SocietyWatch
Ammunition for gun-control advocates
“There are actions that could be taken to make events like this less likely, and one of those actions we could take would be to enhance some basic, common-sense gun-safety laws.” Those were the remarks of U.S. President Barack Obama on June 22 following the arrest of a white man for the racially motivated murders of nine black church members in Charleston, South Carolina.
President Obama made those comments during a podcast interview with comedian Marc Maron, emphasizing that “it’s not enough just to feel bad.”
Later in the interview, the president blamed Congress for failing to act after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. He continued by saying, “I will tell you, right after Sandy Hook, Newtown, when 20 six-year-olds are gunned down, and Congress literally does nothing—yes, that’s the closest I came to feeling disgusted. I was pretty disgusted.”
Chaos reigns in St. Paul schools
Some schools in St. Paul, Minnesota, have become madhouses where students threaten and attack teachers and each other. But the federal government’s proposed solution to the problem may make it worse.
The U.S. Justice Department says the schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul are racist because black students are disciplined and suspended at higher rates than Caucasians and Asians. It has threatened prosecution unless school administrators suspend students according to the proportion of each race in the school.
These school districts don’t have the money to fight the Justice Department and are submitting to its demands, which in St. Paul’s case means adopting the educational and discipline standards of the San Francisco-based Pacific Educational Group (peg).
peg’s main purpose seems to be to sell the concept of victimization. It claims that the American education system—which traditionally has been run by whites (though this is no longer the case)—is racist toward black students.
To solve this alleged racism and help black students achieve, peg states that school curricula should be customized to meet the cultural specifications of black students, which effectively means lowering academic standards. peg also rejects the concept of using suspensions or expulsions to discipline black students.
After peg took over, it radically changed the ways schools are run. Special-needs students (violent students and ones with other behavioral issues) were put back into regular classrooms. Student suspensions were replaced by “time outs.” School officials started forgiving or ignoring violence and other disruptive behavior.
Turning a blind eye to crime doesn’t make it go away. As Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in No Freedom Without Law, “God’s law brings us the ultimate, most wonderful freedom of all. It protects our families. It protects our children. It protects us from all the evil in this world.”
The deeply tragic, completely avoidable murder of Kate Steinle
While walking with her father and a friend on a San Francisco pier, Kate Steinle was murdered in an apparent random act of violence on July 1. Her killer, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a 45-year-old illegal alien, had been deported to Mexico five times and had been convicted of seven felonies over the past 22 years. Sanchez was being held by San Francisco law enforcement but was released due to the city’s “sanctuary” law, which argues that illegal immigrants should not be kept in jail because it violates their rights. After his release, Sanchez shot Steinle in the chest as she was walking along Pier 14, a busy San Francisco tourist destination. While illegal immigrants account for only 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, they represented almost 37 percent of federal sentences, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data obtained by Breitbart News. Even after eliminating all immigration violations, illegal immigrants still account for 13.6 percent of all offenders sentenced in 2014.
