1. Ignore the dire warnings
Kids have gone back to school and, according to at least one former diplomat and journalist turned Boston professor, face “new dangers” including school violence, heat, and Covid.
Along with weirdly including the stabbings of four Idaho college students in her segment on gun violence, she skims over the fact that Covid was never a serious health threat for kids. The CDC estimated at the end of last year that 90% of children have been infected at least once with Covid. Less than 1% of all Covid deaths were those under 18, and the biggest threat to children and teens may have been the effects of lockdowns and masks rather than the disease itself.
School is still the safest place for kids
But if you know (or are) a parent of a school-aged kid, chances are you know someone who’s questioned whether their children are safe during the day.
Since Columbine, kids have received training at school on what to do if there’s an active shooter on campus. Teachers and principals have attended even more extensive trainings on how to protect kids. There are lockdown drills, practiced as regularly as fire drills or, for this California kid, earthquake drills.
Yet school is still the safest place for kids by any considerable metric.
In 2018, just shy of the 20th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting, the statistical probability of a public school student getting killed by a gun on any given day was 1 in 614 million. Of those kids, most were shot at home, on the street, by accident, or as bystanders during a crime. Even the New York Times had to admit that, “While homicide is among the leading causes of death for young people, school is a relative haven compared with the home or the neighborhood. According to the most recent federal data, between 1992 and 2015, less than 3 percent of homicides of children 5 to 18 years old occurred at school, and less than 1 percent of suicides.”
During Covid lockdowns, shootings soared to the #1 cause of death among children 18 and under (and still are, even post-lockdown). And still, out of 2,4000 children who were killed by guns in 2022, just 32 were killed at school. Even that number includes kids who were killed after school hours (during fights after school, shootings after football games, and similar instances.)
If you’re more worried about sexual predators, school is still safer. Most cases of child sexual abuse involve family members or caregivers who know the child.
We humans have a tendency to be afraid of the wrong things. We hop in our cars without a second thought but get nervous when our plane is taking off. We don’t let kids roam the streets or walk to the park when the reality is that missing person reports involving minors fell by 40% between 1997 and 2015…while the rate of population went up. And we balk at sending our kids to school when it’s – still – one of the safest possible places for them to be. Even if we’re not there.
2. The media’s making me defend Lauren Boebert.
Sometimes it’s difficult to evaluate a politician’s ethics by looking at their behavior on Capitol Hill. Did they vote for a bill because they believed in it, or was there some backroom hand-shaking, fundraising, swindling going on? It’s hard to say. But it’s easy to evaluate their character when you see them exhibit arrogant, entitled behavior.
Rep. Lauren Boebert got kicked out of a Denver performing arts theater for doing just about everything your mother told you not to do at nice events. She’s accused of: vaping, talking continusously during the show, singing loudly, groping her date, getting her date to grope her back, taking photos with a flash, and topping it all off by “don’t-you-know-who-I-am”ing those whose unpleasant job it was to remove her.
The media could stick to all that and have plenty to keep them busy. But some, like Newsweek, had to take it too far with their story, “Lauren Boebert May Have Broken the Law With Theater Fondling.”
They reached out to the Denver Police Department and the district attorney’s office – hopefully, I’m assuming – to see if she’d be charged. Rather like the journalists who reach out to Facebook to ask if people they don’t like will be censored.
I don’t like defending people who behave badly, but when the media turns bad behavior into a crime, I have little choice. It’s a pain.
3. Conservatives got Barbie all wrong.
I wrote a few weeks ago about my experience seeing the Barbie movie. It’s not at all about what many conservatives including Piers Morgan, Ben Shapiro, and Matt Walsh say it’s about (one of those guys admits he didn’t even see it). If you enjoyed the write-up, or missed it but want to see what I think, I recorded a video. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
I’m disappointed in Lauren Boeberts behavior. To blame her divorce is ridiculous. She should just admit she behaved just like a teenager might at a concert, with privilege added.
Anyone in the public eye should know better than to behave like that. Grow up Ms Boebert and act like an adult.
I dont trust school safety IE staffers, teachers IE hired Pedos, & Indoc Education
Otherwise Yes physical safety
Dont need teacher abuse