view of an invited speaker or the speaker’s view of the audience members; (D) Staging walk-outs during an event or in the middle of an invited speaker’s remarks that result in considerable disruption or distraction or the need to pause the event for any period of time, however short; and (E) Physically obstructing an invited speaker or an audience member from entering or attending an event.
That is some bullshit. The statute being amended deals with “time, place, and manner” restrictions allowed under the Constitution. This amendment says the First Amendment no longer matters. The following portions of the amendment obligate universities to punish (including expelling students or terminating faculty members) those who violate these new state-specific, named-after-Charlie-Kirk exemptions to the First Amendment.
In addition, violations of any part of this law allow speakers to bring lawsuits or file charges against students and staff members, which turns any perceived dissent into a cause of action.
And it goes further than that, ordering public entities to engage in viewpoint discrimination, which has always been a violation of the Constitution:
(a) Notwithstanding another law to the contrary, a public institution of higher education or a faculty member or agent of the institution shall not discriminate or retaliate against a person on account of the person’s:
(1) Sincere religious beliefs; or (2) Opposition to abortion, homosexuality, or transgender behavior, regardless of whether that opposition is motivated by religious or non-religious beliefs.
(b) A public institution of higher education or faculty member or agent of the institution shall not deny recognition to any student group, or deny any employer access to on-campus student interviews, on account of the student group’s or employer’s:
(1) Sincere religious beliefs; (2) Opposition to abortion, homosexuality, or transgender behavior, regardless of whether that opposition is motivated by religious or non-religious belief; or (3) Refusal to employ or admit into membership or leadership positions, individuals whose beliefs or lifestyle choices are incompatible with the sincere beliefs of the organization.
No similar carve-out is listed for students or faculty members whose viewpoints are opposed to ones the state is preparing to grant extra rights to. No cause of action is given to those who fall on the other end of the viewpoint spectrum should a college discriminate against their viewpoints or deny them access to an audience or refuse to act if their speech is greeted with the actions listed above as forbidden under this bill’s one-sided interpretation of the First Amendment.
There’s no way this law won’t immediately be blocked by courts once it’s enacted. It is absurdly and transparently unconstitutional. But it does get at least one thing right: this is how the person it’s named after — along with his acolytes — actually think the First Amendment works. As they see it, the First Amendment not only allows them to speak freely, but obtain uninterrupted access to a receptive audience. And all the while, they think the First Amendment should be their umbrella, sheltering them from the criticism their statements deliberately provoke.
Any governor who signs a bill like this similarly signals they don’t actually care about free speech. All they want is for people to be compelled to listen quietly and keep their comments to themselves.
Back in 2008, Chattanooga, Tennessee decided to build its own city-owned fiber broadband network on the back of its existing electrical utility, EPB. In the years since, the network has become one of the most popular in the nation, offering affordable, 25 gigabits per second fiber access to local residents.
It almost struggled to be, thanks to the usual bullshit behavior by regional telecom monopolies like Comcast. Comcast tried repeatedly to sue the network out of existence. As we’ve seen elsewhere, they also used co-funded “free market think tanks,” fake consumer groups, and for-hire pundits to seed lies in the local populace about how community broadband was a dangerous, inevitable boondoggle.
Benefits range from savings on upgraded smart city meters, local consumer savings on broadband access, free marketing due to the network’s popularity, improved health care outcomes, expanded business and remote work opportunities, improved tourism to revitalized parts of the city, and direct profits from the network itself:
“Since the project was fully completed in 2011, it has returned more than six times the original cost of the investment,” said Bento Lobo, Ph.D., lead author and director of the Department of Finance and Economics at the UTC Rollins College of Business – describing Chattanooga’s fiber network as “one of our community’s most meaningful and impactful investments.”
Telecom monopolies (and the various academics, consultants, lobbyists, and think tankers) spent decades insisting these sorts of networks would be a socialist nightmare and inevitable boondoggle. They did this, because they know that this sort of approach — treating broadband access as a community-owned utility and public good — is extremely effective and extremely popular.
And while telecoms have tried desperately to seed partisan division in the discussions surrounding municipal broadband viability, in reality they see broad, bipartisan support across the electorate. More often than not, they wind up getting built in Conservative cities and counties, thanks in part to frustration with Republican policies on telecom (which almost always involve coddling the regional monopoly).
Republicans and their telecom allies (including fake “taxpayer protection groups”) will breathlessly insist this is all a dangerous waste of taxpayer resources. But if you pay attention, you’ll notice they never have a single bad word to say about the billions taxpayers throw at regional giants like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon in exchange for broadband networks that are always, curiously, left half-completed.
Open access fiber networks come in a variety of flavors, including directly municipally owned, an extension of the existing city utility, a cooperative, or a public-private partnerships. These creative, locally controlled solutions really do work and are very popular; but routinely get derailed because the U.S., if you hadn’t noticed, is often too corrupt to function in the public interest.
