Tag: school shooting
In Deranged Interview, Alex Jones Says He’s 'Hitler' and Shot Sandy Hook Victims

In Deranged Interview, Alex Jones Says He’s 'Hitler' and Shot Sandy Hook Victims

Alex Jones, the host of the conspiracy theory show InfoWars declared that he himself is Hitler and that he shot kids to death in an interview on Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan.

When Callaghan asked Jones if he felt responsible for what happened to the Sandy Hook parents, meaning the harassment and death threats they faced after Jones told his millions of viewers that they were “crisis actors” who helped fake a 2012 school shooting in order to help the government confiscate people’s guns.

Jones responded, “I went to that school. I pulled the gun out. I shot every one of myself. I mean, I’m guilty.” Later on, he repeats over and over again, “I killed them. I’ll admit it. I did it. I’m the bad guy…. I murdered those children. I did. I did it myself.”

The December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting left 26 people dead, including 20 children ages 6 and 7. Jones was not the shooter.

“We should bow five times a day to New Haven, Connecticut for the kids that died,” Jones said, before saying that people have been hypnotized into believing that they should give their guns to George Soros, a Jewish billionaire that anti-Semites think controls left-wing politics.

“I was actually Hitler. It wasn’t actually Hitler,” Jones said. “I did it. I was in a time machine in Germany. I did all that.”

Later in the interview, Jones said, “I was being sarcastic earlier. I didn’t kill the children. I’m not Jeffrey Dahmer. I didn’t invent hemorrhoids. I simply questioned things and they’re trying to demonize me to say questioning things is a bad deal.”

That’s a lie though. Jones himself said the shooting was fake, and he has said in court that he believed it was, though he now believes otherwise. He has also claimed that his company is broke, despite raking in millions in online sales.

“Nobody thinks you killed the kids,” Callaghan told Jones during their interview. “Nobody thinks that oh, it’s what you did. What you killed is [the parents’] ability to get over the death of children.”

Jones responded, “Everyone’s like yeah, ‘We’re gonna get him immediately.’ Like, they’ve built me up and like I’m this giant creature like all-powerful, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and none of it’s real. So it’s like it’s funny, actually. It’s actually comical. I mean, it’s, it’s actually hilarious.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump And Cruz Are Worthless

Why School Safety Schemes Proposed By Trump And Cruz Are Worthless

As people in Uvalde and across the country groped for solutions in response to the latest mass school shooting, Texas Republican officials pointed, again, to school doors.

“Have one door into and out of the school, and have ... armed police officers at that door,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said on Fox News the day after a gunman killed 19 elementary school students and two teachers.

On Tuesday, an 18-year-old armed with an assault rifle entered Robb Elementary School through a back door and opened fire on fourth grade students and teachers, according to state officials. The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety said Friday that the back door had been propped open by a teacher minutes before the shooting began.

Texas’ lieutenant governor has echoed the idea of locking all but one door of a school. And Cruz and former President Donald Trump repeated the call for single-entry schools at the National Rifle Association convention in Houston on Friday.

“We also know that there are best practices at federal buildings and courthouses, where for security reasons they limit the means of entry to one entrance,” Cruz said at the convention. “Schools, likewise, should have a single point of entry. Fire exits should only open out. At that single point of entry, we should have multiple armed police officers. Or if need be, military veterans trained to provide security and keep our children safe.”

But limiting schools to one access point is not a proposal grounded in reality, according to several school and safety experts.

Many schools have thousands of children, teachers and staff who could take hours to funnel in and out of a single entrance every day. Even more use portable buildings or have multiple buildings, with children and staff often moving among them. Not to mention that renovations to older schools, which officials say typically have more exterior entrances, put a heavy burden on local taxpayers.

“It is not feasible to think we’re going to ever get to the point where we have one door in and one door out,” said Bill Avera, chief of police and emergency manager for the Jacksonville Independent School District in East Texas and a board member of the Texas School Safety Center.

And while many districts sought to increase school security in the aftermath of Texas’ last mass school shooting in Santa Fe in 2018, teachers’ advocates and school officials fault state leaders for focusing on further “hardening” schools after the Uvalde shooting.

“The other elements of school safety are harder conversations to have either politically or because we just know less about it — for instance, mental health,” said Brian Woods, superintendent of Northside ISD in San Antonio. “But just because they’re harder conversations doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have them, and it doesn’t mean we should restrict the conversation to hardening.”

After the Santa Fe High School shooting, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also blamed school infrastructure, saying there were “too many entrances and too many exits to our more than 8,000 campuses in Texas.”

On Friday, Cruz said it was maddening that “the shooter in Uvalde got in the exact same way the Santa Fe shooter did. He walked through an unlocked back door into an open classroom.” He called for “serious funding” to install bulletproof doors and locking classroom doors.

Architects already try to limit entryways and design schools to guide students and visitors to one main front entrance, but more than one door is necessary for fire safety and to carry out school operations, said Bill Bradley, a school design expert with Stantec Architecture and chair of the Association for Learning Environments.

A school, for example, may need additional entrances to use a school gymnasium for sports, community events or voting booths without opening up the entire school to the public, Bradley said.

“Let’s say you had a high school that had 3,000 students, and you’re going to use one entry point to bring those students into that building every day,” Avera said. “That’s going to literally double the amount of time it takes to get folks in that building.”

Schools also have to account for staff and deliveries for things like lunch items and classroom materials, Avera said.

