Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck

The Persecution Of Justin Carter And The Consequences Of Fear-Mongering: If This Doesn’t Make You Angry, Something’s The Matter With You

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

strike

Here I was, naively thinking that the threatened jailing of a student for resisting a teacher’s efforts to make him remove his T-shirt with the image of a rifle on it was the most shocking proof of how imperiled free thought and expression are in today’s fearful, dim-witted and child abuse-rationalizing America. Then this jaw-dropping story came across my screen, and I realized that the situation is far worse than I imagined or could imagine—and I have a pretty good imagination.

Now the question is, I think, this: what are we going to do about it?

Nineteen-year-old Justin Carter has been in prison since March. You will not believe why, or perhaps, being both paranoid and right,  you will. A Facebook friend and video game pal described him in an exchange as “crazy” and “messed up in the head,” and Carter replied, with sarcasm detectable by anyone who isn’t an SS officer. “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts. lol. jk.” A Canadian busybody read the exchange, and decided to report Justin to the Austin police, who then arrested him–he was 18 at the time—searched his family’s house, and charged him with making a “terroristic threat.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Jim Carrey

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments
Jim Carrey, not fooling as much as we thought...

Jim Carrey, not fooling as much as we thought…

There are no rule, laws, or principles of ethics that requires that an actor who usually portrays an ass actually has to be an ass, but if there were, Jim Carrey would be in complete compliance with them.

Jim Carrey announced via Twitter that he now objects to  “Kick-Ass 2,” the soon-to-be-released movie he stars in, citing as his reason the December, 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, which he apparently thinks will be made worse by the movie, or would have been caused by it if the film had come out earlier, or, well, something.  “I did Kick-Ass a month [before] Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence,” Carrey tweeted. “I meant to say my apologies to others [involved] with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.” Continue reading →

Slate Gives Us A Lovely Example Of Deceit

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Deceit_Cvr_CMYK

Thanks, Slate!

A lot of people have trouble with the concept of deceit, which is the intentional use of apparently true statements to deceive. Now I have a wonderful example to give them, thanks to Slate’s use of the most sneaky of lies as its recent contribution to the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck, Media Anti-gun Propaganda Division.

Slate compiled a list it called “How Many People Have Been Killed By Guns Since Newtown,” and illustrated it with an “infographic.” The list was widely used in the current “those crazy Republican gun nuts have blood on their hands” campaign led by the President, the Vice President, Mayor Bloomberg and others.  The list is unreliable, however, as an advocacy device, since one of the names it includes is Boston Marathon terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed in a shootout with police. How many other gun casualties are on the list that are perfectly justified, legally and ethically, unless one is an anti-gum absolutist who thinks neither the police nor other law enforcement should have access to firearms either? Quite a few, it turns out.

The only explanation for including Tsarnaev (and the others) is to mislead the public and inflame fear and passion by maximizing the raw number of names on the “shooting death list.” Yes, this is literally an accurate (I guess) list of every gun death since Newtown, but if the purpose of the list is to dramatize the need for anti-gun measures in the wake of the Sandy Hood shooting, why is a Boston Marathon child-killer on the list? What does his death have to do with the defeat of gun-control legislation in the Newtown aftermath, or the Newtown massacre generally? Nothing…except that it inflates the number, to be used in fear-mongering and misrepresentation. And that is exactly how Slate’s list is being used…as if it didn’t know. Those defeated, Newtown-inspired anti-gun measures would not have have saved the terrorist, nor does anyone sane wish they could have. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

“If we want older kids to not think guns are cool, we need to start early.”

—-Charles Hill, Principal of the Strobridge Elementary School in Hayward, California, advocating his school’s toy gun buy-back program.

Cool!

Cool!

I would also nominate this as the most chilling quote of the week, the month, and perhaps the year. It is an admission that this principal, and this school—and, like cockroaches, there is never just one rogue school—are interested not in education and the conveyance of knowledge, but indoctrination, compelling children how to think and what to believe, regardless of the desires of their parents and the values of the nation. Continue reading →

Indoctrination Ethics: Boy, Do I Ever Hate Thinking Like This, And Curse The Irresponsible Leaders Who Made Me.

/ Jack Marshall / 69 Comments

constitution-burning1

In Huntingtown, Maryland, a school bus driver heard an 11-year-old boy talking about how he wished he had a gun to protect everyone from bad guys. You know—like a normal American kid, or at least like how a normal American kid used to be able to think of himself, until silly, freedom-fearing, anti-violence fanatics and ideologues were allowed to get their hands on the controls of the culture. But this is 2013, and we have an irresponsible President who speaks about justifying any measure “if it will save the life of just one child.” So the bus driver reported this innocent conversation to the principal, who suspended the sixth grader for ten days, telling him that “with what happened at Sandy Hook if you say the word ‘gun’ in my school you are going to get suspended.”

Fact: This is blatant indoctrination, state-sponsored bullying and attempted mind-control. Continue reading →

NOW You Tell Us: The Undeniable Deceit In The Post-Sandy Hook Anti-Gun Push

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments
It's a litmus test: if this story doesn't bother you, then you believe the ends justify the means, as long as you like the ends.

It’s a litmus test: if this story doesn’t bother you, then you believe the ends justify the means, as long as you like the ends.