Sixteen states still have laws, ghost written by telecom monopoly lawyers, either banning community owned networks or limiting how they can fund or where they can expand. And at the heat of COVID lockdowns, when these networks were showcasing their significant benefits to local communities, House Republicans responded by trying to ban them country wide.
One afternoon in mid-September, a group of middle school girls in rural East Tennessee decided to film a TikTok video while waiting to begin cheerleading practice.
In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. “Put your hands up,” she says, while a classmate flickers the lights on and off. As the camera pans across the classroom, several girls dramatically fall back on a desk or the floor and lie motionless, pretending they were killed.
When another student enters and surveys the bodies on the ground in poorly feigned shock, few manage to suppress their giggles. Throughout the video, which ProPublica obtained, a line of text reads: “To be continued……”
Penny Jackson’s 11-year-old granddaughter was one of the South Greene Middle School cheerleaders who played dead. She said the co-captains told her what to do and she did it, unaware of how it would be used. The next day, she was horrified when the police came to school to question her and her teammates.
By the end of the day, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department charged her and 15 other middle school cheerleaders with disorderly conduct for making and posting the video. Standing outside the school’s brick facade, Lt. Teddy Lawing said in a press conference that the girls had to be “held accountable through the court system” to show that “this type of activity is not warranted.” The sheriff’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident.
Widespread fear of school shootings is colliding with algorithms that accelerate the spread of the most outrageous messages to cause chaos across the country. Social videos, memes and retweets are becoming fodder for criminal charges in an era of heightened responses to student threats. Authorities say harsh punishment is crucial to deter students from making threatening posts that multiply rapidly and obscure their original source.
In many cases, especially in Tennessee, police are charging students for jokes and misinterpretations, drawing criticism from families and school violence prevention experts who believe a measured approach is more appropriate. Students are learning the hard way that they can’t control where their social media messages travel. In central Tennessee last fall, a 16-year-old privately shared a video he created using artificial intelligence, and a friend forwarded it to others on Snapchat. The 16-year-old was expelled and charged with threatening mass violence, even though his school acknowledged the video was intended as a private joke.
Other students have been charged with felonies for resharing posts they didn’t create. As ProPublica wrote in May, a 12-year-old in Nashville was arrested and expelled this year for sharing a screenshot of threatening texts on Instagram. He told school officials he was attempting to warn others and wanted to “feel heroic.”
In Greene County, the cheerleaders’ video sent waves through the small rural community, especially since it was posted several days after the fatal Apalachee High School shooting one state away. The Georgia incident had spawned thousands of false threats looping through social media feeds across the country. Lawing told ProPublica and WPLN at the time that his officers had fielded about a dozen social media threats within a week and struggled to investigate them. “We couldn’t really track back to any particular person,” he said.
But the cheerleaders’ video, with their faces clearly visible, was easy to trace.
Jackson understands that the video was in “very poor taste,” but she believes the police overreacted and traumatized her granddaughter in the process. “I think they blew it completely out of the water,” she said. “To me, it wasn’t serious enough to do that, to go to court.”
That perspective is shared by Makenzie Perkins, the threat assessment supervisor of Collierville Schools, outside of Memphis. She is helping her school district chart a different path in managing alleged social media threats. Perkins has sought specific training on how to sort out credible threats online from thoughtless reposts, allowing her to focus on students who pose real danger instead of punishing everyone.
The charges in Greene County, she said, did not serve a real purpose and indicate a lack of understanding about how to handle these incidents. “You’re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence,” she said. “Did those charges make that school safer? No.”
When 16-year-old D.C. saw an advertisement for an AI video app last October, he eagerly downloaded it and began roasting his friends. In one video he created, his friend stood in the Lincoln County High School cafeteria, his mouth and eyes moving unnaturally as he threatened to shoot up the school and bring a bomb in his backpack. (We are using D.C.’s initials and his dad’s middle name to protect their privacy, because D.C. is a minor.)
D.C. sent it to a private Snapchat group of about 10 friends, hoping they would find it hilarious. After all, they had all teased this friend about his dark clothes and quiet nature. But the friend did not think it was funny. That evening, D.C. showed the video to his dad, Alan, who immediately made him delete it as well as the app. “I explained how it could be misinterpreted, how inappropriate it was in today’s climate,” Alan recalled to ProPublica.
It was too late. One student in the chat had already copied D.C.’s video and sent it to other students on Snapchat, where it began to spread, severed from its initial context.
That evening, a parent reported the video to school officials, who called in local police to do an investigation. D.C. begged his dad to take him to the police station that night, worried the friend in the video would get in trouble — but Alan thought it could wait until morning.
The next day, D.C. rushed to school administrators to explain and apologize. According to Alan, administrators told D.C. they “understood it was a dumb mistake,” uncharacteristic for the straight-A student with no history of disciplinary issues. In a press release, Lincoln County High School said administrators were “made aware of a prank threat that was intended as a joke between friends.”
But later that day, D.C. was expelled from school for a year and charged with a felony for making a threat of mass violence. As an explanation, the sheriff’s deputy wrote in the affidavit, “Above student did create and distribute a video on social media threatening to shoot the school and bring a bomb.”
