printPresident Trump made a remarkable effort, EVEN HISTORICAL, hosting and listening to a discussion with victims of school shootings, including students and teachers from Parkland, Florida, as well as victims from the Columbine and Sandy Hook shootings.
Alas, CNN’s “legal analyst,” Jeffrey Toobin, pooh-poohed the event POTUS had held where a large group of school-shootings survivors exchanged views amicably, politely and so much more constructively than on any of CNN’s putrid panels.
3:09 minutes into this segment, a bereaved dad, Andrew Pollack, spoke about daughter Meadow Pollack, shot by “some animal” free to roam. “We should’ve fixed the schools,” roared Pollack. “I’m pissed!” The grieving Mr. Pollack focused the debate considerably. “It is not about gun laws. That is another fight, another battle. Let’s fix the schools and then you guys can battle it out whatever you want. But we need our children safe.”
True. We’ve arrived at a point where guards and metal detectors at the entrance to public venues—schools, amusement parks, concert halls, ballgames—are in order. Like in Israel.
UPDATE (2/22): I clean forgot to mention Darrell Scott, yet another bereaved parent from 1999, who runs a program emphasizing the promotion of connectedness and comity. He pointed out that diversity enforcement increases division and anger.
Conversely, the competing CNN TownHall, also with students, parents, lawmakers—but of a different stripe and temperament—showcased incivility and divisions. Boorish parent Fred Guttenberg berated a patient and stoic Sen. Marco Rubio.
To judge from what the rather mediocre students said at the CNN townhall, their education transmits sentimentality over reason, attitude and mush over canon and curriculum. They’ve been forced-fed a pedagogic diet of pop psychology by female teachers who promote every mythical, politically correct orthodoxy that pervades the Zeitgeist. Their parents were not that different. The apple never falls far from the tree.
With no moderation, if only for maintaining manners, from activist journo Jake Tapper of CNN, the students of Stoneman Douglas High hurled insults at Sen. Rubio and NRA representative Dana Loesch, showing themselves to be simple-minded, yet arrogant, liberals.
Loudmouth Sheriff Israel, of Broward County, was on easy street, surrounded as he was by the social justice warrior students of Stoneman Douglas High. None of these inquiring minds asked the sheriff about his department’s abysmal failures in stopping Nikolas Cruz.
Democratic Parkland congressman Rep. Ted Deutch regaled the predictable crowd with windy, empty, grandstanding. He got louder as the evening progressed and he saw Rubio isolated and Loesch desperately trying to please.
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