Sunday, February 18, 2018






No, there haven’t been 18 school shootings so far this year

If you’ve been online in the last 24-hours you’ve probably heard this factoid about the number of school shootings that have (supposedly) taken place so far this year:

But as the Washington Post points out today, this claim comes from the anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety which uses some dubious methods to pad the numbers.

Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counts as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.

Also listed on the organization’s site is an incident from Jan. 20, when — at 1 a.m. — a man was shot at a sorority event on the campus of Wake Forest University. A week later, as a basketball game was being played at a Michigan high school, someone fired several rounds from a gun in the parking lot. No one was injured, and it was past 8 p.m., well after classes had ended for the day, but Everytown still labeled it a school shooting…

Just five of Everytown’s 18 school shootings listed for 2018 happened during school hours and resulted in any physical injury. Another three appeared to be intentional shootings but didn’t hurt anyone. Two more involved guns — one carried by a school police officer and the other by a licensed peace officer who ran a college club — that were unintentionally fired and, again, led to no injuries. At least seven of Everytown’s 18 shootings took place outside normal school hours.

Even Everytown agrees the first shooting doesn’t belong on their list, telling the Post (after the story went up today) that it would stop counting the suicide near an empty school as a school shooting.

This isn’t the first time the Post had called out misleading claims based on Everytown’s counting methods for school shootings. In 2015 one of the Post’s fact checkers gave Sen. Chris Murphy four Pinocchios for this misleading claim, “Since Sandy Hook there has been a school shooting, on average, every week.”

The source for the claim then, and for Murphy’s recent statement, is a report by Everytown for Gun Safety, which describes itself as “a movement of Americans working together to end gun violence and build safer communities.”

The group keeps a tally of school shootings since Sandy Hook, counting at least 126 as of June 8, 2015…

This list comprises a variety of shootings at or near a school, including: attempted and committed suicides, accidental discharges, armed robberies, gang fights, shootings resulting from altercations, and shootings similar to the rampages at Sandy Hook or in Charleston, where a person intends to kill multiple people…

There are many ways to define school shooting. But applying the “reasonable person” standard, as is the standard at The Fact Checker, it is difficult to see how many of the incidents included in Everytown’s list — such as suicide in a car parked on a campus or a student accidentally shooting himself when emptying his gun and putting it away in his car before school — would be considered a “school shooting” in the context of Sandy Hook.

The fact is, even if there were five school shootings this year, that’s more than we want to see. Reality is bad enough without padding the numbers with incidents that have no relation to what most people think of as a school shooting. Everytown is a repeat offender in efforts to mislead people about the facts.

SOURCE





Catholic School Fired Gay Teacher Because She Got Married, Church Says

A gay schoolteacher has been fired by a Miami Catholic school after marrying her same-sex partner in an apparent violation of church rules, church officials said.

Archdiocese of Miami officials confirmed to the Miami Herald that first-grade teacher Jocelyn Morffi lost her job at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic School on Thursday, the day after she returned from her Florida Keys wedding.

“This weekend I married the love of my life and unfortunately I was terminated from my job as a result,” Morffi said in a post on social media. “In their eyes I’m not the right kind of Catholic for my choice in partner.”

Several parents say they were surprised and upset at Morffi’s firing, which they learned of in a letter from the school Thursday evening. About 20 parents went to the school Friday morning to demand an explanation.

“We were extremely livid. They treated her like a criminal and they didn’t even let her get her things out of her classroom,” said Cintia Cini, the parent of one of the children in Morffi’s class.

Cini told the newspaper the parents didn’t know Morffi was gay, but they didn’t care about her sexual orientation.

“Our only concern was the way she was with our children, the way she taught our children and this woman by far was one of the best teachers out there,” Cini said.

She said the principal spoke to each of the parents but did not give a reason for the firing.

The school didn’t respond to a request for comment, but archdiocese spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta confirmed Morffi broke her contract under church rules of conduct.