During a subsequent hearing where D.C. appealed his school expulsion, Lincoln County Schools administrators described their initial panic when seeing the video. Alan shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica. Officials didn’t know that the video was generated by AI until the school counselor saw a small logo in the corner. “Everybody was on pins and needles,” the counselor said at the hearing. “What are we going to do to protect the kids or keep everybody calm the next day if it gets out?” The school district declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions about how officials handled the incident, even though Alan signed a privacy waiver giving them permission to do so.
Alan watched D.C. wither after his expulsion: His girlfriend broke up with him, and some of his friends began to avoid him. D.C. lay awake at night looking through text messages he sent years ago, terrified someone decades later would find something that could ruin his life. “If they are punishing him for creating the image, when does his liability expire?” Alan wondered. “If it’s shared again a year from now, will he be expelled again?”
Alan, a teacher in the school district, coped by voraciously reading court cases and news articles that could shed light on what was happening to his son. He stumbled on a case hundreds of miles north in Pennsylvania, the facts of which were eerily similar to D.C.’s.
In April 2018, two kids, J.S. and his friend, messaged back and forth mocking another student by suggesting he looked like a school shooter. (The court record uses J.S. instead of his full name to protect the student’s anonymity.) J.S. created two memes and sent them to his friend in a private Snapchat conversation. His friend shared the memes publicly on Snapchat, where they were seen by 20 to 40 other students. School administrators permanently expelled J.S., so he and his parents sued the school.
In 2021, after a series of appeals, Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled in J.S.’s favor. While the memes were “mean-spirited, sophomoric, inartful, misguided, and crude,” the state Supreme Court justices wrote in their opinion, they were “plainly not intended to threaten Student One, Student Two, or any other person.”
The justices also shared their sympathy with the challenges schools faced in providing a “safe and quality educational experience” in the modern age. “We recognize that this charge is compounded by technological developments such as social media, which transcend the geographic boundaries of the school. It is a thankless task for which we are all indebted.”
After multiple disciplinary appeals, D.C.’s school upheld the decision to keep him out of school for a year. His parents found a private school that agreed to let him enroll, and he slowly emerged from his depression to continue his straight-A streak there. His charge in court was dismissed in December after he wrote a 500-word essay for the judge on the dangers of social media, according to Alan.
Thinking back on the video months later, D.C. explained that jokes about school violence are common among his classmates. “We try to make fun of it so that it doesn’t seem as serious or like it could really happen,” he said. “It’s just so widespread that we’re all desensitized to it.”
He wonders if letting him back to school would have been more effective in deterring future hoax threats. “I could have gone back to school and said, ‘You know, we can’t make jokes like that because you can get in big trouble for it,’” he said. “I just disappeared for everyone at that school.”
When a school district came across an alarming post on Snapchat in 2023, officials reached out to Safer Schools Together, an organization that helps educators handle school threats. In the post, a pistol flanked by two assault rifles lay on a rumpled white bedsheet. The text overlaid on the photo read, “I’m shooting up central I’m tired of getting picked on everyone is dying tomorrow.”
Steven MacDonald, training manager and development director for Safer Schools Together, recounted this story in a virtual tutorial posted last year on using online tools to trace and manage social media threats. He asked the school officials watching his tutorial what they would do next. “How do we figure out if this is really our student’s bedroom?”
According to MacDonald, it took his organization’s staff only a minute to put the text in quotation marks and run it through Google. A single local news article popped up showing that two kids had been arrested for sharing this exact Snapchat post in Columbia, Tennessee — far from the original district.
“We were able to reach out and respond and say, ‘You know what, this is not targeting your district,’” MacDonald said. Administrators were reassured there was a low likelihood of immediate violence, and they could focus on finding out who was recirculating the old threat and why.
In the training video, MacDonald reviewed skills that, until recently, have been more relevant to police investigators than school principals: How to reverse image search photos of guns to determine whether a post contains a stock image. How to use Snapchat to find contact names for unknown phone numbers. How to analyze the language in the social media posts of a high-risk student.
“We know that why you’re here is because of the increase and the sheer volume of these threats that you may have seen circulated, the non-credible threats that might have even ended up in your districts,” he said. Between last April and this April, Safer Schools Together identified drastic increases in “threat related behavior” and graphic or derogatory social media posts.
Back in the Memphis suburbs, Perkins and other Collierville Schools administrators have attended multiple digital threat assessment training sessions hosted by Safer Schools Together. “I’ve had to learn a lot more apps and social media than I ever thought,” Perkins said.
The knowledge, she said, came in handy during one recent incident in her district. Local police called the district to report that a student had called 911 and reported an Instagram threat targeting a particular school. They sent Perkins a photo of the Instagram profile and username. She began using open source websites to scour the internet for other appearances of the picture and username. She also used a website that allows people to view Instagram stories without alerting the user to gather more information.
With the help of police, Perkins and her team identified that the post was created by someone at the same IP address as the student who had reported the threat. The girl, who was in elementary school, confessed to police that she had done it.
The next day, Perkins and her team interviewed the student, her parents and teachers to understand her motive and goal. “It ended up that there had been some recent viral social media threats going around,” Perkins said. “This individual recognized that it drew in a lot of attention.”
Instead of expelling the girl, school administrators worked with her parents to develop a plan to manage her behavior. They came up with ideas for the girl to receive positive attention while stressing to her family that she had exhibited “extreme behavior” that signaled a need for intensive help. By the end of the day, they had tamped down concerns about immediate violence and created a plan of action.
In many other districts, Perkins said, the girl might have been arrested and expelled for a year without any support — which does not help move students away from the path of violence. “A lot of districts across our state haven’t been trained,” she said. “They’re doing this without guidance.”
Watching the cheerleaders’ TikTok video, it would be easy to miss Allison Bolinger, then the 19-year-old assistant coach. The camera quickly flashes across her standing and smiling in the corner of the room watching the pretend-dead girls.
Bolinger said she and the head coach had been next door planning future rehearsals. Bolinger entered the room soon after the students began filming and “didn’t think anything of it.” Cheerleading practice went forward as usual that afternoon. The next day, she got a call from her dad: The cheerleaders were suspended from school, and Bolinger would have to answer questions from the police.
“I didn’t even know the TikTok was posted. I hadn’t seen it,” she said. “By the time I went to go look for it, it was already taken down.” Bolinger said she ended up losing her job as a result of the incident. She heard whispers around the small community that she was responsible for allowing them to create the video.
Bolinger said she didn’t realize the video was related to school shootings when she was in the room. She often wishes she had asked them at the time to explain the video they were making. “I have beat myself up about that so many times,” she said. “Then again, they’re also children. If they don’t make it here, they’ll probably make it at home.”
Jackson, the grandmother of the 11-year-old in the video, blames Bolinger for not stopping the middle schoolers and faults the police for overreacting. She said all the students, whether or not their families hired a lawyer, got the same punishment in court: three months of probation for a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, which could be extended if their grades dropped or they got in trouble again. Each family had to pay more than $100 in court costs, Jackson said, a significant amount for some.
Jackson’s granddaughter successfully completed probation, which also involved writing and submitting a letter of apology to the judge. She was too scared about getting in trouble again to continue on the cheerleading team for the rest of the school year.
Jackson thinks that officials’ outsize response to the video made everything worse. “They shouldn’t even have done nothing until they investigated it, instead of making them out to be terrorists and traumatizing these girls,” she said.
Here’s how you know the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case represents something fundamentally broken in government accountability: within hours of two federal judges ordering his release and explicitly warning the government not to play games with him, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin went on X to repeat laughably false claims about Abrego while declaring that he “will never walk America’s streets again” and calling one of the judges “lawless” and “unhinged.”
That’s a Department of Homeland Security official publicly announcing the government’s intent to defy court orders while repeating laughable claims that judges have already called “bordering on fanciful.”
The backstory matters because it shows this isn’t just bureaucratic incompetence—it’s a pattern of lawlessness that continues even when judges explicitly call it out.
Of course, once they had cooked up a completely bogus indictment, based off of letting actual traffickers go freein exchange for claims about Abrego, suddenly it turned out that they were able to bring him back to the US… to face these laughable charges.
Multiple judges have called out the frivolous nature of the charges, and the US government said “well if you free him, we’ll just traffic him to some random third country that isn’t El Salvador.”
Which brings us to this week’s judicial smackdown—and the government’s immediate decision to make its intentions to ignore it clear.
On Wednesday, Judge Waverly Crenshaw ordered that Abrego be released from detention. There’s a lot to the ruling, but in short, the court is not persuaded that Abrego is a flight risk:
The insufficiency of this evidence is underscored by what is not in the record that normally warrants a finding that a defendant is at risk for nonappearance. The Government has presented no evidence that Abrego has failed to appear for court proceedings in the past, that he failed to abide by the protective orders Ms. Vasquez took out against him, or that he has otherwise ever shown a pattern of disrespect for the law. Nor has the Government presented evidence that Abrego has the financial means to finance flight, even if he wanted to. To the contrary, the Court has evidence before it that suggests that if the Court released Abrego on conditions, he would comply. As the Pretrial Services Report demonstrates, Abrego has reported to an ICE officer on four separate occasions from October 23, 2020 to January 2, 2024. Further, as the THP body camera footage from November 30, 2022 demonstrates, when Abrego was pulled over that night, although not fully truthful, he did not flee or attempt to flee, was cooperative, answered the officer’s questions, and provided the officer with the information requested to the extent he was able to do so. This cuts against the notion that Abrego disrespects the law so much that he would voluntarily avoid future court proceedings or court orders if released.
Perhaps more importantly, the judge sees no reason to believe that Abrego is “a danger to the community.”