As school districts grow, their campuses sometimes sprawl with multiple buildings or portables, making a single entrance impossible.

At San Antonio’s Northside ISD, district leaders had to add gyms in exterior buildings to elementary schools initially built without them, said Woods, the superintendent. He estimated about half of the district’s 125 campuses also use portables to avoid cramping in students or to deal with population growth.

To increase safety, school districts can arm school entrances with access-control technology that automatically locks doors from the outside and requires key cards. In the Jacksonville school district, Avera can remotely lock the district’s exterior doors from his phone, but it’s an expensive investment.

“You’re talking about anywhere from $700 to $1,000, $1,500 a door to outfit them,” he said, noting the technology also requires a robust internet and cable network. “So you could see it could get to be very expensive very quickly.”

Secured entryways should still allow individuals to leave a school in situations such as fire, Avera said.

Today, school officials are increasingly paying to build or retrofit schools to require visitors to go through two entrances or a front office, where people are often screened.

In Northside, Woods said, the district added “ballistic security lobbies” at its elementary schools without a full-time district police officer. He said the district has slowly sought to rebuild or renovate older schools, which typically have more exterior doors because classrooms often needed to prop doors open for air flow when schools lacked air conditioning.

“Of course they lived in a very different security environment at that time,” he said.

But building renovations and security upgrades cost much more than the money the district got from the state funds parceled out after the Santa Fe shooting, he said. Luckily, he said, his community has regularly approved local bond measures to make schools more secure.

“That would not be a true statement everywhere,” he added.

Indoors, some experts recommend locking classroom doors, but it can be a tedious requirement when students have to go to the restroom or leave for other activities.

“It’s hard to have a hard fast rule about locking doors,” Avera said. “It is best practice and it’s highly recommended, but there are a lot of circumstances, again, that you can’t always plan for that might cause a need not to have the door locked.”

School leaders can’t only focus on making schools impenetrable fortresses, Bradley said. Studies have shown that school environments and access to natural light can impact learning outcomes, he said, and creating visibility within schools can help staff identify threats from a distance.

“These are still schools, and we want them to be exciting and inviting for students,” he said.

The focus on the “physical engineering” of schools also will not address the more common gun violence that affects children outside of schools, said Jagdish Khubchandani, a professor of public health at New Mexico State University who has studied school violence.

“We’re just not going to the foundation of the issue. We’re just planting a Band-Aid solution,” he said.

"Trump and Cruz propose “hardened” one-door schoolhouses. Experts say that’s not a credible solution." was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

At NRA Convention, Cruz Blames School Shootings On Everything…Except Guns

At NRA Convention, Cruz Blames School Shootings On Everything…Except Guns

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) opted to appear at the National Rifle Association convention in Houston, Texas on Friday after multiple Republican lawmakers backed out of making public appearances in wake of the Uvalde school shooting.

Now, Cruz is facing deep scrutiny not only for attending the conference but also for his remarks praising firearms. During the convention, Cruz also offered a number of reasons he believes are to blame for the shooting other than guns.

“It’s a lot easier to moralize about guns and to shriek about those you disagree with politically. But it’s never been about guns,” Cruz said on Friday, after naming tons of excuses for mass shootings, such as “broken families, absent fathers, declining church attendance, social media bullying, violent online content ... chronic isolation, prescription drug, and opioid abuse.”

Speaking of the shooting, Cruz said, “The entire state ― the entire country ― is horrified and grieving." He added, “And it is an evil that has happened too many damn times.”

The lawmaker's remarks have been deeply criticized as many Twitter users have weighed in with their reactions. Some users also pushed back to refute Cruz's claims.







Cruz's remarks at the convention come just days after his previous attempt to blame other factors for the mass shooting. Distancing from the discussions and calls for stricter legislation on gun control, the Texas lawmaker claimed suggested that one solution might be to have fewer doors at education facilities.

“One of the things that everyone agreed is, don’t have all of these unlocked back doors,” he told Fox News Wednesday. “Have one door into and out of the school and have ... armed police officers at that door.”

During his speech on Friday, Cruz also echoed his previous call for more armed law enforcement agents. Those remarks came amid reports criticizing the Uvalde Police Department and its officers' delayed actions to confront and subdue the shooter.

“Ultimately, as we all know, what stops armed bad guys is armed good guys,” Cruz told the NRA. A bipartisan group of lawmakers are reportedly working to craft a proposed piece of legislation that, according to HuffPost, will include: "more stringent background checks, proposals to bolster school safety, and 'red flag' laws that allow authorities to temporarily seize firearms from people who have been determined to be a danger to themselves or others."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Endorse This! Kimmel Calls Out Cowardly GOP After Uvalde Shooting

Endorse This! Kimmel Calls Out Cowardly GOP After Uvalde Shooting

The totally needless killing of 19 school children and two teachers in the latest school shooting shows once again that we're a nation on the verge of total disaster.

Never hesitant to nail hypocritical Republicans, Jimmy Kimmel began his show without an audience on Wednesday and delivered a poignant monologue about the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 children and two teachers dead. Kimmel blasted feckless Republicans by noting most Americans support common-sense gun laws, but the legislation stalls “because our cowardly leaders just aren’t listening to us ― they’re listening to the NRA.”

“If your solution to children being massacred is armed guards, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on,” Kimmel said. “There was an armed guard in Buffalo. There was an armed guard in Parkland. There was an armed guard in Uvalde.”

Watch the entire segment below: