Teenage students “are being used and exploited as human props” by gun control advocates, said Conservative Review’s Michelle Malkin during an interview on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour.
Malkin’s comments were directed towards students of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, advocating for further federal restrictions on the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
Elevating teenagers as thought leaders impedes the pursuit of effective preventative measures against mass shootings, said Malkin.
“We could not have this discussion of actual, practical school security plans when these children — who are being used and exploited as human props for the likes of Moms Demand Action — were screaming at the likes of Donald Trump when they should be screaming at their school administrators, the Broward County sheriff, and these school resources officers who treated their job like they were Mayberry police,” said Malkin.
Hostility from “left-wing students” should be directed towards local enforcement, said Malkin, pointing to the failures of the Broward County’s Sheriff’s Office, including the refusal of local deputies to engage Nikolas Cruz as he carried out a mass murder.
“The fish apparently rotted from the head down at the sheriff’s office,” said Malkin, describing Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel – a left-wing Democrat and leadership council member of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 president campaign in Florida — as “feckless” and waging a “CYA campaign.”
Malkin predicted that “multimillion dollar lawsuits [will be filed] against the people who are truly responsible for the massacre,” pointing to school administrators and the sheriff’s office of Broward County.
Mansour noted Israel’s refusal to accept responsibility — during CNN’s town hall on gun policy — for his office’s failure to address forwarnings of the Florida school mass murderer’s violent proclivities, including local police being called to his family’s home 39 times since 2010.
“The sheriff just point blank denied it, pretended like this didn’t happen,” said Mansour. “This guy is basically just blaming the NRA and anybody who wants to hold true to the Second Amendment when his entire force just completely dropped the ball.”
School administrators and local authorities abdicated their duties in ignoring warning signs of Cruz’s behavior, said Malkin: “It is mind boggling that there wasn’t a single adult that wanted to take responsibility.”
“They do not have wisdom,” said Malkin of children, drawing on her latest op-ed entitled, “Do Not Let the Children Lead” and reflecting on her own experience as a mother of two teenage children. “Being able to parrot anti-NRA talking points is not wisdom.”
CNN’s gun control town hall featured “obnoxious” teenagers, said Malkin, pointing to Emma Gonzalez, whom she called “the Shannon Watts Jr.” of the left’s push for gun control. “Social justice teachers, these agitators,” Malkin added, cultivate this behavior in their students:
A lot of people have remarked about how obnoxious some of the teenagers were that were elevated by CNN at the town hall, and I made the point that they don’t just get like that. There are parents, there are teachers, there are adults in their lives that countenance their behavior, and I thought it was very noteworthy that Emma Gonzalez — who has become the Shannon Watts Jr. — when she was about to question [NRA spokeswoman Dana] Loesch, instead turned to her teacher, and thanked her teacher for making her what she was. I think that was a real revelation, because that tells you that it’s these social justice teachers, these agitators, who have been egging these students on.
As she described the failures and lack of responsibility of the Florida educators in preventing last week’s mass shooting, Malkin reflected on her own mother’s experiences as a public school teacher for three decades:
There wasn’t a single adult that wanted to take responsibility. And I say this would a caveat because, of course, schools have been forced to turn into these all-purpose social welfare centers, and it does seem quite unfair to expect schools to do all of this. However, that’s what local communities are for.
My mom was a public school teacher in South Jersey in a troubled school district — a minority-majority school district — that had been taken over by the state, and she was there for almost three decades, and she had to put up with one of the worst teachers’ unions in the country; the mafia of the NJEA, and it wore on her. But year after year, she would do all the extra-curricular activities; she would take kids into our home; she would drive them from South Jersey to Philadelphia so they could be exposed to musical theater and the arts. It’s just something she did because she felt it was part of being a good teacher. She took responsibility.
I was talking with her earlier today, and she said, “Why aren’t there more parents demanding to know where the school administrator was? Where the guidance counselor was? Where were all the people who knew when Nikolas Cruz was walking onto campus, they knew it was him, they knew he was trouble?” Nobody has been forced to answer for it, because again, the big bogey man is the NRA and it’s so much easier to demonize five million law-abiding gun owners than to point fingers at people in your own backyard.
“Your mom sounds like the type of educator everybody wants their kids to have, the type that takes responsibility,” said Mansour to Malkin.
Malkin speculated that he Baker Act — a Florida state law allowing for involuntary institutionalization and medical examination of a person — could have been used to institutionalize and examine Cruz prior to his commission of mass murder. Such an institutionalized would have been on a firearm purchase background check, preventing Cruz for legally purchasing firearms.
“Clearly there were all these red flags,” said Malkin. “I don’t understand why the Baker Act was not triggered. You look at the actual criteria: a clear and present danger and imminent threat to oneself or others; and you look at the reams of laws at the local, state, and federal level.”
Henderson Behavioral Health, a mental health facility in Florida, examined Cruz in 2016 and opted against hospitalizing him. “I believe that would have counted as the kind of adjudication… that Nikolas Cruz would’ve had to report on his background check,” said Malkin.
Cruz’s 17-year-old brother Zachary was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility — via the Baker Act — two days after the mass shooting last week, noted Mansour.
Malkin also suggested that racial and ethnic quotas regarding school discipline could be related to last week’s mass murder in Florida:
The link between the social justice school administrators who adopted those radical left-wing policies subsidized by federal tax dollars that have the aim and goal of eradicating any kind of disproportionate reporting actions on these campuses because too many Latino and black students were being reported. So what did they do instead? Report no one. It’s not a big leap to think that that attitude seeped into the Broward County deputies that were assigned to patrol the school and school resource office, as well. It just goes to show that political correctness always has bloody consequences. We knew that when it came to jihad. How many other school districts have adopted these same “conflict resolution” policies that result in looking the other way at clear menaces?
“Political correctness” is deadly, said Mansour: “I think that we wrap political correctness around ourselves like a suicide belt. We’re going to kill ourselves over our stupidity with these things.”
Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
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