As the Court discussed above, the Government’s general statements about the crimes brought against Abrego, and the evidence it has in support of those crimes, do not prove Abrego’s dangerousness. See supra, Section III.B.2.a. Although the Government has presented evidence by a preponderance that Abrego transported minors, there is no solid evidence in the record indicating any of them, or others transported, were physically or emotionally harmed by Abrego. And Abrego is correct that these crimes are not those that are considered typically violent such that a presumption of detention is warranted. See supra, Section III.B.2.a. While the Court does give some weight to Agent Joseph’s testimony that CW-1 and CW-1 stated Abrego was involved with guns and drugs while participating in the human smuggling conspiracy, the Court notes that this testimony was based on witness statements that evolved throughout the interview process, and so it alone cannot show that Abrego is a danger to the community such that he cannot be released.
Those “evolving” witness statements are detailed by the court and make the claims by the informant—again who asked for and received protections from the US government for making these claims against Abrego—look pretty sketchy.
Indeed, the court calls out the DOJ’s “poor attempts” to claim that Abrego is a high-ranking member of MS-13. Or even connected to MS-13 at all, saying that the DOJ’s argument “border[ed] on fanciful.”
Nor does the Government’s poor attempts to tie Abrego to MS-13 get it there. Of the three witnesses Agent Joseph testified about that discussed Abrego’s purported affiliation with MS-13, the closest any of them come to stating that Abrego is a member of MS-13 is two witnesses stating he was “familial” with gang members and a third witness stating she “believed” him to be a member. Entirely absent from the record, however, are any indications that such “belief” is rooted in fact or that such “familial” nature came from his actual membership in or support of MS-13 rather than the simple fact that he, like many members of MS-13, is El Salvadorian. For instance, there is no evidence before the Court that Abrego: has markings or tattoos showing gang affiliation; has working relationships with known MS-13 members; ever told any of the witnesses that he is a MS-13 member; or has ever been affiliated with any sort of gang activity.12 To the contrary, Agent Joseph presented testimony based on statements from cooperating witnesses that Abrego transported both Barrio 18 and MS-13 members alike, and was cordial with both during those trips. This cuts against the already slim evidence demonstrating Abrego is a member of MS-13. Based on the record before it, for the Court to find that Abrego is member of or in affiliation with MS13, it would have to make so many inferences from the Government’s proffered evidence in its favor that such conclusion would border on fanciful.
The magistrate judge on that same case (the one who initially argued Abrego should be freed) has put a 30-day stay on the ruling to allow the government to appeal (meaning that Abrego Garcia will spend today, which apparently is his 30th birthday, still detained).
Around the same time, over in Maryland, Judge Paula Xinis, who is handling the original Abrego case (the “facilitate his return” case), issued an order saying that Abrego needs to be returned to Maryland, but more importantly put a ton of restrictions on the federal government not to fuck with Abrego:
By Order of this Court, Defendants (1) are prohibited from taking Abrego Garcia into immediate ICE custody in Tennessee; (2) must restore him to his ICE Order of Supervision in Baltimore; and (3) if they initiate third-country removal proceedings, must provide seventy-two (72) business hours’ notice to Abrego Garcia and his counsel of the intended third country, as more fully detailed below.
Judge Xinis reminds everyone how badly the DOJ fucked around on this case and notes in passing that sanctions are still on the line.
For three months after this Court issued the injunction, Defendants disclaimed any authority to facilitate his return and disregarded court orders. Defendants’ defiance and foot-dragging are, to be sure, the subject of a separate sanctions motion. ECF No. 195. The Court will not recount this troubling history in detail, other than to note Defendants’ persistent lack of transparency with the tribunal adds to why further injunctive relief is warranted.
Eventually, on June 6, 2025, Defendants returned Abrego Garcia much the same way they had removed him—in secret and with no advance notice. Nonetheless, he is back, and the first part of this Court’s injunctive relief has been met.But Defendants have demonstrated no appetite for fulfilling the second part: to restore Abrego Garcia to the status quo ante.
In a footnote, Judge Xinis separately notes that to this day, the government hasn’t even explained how Abrego got back and no one in the government—at any point—informed his family or lawyers, who all found out about it on the news.
The judge isn’t saying that the government can’t start immigration proceedings against him, but that it must actually allow for the kind of due process he’s been denied this year:
That said, once Abrego Garcia is restored to ICE supervision in this District, he may be ordered to appear at the Baltimore Field Office for commencement of immigration proceedings, and these proceedings may or may not include lawful arrest, detention and eventual removal. So long as such actions are taken within the bounds of the Constitution and applicable statutes, this Court will have nothing further to say.
But Judge Xinis wasn’t born yesterday. She knows how much the DOJ has been lying to her.
Defendants have done little to assure the Court that absent intervention, Abrego Garcia’s due process rights will be protected.
And this is where McLaughlin’s immediate violation becomes so telling. Rather than acknowledge the judicial findings or express any intent to comply with court orders, DHS doubled down on the same fabricated narrative that judges have systematically dismantled.
McLaughlin’s tweets weren’t just inappropriate—they were a confession. Hours after one judge ordered Abrego’s release and another explicitly prohibited DHS from taking him into ICE custody, McLaughlin declared he “will never walk America’s streets again”—publicly announcing the government’s intent to violate both orders.