From the Los Angeles Times:

“Gun crime has plunged in the United States since its peak in the middle of the 1990s, including gun killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes, two new studies of government data show. Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly release report by the Pew Research Center. In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns. Violent crime dropped steeply during the 1990s and has fallen less dramatically since the turn of the millennium.”

Interesting timing, don’t you think? This information would have been invaluable during the months of Democrat-fueled hysteria following the Newtown tragedy, when gun violence suddenly was represented far and wide, on television, in print and on the stump, as a deepening crisis so serious and deadly that it warranted pushing all other priorities aside. Now, after the dishonest and emotion-based assault on guns and gun-ownership stalled, the public is provided with the information, always there and waiting in official government statistics, that would have placed the need for new gun laws in proper perspective. Instead, the public was treated to laments by mourning parents, scripted statements by Gaby Giffords, and harangues by Piers Morgan.

Gee. I wonder why more than half the public believes that gun violence is getting worse? Continue reading →

No Gun Control, But Our Leaders Have Succeeded In Making Schools Crazy

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments
"Kidding, kids! Just a drill!"

“Kidding, kids! Just a drill!”

You see, there really are consequences to our political leaders’ irresponsible fear-mongering. People still tend to believe and trust our leaders, the fools, and when prominent ones like President Obama and Diane Feinstein, aided and abetted by hysterical media voices like Piers Morgan and blathering celebrities like Jim Carrey, exploit the deaths of small children in a tragic school shooting to use fear rather than reason to pass additional gun regulations, it isn’t surprising that members of the public get frightened. This is supposed to cause them to push their representatives for gun measures that, in truth, have little to do with preventing school shootings, but it also causes them to act irrationally. Reckless conduct and cynical legislative strategies have consequences.

At Pine Eagle Charter School in tiny (population 288) Halfway, Oregon, administrators thought the risk of another Adam Lanza shooting up their small school was so serious that it justified staging an unannounced massacre drill. Two masked men wearing hoodies and wielding handguns burst into a meeting room full of teachers and opened fire, with blanks. Not that the terrified teachers knew that, until it was clear to them that they had been shot and weren’t dead. Continue reading →

Fire Brandi Hucko

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
The Horror.

The Horror.

Let’s stop being mild and measured, shall we? Heads need to role, messages need to be sent, and a culture needs to be saved.

Fire Brandi Hutto.

If she can’t be fired because a union insists that fools and hysterics be allowed to abuse our children and warp our culture, then parents have to boycott the school, while flooding local papers with letters and petitions protesting the lunatic who is running the Garden Gate Elementary School in Cuperino, California. That is, unless this silly, incompetent, stupid, stupid woman gets down on her knees and begs forgiveness from young Braden Bandermann and his family, while also apologizing to his class and the schools itself for making the child feel like a criminal and trying to turn all the other children into trembling, terrified, weenies.

Fire Brandi Hutto. Continue reading →

The Stigmatized Science Fair Project: School Indoctrination, Power Abuse and Passive Parents

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

indoctrinationFrom Lenore Skanzy’s useful and fascinating blog Free Range Kids comes a report from a mother whose Middle Schooler’s science fair project was summarily disqualified after he devoted months of work on it because it involved Airsoft guns, the realistic-looking gun replicas that shoot plastic pellets—toys, though expensive ones, much favored by pre-teen and teen-aged boys. The Airsoft was not physically featured in the project display; apparently the boy was punished for having the bad taste to use anything that looked and behaved like a gun in any activity related to school. According to the mother, his experiment, involving the spin on propelled objects, received a high enough score to send him and his experiment to the regionals, had he not been slapped down for daring to use a toy gun at his own home.

What is going on here? What is going on is a concerted, widespread nation-wide, ideologically-motivated and unethical effort by teachers, administrators and school districts to create a pervasive anti-gun, anti-gun ownership, anti-Second Amendment and pro-gun confiscation culture in the schools, ensuring, through cultural reinforcement, that future generations emerge from public education thoroughly phobic about guns no matter what their purpose. This abuse of power, a particularly stupid, sinister and ignorant abuse of power, is being encouraged by elected officials and the news media, and it is the tip of a very ugly iceberg.

This isn’t about guns, though they are the target this time. It is about school personnel and schools using their influence to implant ideology and political policy views in children, which is neither their job nor the appropriate role of public education. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce (Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck and U.S. Public School Incompetence Divisions): Logan Middle School in Logan, W.Va.

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

Sigh.

Send him to the re-education center...

Send him to the re-education center…

I’ll stop flagging the unethical conduct of anti-gun hysterics during the Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck when they stop abusing kids and law-abiding citizens in their deranged determination to turn America into a gun-free zone through fear-mongering and intimidation. I’m genuinely sick of writing about this stuff, but not as sick as I am of the idiocy that produces it. Has any sane, prominent, respectable voice from the gun-regulation side registered strong objections to incidents like what happened in Logan? If so, I must have missed it. That’s illuminating, don’t you think?

Jared Marcum, an eighth-grader boy at Logan Middle School in Logan, W.Va., was suspended and arrested by police for wearing a pro-NRA T-shirt that depicted a firearm and the phrase “Protect your right” to class. He was charged with “obstruction and disturbing the education process.” It appears that his teacher asked him to remove his shirt, and he refused, prompting the arrest. Marcum was on solid ground, and his teacher was not.  The school dress code reads in part: Continue reading →