“As a teacher in a Catholic school their responsibility is partly for the spiritual growth of the children,” Agosta said. “One has to understand that in any corporation, institution or organization there are policies and procedures and teachings and traditions that are adhered to. If something along the way does not continue to stay within that contract, then we have no other choice.”

Morffi worked for the school for almost seven years. She also coached basketball and ran a volunteer organization called #teachHope70x70 that takes students around downtown Miami on weekends to distribute meals to the homeless, said Morffi’s friend, Katerina Reyes-Gutierrez.

SOURCE






What Left-Wing Educators Don't Teach During 'Black History Month'

Larry Elder
   
When will Black History Month be … history?

Apart from the bizarre notion that educators should set aside one month to salute the historical achievements of one race apart from and above the historical achievements of other races, Black History Month appears to omit a lot of black history.

About slavery, do our mostly left-wing educators teach that slavery was not unique to America and is as old as humankind? As economist and author Thomas Sowell says: “More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.”

Are students taught that “race-based preferences,” sometimes called “affirmative action,” were opposed by several civil rights leaders? While National Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young supported a type of “Marshall Plan” for a period of 10 years to make up for historical discrimination, his board of directors refused to endorse the plan. In rejecting it, the president of the Urban League in Pittsburgh said the public would ask, “What in blazes are these guys up to? They tell us for years that we must buy [nondiscrimination] and then they say, ‘It isn’t what we want.’” A member of the Urban League in New York objected to what he called “the heart of it — the business of employing Negroes (because they are Negroes).” Bayard Rustin was one of Martin Luther King Jr.‘s key lieutenants and helped to plan and organize the civil rights march in DC that culminated in King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin, an openly gay black man, also opposed race-based preferences.

Do our left-wing educators, during Black History Month, note that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s celebrated New Deal actually hurt blacks? According to Cato Institute’s Jim Powell, blacks lost as many as 500,000 jobs as a result of anti-competitive, job-killing regulations of the New Deal. Powell writes: “The flagship of the New Deal was the National Industrial Recovery Act, passed in June 1933. It authorized the president to issue executive orders establishing some 700 industrial cartels, which restricted output and forced wages and prices above market levels. The minimum wage regulations made it illegal for employers to hire people who weren’t worth the minimum because they lacked skills. As a result, some 500,000 blacks, particularly in the South, were estimated to have lost their jobs. Marginal workers, like unskilled blacks, desperately needed an expanding economy to create more jobs. Yet New Deal policies made it harder for employers to hire people. FDR tripled federal taxes between 1933 and 1940. … By giving labor unions the monopoly power to exclusively represent employees in a workplace, the [1935] Wagner Act had the effect of excluding blacks, since the dominant unions discriminated against blacks.”

Are students taught that gun control, widely embraced by today’s black leadership, began as a means to deny free blacks the right to own guns? In ruling that blacks were chattel property in the Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney warned of that the consequences of ruling otherwise would mean that blacks would be able to own guns. If blacks were “entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens,” said Taney, “it would give persons of the Negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one state of the union, the right … to keep and carry arms wherever they went … endangering the peace and safety of the state.”

Are students taught that generations of civil rights leaders opposed immigration — both legal and illegal immigration? After the Civil War, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass implored employers to hire blacks over new immigrants. Twenty-five years later, Booker T. Washington pleaded with Southern industrialists to hire blacks over new immigrants: “One third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. … To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South: Cast down your bucket where you are. Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fireside.”

About illegal immigration, an issue that nearly all of the today’s so-called black leaders simply ignore, Coretta Scott King signed a letter urging Congress to retain harsh sanctions against employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. The letter said: “We are concerned … that … the elimination of employer sanctions will cause another problem — the revival of the pre-1986 discrimination against black and brown U.S. and documented workers, in favor of cheap labor — the undocumented workers. This would undoubtedly exacerbate an already severe economic crisis in communities where there are large numbers of new immigrants.”

These are just a few historical and inconvenient notes left on the cutting room floor during Black History Month.

SOURCE


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