Separately, Abrego’s lawyers filed a motion with Judge Crenshaw arguing that McLaughlin’s statements violate local court rules designed to protect defendants’ right to a fair trial. The filing makes clear this isn’t just about inappropriate tweeting:
These are exactly the kinds of statements that Local Criminal Rule 2.01 recognizes are likely to prejudice Mr. Abrego’s right to a fair trial, as Mr. Abrego has already argued about similar statements the government has made. (See Dkt 69 at 11-13; Dkt 94 at 2). The government has persisted in its efforts to use press statements outside of court to persuade the public of its allegation that Mr. Abrego is a member of MS-13—an allegation the Court described, just yesterday, as “border[ing] on the fanciful.” (Dkt. 95 at 32). These repeated public statements are likely to taint the jury pool. They are likely to endanger Mr. Abrego and his family. And they violate this Court’s Local Criminal Rules and Mr. Abrego’s due process rights.
Indeed, McLaughlin’s unhinged tweets seem only likely to help Abrego, as it makes it clear that since the government can’t stop lying about him, there’s no way he can get a fair trial.
But the real story here isn’t legal strategy—it’s the gleeful lawlessness on display. This isn’t bureaucratic incompetence or even garden-variety cover-ups. This is a government so committed to never admitting error that they will fabricate evidence, defy court orders, and publicly attack federal judges rather than acknowledge they accidentally trafficked an innocent man to a torture camp.
The cruelty isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. McLaughlin’s tweets weren’t a communications mistake—they were a deliberate middle finger to two federal courts and a public declaration that this administration considers itself above judicial oversight. They’d rather destroy one man’s life than admit their “mass deportation” strategy is a lawless mess that sends innocent people to be tortured.
That’s not just evil. It’s really fucking stupid evil, performed for an audience that cheers when government officials brag about ignoring judges. And that should terrify anyone who thinks courts might someday protect them from an out-of-control executive branch.
Book bans are all the rage these days, as you likely well know. Far too many people, and folks in government more importantly, seem to have read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 not as a lesson in the dangers of new media, but as some sort of instruction manual for how to treat literature. But the real story here is that a bunch of cowardly state and federal politicians are placating the desires largely of the religious right, who are seeking to tightly control the books that children have access to in public, secular schools. And if you can’t manage to understand how plainly that is the antithesis of our form of government, then you’re beyond help.
But because authoritarianism makes a fool of itself as a habit, and religiously-based authoritarianism all the moreso, then end result of these attempts at censorship always eventually reveal themselves as absurd. And if you need an example of that, you need only look at the state of Tennessee.
Magic Tree House author Mary Pope Osborne, children’s poet Shel Silverstein and Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson have joined Judy Blume, Sarah J. Maas, Eric Carle and Kurt Vonnegut on a mind-boggling list of hundreds of books purged from some Tennessee school libraries.
The removals are the result of a growing political movement to control information through book banning. In 2024, the state legislature amended the “Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022” to specify that any materials that “in whole or in part” contain any “nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse” are inappropriate for all students and do not belong in a school library. This change means books are not evaluated as a whole, and excerpts can be considered without context, if they have any content that is deemed to cross these lines. This leaves no room for educators and librarians to curate collections that reflect the real world and serve the educational needs of today’s students.
And because you have groups of far-right activists marching around looking for any scintilla of material over which they can manufacture faux outrage, you get these examples of books being banned for their terrible, awful, smutty content. Such as a Magic Tree House, book that was banned because it had this pornographical image on its cover:
Special thanks to Mike Masnick for briefly allowing me to post porn images on Techdirt. And for all of you whose naughty bits are currently twitching due to that book cover, I offer you my sincerest apologies.
But if you thought that was bad, check out this panel image from a Calvin & Hobbes book that got it banned. Here we have the nude image of a child on full display.
Now, I sure hope everyone realizes that the above is a dalliance into sarcasm, because I was laying it on quite thick. I grew up on Calvin & Hobbes, not to mention Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic, which was also banned. Why? More butts, that’s why. And, because the universe is not without a sense of irony, one school even had to ban a book authored by an alumnus.
Oak Ridge Schools, where a significant number of the bans target art history books, even removed Richard Jolley: Sculptor of Glass, a collection of works by the artist, who graduated from Oak Ridge High School.
“Regarding the book written by Mr. Jolley, we were thrilled to feature a book written by an ORHS alumni on our shelves and were equally disappointed to have to remove it,” Molly Gallagher Smith, an Oak Ridge Schools spokeswoman, told WBIR. “Unfortunately, as an artist, Mr. Jolley’s book features depictions of the human body that are in direct violation of the law.”
There are more and the bans hit all the notes you would expect: LGBTQ+ material, books about the Holocaust, books about African American contributions to government and science, and, because of course, Fahrenheit 451 itself.
Now, this is indeed all absurd, but it isn’t remotely funny. There is a ton of literature, hundreds of books, that are being banned under this Tennessee law. Many of them reportedly without going through any review process.
And many of the bans are coming without any review or discussion. The Tennessee Association of School Libraries found in a survey of its members that in 20% of school districts, books were removed from the shelves at the command of district leaders without any sort of review process. “Librarians and educators are concerned that we will end up pulling a massive amount of books without looking at the books as a whole,” one member said in the survey. “It’s a slippery slope,” said another, “and I’m fearful of the next topic that will be regulated.”
Open up book bans to the frothy-mouthed mob. What could possibly go wrong, other than keeping valuable literature out of the hands of our children?
New laws in Georgia and New Mexico are requiring harsher punishments for students — or anyone else — who make threats against schools, despite growing evidence that a similar law is ensnaring students who posed no risk to others.
ProPublica and WPLN News have documented how a 2024 Tennessee law that made threats of mass violence at school a felony has led to students being arrested based on rumors and for noncredible threats. In one case, a Hamilton County deputy arrested an autistic 13-year-old in August for saying his backpack would blow up, though the teen later said he just wanted to protect the stuffed bunny inside.
In the same county almost two months later, a deputy tracked down and arrested an 11-year-old student at a family birthday party. The child later explained he had overheard one student asking if another was going to shoot up the school tomorrow, and that he answered “yes” for him. Last month, the public charter school agreed to pay the student’s family $100,000 to settle a federal lawsuit claiming school officials wrongly reported him to police. The school also agreed to implement training on how to handle these types of incidents, including reporting only “valid” threats to police.
Tennessee requires schools to assess whether threats of mass violence are valid before expelling students. But the felony law does not hold police to the same standard, which has led to the arrests of students who had no intent to disrupt school or carry out a threat.
In Tennessee’s recent legislative session, civil and disability rights advocates unsuccessfully pushed to change the law to specify that police could arrest only students who make credible threats. They argued that very young students and students who act disruptively as a result of a disability should be excluded from felony charges.
Several Tennessee lawmakers from both parties also voiced their dissatisfaction with the school threats law during the session, citing the harm done to children who did not pose real danger. “I’m still struggling through the unintended consequences because I’m still not entirely happy with what we did before,” Sen. Kerry Roberts, a Republican, said at a committee hearing in April. “We’re still struggling to get that right.”
But Greg Mays, the deputy commissioner of the Department of Safety and Homeland Security, told a committee of lawmakers in March that in his “informed opinion,” the law was having a “deterrent effect” on students who make threats. Mays told ProPublica that the number of threats his office was tracking had decreased since the law went into effect. His office did not immediately release that number and previously denied requests for the number of threats it has tracked, calling the information “confidential.”
According to data ProPublica obtained through a records request, the number of students criminally charged is growing, not shrinking. This past school year through the end of March, the number of charges for threats of mass violence in juvenile court has jumped to 652, compared to 519 the entire previous school year, when it was classified as a misdemeanor. Both years, students were rarely found “delinquent,” which is equivalent to guilty in adult court. The youngest child charged so far this year is 6.
Rather than tempering its approach, Tennessee toughened it this year. The Legislature added another, higher-level felony to the books for anyone who “knowingly” makes a school threat against four or more people if others “reasonably” believe the threat will be carried out. Legal and disability rights advocates told lawmakers they worried the new law would result in even more confusion among police and school officials who handle threats.
Despite the outcry over increased arrests in Tennessee, two states followed its lead by passing laws that will crack down harder on hoax threats.
In New Mexico, lawmakers increased the charge for a shooting threat from a misdemeanor to a felony, in response to the wave of school threats over the previous year. To be charged with a felony, a person must “intentionally and maliciously” communicate the threat to terrorize others, cause the evacuation of a public building or prompt a police response.
Critics of the bill warned that even with the requirement to prove intent, it was written too vaguely and could harm students.
“This broad definition could criminalize what is described as ‘thought crimes’ or ‘idle threats,’ with implications for statements made by children or juveniles without a full appreciation of the consequences,” the public defenders’ office argued, according to a state analysis of an earlier, similar version of the legislation.
After a 14-year-old shot and killed four people at Apalachee High School in Georgia last September, the state’s House Speaker Jon Burns vowed to take tougher action against students who make threats.
He sponsored legislation that makes it a felony to issue a death threat against a person at a school that terrorizes people or causes an evacuation. The law, which went into effect in April, says someone can be charged either if they intend to cause such harm or if they make a threat “in reckless disregard of the risk” of that harm.
Neither Burns nor the sponsor of the New Mexico bill responded to requests for comment.
Georgia also considered a bill that would treat any 13- to 17-year-old who makes a terroristic threat at school as an adult in court. But after pushback from advocates, the bill’s author, Sen. Greg Dolezal, a Republican, removed threats from the list of offenses that could result in transfer to adult court.
During a March committee hearing, Dolezal acknowledged advocates’ concerns with the original bill language. “We recognize that there is actually a difference between people who actually commit these crimes and minors who are unwisely threatening but perhaps without an intent to ever actually follow through on it,” he said.
Other states also considered passing harsher penalties for school threats.
In Alabama, Rep. Alan Baker, a Republican, sponsored a bill that removes the requirement that a threat be “credible and imminent” to result in a criminal charge. The bill passed easily in both chambers but did not go through the final steps necessary to make it through the Legislature.
Baker said the broader version of the penalty was intended to target hoax threats that cause panic at schools. A first offense would be a misdemeanor; any threats after that would be a felony. “You’re just talking about a very disruptive type of scenario, even though it may be determined that it was just a hoax,” Baker said. “That’s why there needed to be something that would be a little bit more harsh.”
Baker told ProPublica that he plans to reintroduce the bill next session.
Pennsylvania is considering legislation that would make threats against schools a felony, regardless of credibility. The bill would also require offenders to pay restitution, including the cost of supplies and compensation for employees’ time spent responding to the threat.
In a memo last December, state Sen. Michele Brooks, a Republican, cited the “cruel and extremely depraved hoax” threats following Nashville’s Covenant School shooting as the reason for the proposal. “These calls triggered a massive emergency response, creating perilous conditions for students, teachers and public safety agencies alike,” she wrote.
The ACLU of Pennsylvania opposes the legislation, calling it a “broad expansion” of current law that could lead to “excessive” costs for children.
Pennsylvania’s Legislature adjourns at the end of December.
There are lots of things we could be doing to limit school shootings. But none of those have been tried because most people, lobbyists, and politicians continue to believe issuing “thoughts and prayers” statements while standing on children’s graves is the absolute utmost they should be expected to do.
Instead of common sense measures that have managed to keep every other First World country almost completely free of school shootings, the US continues to take a hands-off approach… I mean, not counting the pallbearers asked to deliver innocent children to their final place of rest.
One of the so-called solutions is making tech companies richer while not actually making kids any safer. Lots of firms are offering “gun detection tech” to schools which seem to be more prone to false positives than life-saving gun detections.
While a lot of recent attention has been directed at Evolv — due to its failures pretty much everywhere (hospitals, schools, subways) it’s been deployed — this recent tragedy adds another tech company to the list of entities that are well-meaning, but ultimately useless, when lives are on the line. Here’s the latest bad news/worse news, as reported by Nashville (TN) Fox affiliate, WZTV.
The technology system meant to prevent school shootings failed to detect the Antioch High School shooter’s gun, an official confirms.
A Metro Nashville Public Schools’ spokesperson says based on the camera location and the shooter in relation to the camera, it did not detect the weapon.
MNPS adds the camera did activate an alarm trigger when law enforcement and school resource officers arrived with their weapons.
The technology, Omnialert, is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) gun detection used in all Metro Schools.
Gun detection tech isn’t much use when it only detects weapons carried by law enforcement officers deployed to neutralize an active shooter. Obviously, everyone in the building and the underperforming AI expected an armed response to a school shooting. “Detecting” blatantly obvious things isn’t anyone’s definition of “detection,” a term that’s normally associated with acts of intuition where things not immediately apparent are sussed out by instinct, skill, or… I don’t know… reliable tech.
I’m sure Omnilert appreciates the inadvertent typo, which will help muddy the search results and brush a bit of its earned shame off its shoulders. The company is Omnilert and it claims it’s the ultimate blend of military know-how and AI magic. (Omnialert is a brand linked to othernon-gun detection products.)
Our expertise in AI has roots in the U.S. Department of Defense and DARPA related to real-time target recognition and threat classification. That military focus on high reliability and precision carried through to the development of our AI threat detection that goes beyond identifying guns to finding active shooter threats.
We employ a data-centric AI methodology that prioritizes high-quality training data. While traditional methods focus on data volume, sourcing millions of gun images, we take a quality-over-quantity approach. Our training data is hand-curated with rich annotations that improve accuracy and increase reliability.
Cool cool cool. Thanks for letting us know your failure was bespoke (“hand-curated”), rather than just off-the-shelf “hey man is that a gun” detection algos that aren’t backstopped by human assistance. If nothing else, it lets us know the company has a bit of blood on its “curating” hands before we even have to enter the discovery phase of post-school shooting litigation.
503 mass shootings in the U.S. and 330 incidents in schools highlight the ongoing need to provide layers of protection including technologies such as AI visual gun detection
… and ends with this:
Protect your people, facilities, and operations with Omnilert’s AI-powered visual gun detection. Act now to transform your security cameras into proactive, life-saving tools.
Maybe the tech is better than this very limited sample size shows. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, it failed when it mattered most, resulting in the killing of one student and the wounding of another. And only the most extreme cynic would claim that’s an acceptable loss in comparison to other mass shootings.
Taxpayers were asked (although not explicitly) to pay for a product that didn’t do the only thing it’s supposed to do when it mattered most. And most likely they’ll be expected to keep paying for it because it might do the job the next time around. There are many useful ways to limit gun violence, but this nation will never go for them. Instead, we’ll just keep sacrificing kids to the AI gods because somehow that’s more acceptable than asking citizens to subject themselves to a bit more scrutiny before being allowed to purchase and carry deadly weapons.
