Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[iam416]

A final comment on the M parents and school board. In the law there are two types of causation -- "but-for" and "proximate". But-for causation is literally anything that ultimately leads to the criminal act. "But for" a criminal getting out of bed this morning the crime wouldn't have been committed. We don't punish based on "but-for" causation We punish on "proximate" causation or "legal causation" -- that is, were your acts close enough in time and with the requiste intent to be fairly attributed as the cause such they we, as a society, can punish you. An important element in this assessment is intent.

In the law there are essentially 4 categories of intent:

Strict liability -- no intent required
Negligence -- you were careless -- you might not have know about the risk, but you should have
Reckless -- you consciously disregarded a known risk
Intentional -- self-explanatory

I don't think we ever punish beyond a misdemeanor for strict liability crimes. Those are even rarities in civil law.

We rarely punish for negligence in terms of jail time. We usually leave the civil system to address negligence. First, and foremost, we generally want to put "bad" people in jail, not doofuses. We ant to make doofuses pay civil damages.

We punish reckless all the time. I would reckon that's the standard for Involuntary Manslaughter in Michigan. You might not have intended for the result to happen, but you knew of risk and consciously disregarded that risk and the criminal act occured. This is sometimes referred to a criminal negligence.

I don't think Michigan's manslaughter statute punishes for mere negligence. It has to be reckless. So the evidence that you have to marshall together is that the parents (or school) knew that the murderer was a risk to kill someone and consciously disregarded that risk in a material way. I'm not familiar with M caselaw on the types of duties folks incur when they are made aware of a risk, but I'd bet last dollar that they are generally not required to "do something." However, if you know someone wants to go shoot up something AND you have the power to remove the weapon from that person you probably have to act.

So, in this case, the question will be how "known" was the risk. It can't be a "should have known" -- that's negligene. It has to be a "known." That's why these cases should be rarely prosecuted and why this case may end up being unique. Most parents of kids who shoot someone don't specifically know what they're planning. And that goes for a school shooter or a kid on the southside of Chicago. And to be clear, you don't need to "know" of the specific plan -- "knowing" that your kid really wants to shoot someone would suffice -- or rather, it'd be a sufficient basis for the jury to convict if the jury saw it that way.

I don't really give a flying fuck what people think the law should be -- this is what the law is.

[Dr. Strangelove]

They are in custody now, they found them right around Belle Isle.

Yeah I was up late and right before bed I had heard they had found their car in downtown Detroit. Figured they'd be caught soon. They were hiding in an industrial building that someone let them into, so there's potentially more charges coming for yet another person. The geniuses parked right out in the parking lot of where they were hiding.

[WingsFan]

Well, its all over the news here. Last night the local news was giving us a BOLO for them. They were hiding around the corner at Gratiot and Mack, bad area to be in. Now there have been 4 other young people arrested around Oakland County for making terrorist threats calling schools. All the schools have shut down for now. Last night there was a large Vigil held , social media mostly Facebook had been spreading around rumors there might be another shooting. Then someone fainted and everyone ran into a panic for a short time thinking an active shooting was going on.

[Jeff Buchanan]

My anger over this shooting stems from my belief (and Froot properly points out the facts are not yet clear in the public domain) that there was an opportunity for school officials to act in preventing the shooting. Talent makes the case that the parents may not have known (had specific knowledge) the kid was going to kill other students at school. That's an element of the charges the parents are facing that needs to be proven by the prosecutor.

My point is that we've experienced multiple school shootings of late and yet they continue to occur. Candle light vigils and support groups aren't doing shit to end them. The facts suggest, parents of these kids that carry firearms onto school grounds and open fire with them range from responsible and informed about their kids to clueless and uninvolved with these shooters. You can blame them but the reality is that parents aren't likely to call the cops on their kid or send them off to receive psychiatric care.

That line of defense might work. But it hasn't. The next line of defense is school officials and taking advantage of intelligence that's most likely available. There's a decade long debate that teachers aren't responsible for parenting. In general, I suspect most school boards have policies in place that limit the authority of school officials and teachers to act. They may in fact, know of a potentially violent student or who are in receipt of information from other students that there's a kid amongst us sending all kinds of signals that are red flags but they can't do anything about it except convene a conference. - I think this was the case in the MI shooting. I've made the case the intell was there. Hard evidence of the commission of a gun crime was within feet of them when the conference occurred. Yet, the school authorities in this case didn't or couldn't act to derail an impending train wreck.

Active shooter drills, which apparently were undertaken in this school when the kid started firing may have saved lives but 4 people are dead and one is too many. Fences and metal detectors have been put around and in schools. Working? Obviously not. Putting law enforcement in and around school? Not working either. School boards and the state laws that govern them, need to be able to intervene based on reliable intelligence that the potential for a gun crime going down in a school is present. There also needs to be a clear process to do so. Fuck privacy rights here. If I were to use the often miss used line, "the children," this is the place I'd use it. Adults are letting them down and they are dying because of it.

[Da Geezer]

You didn't take proper precautions to secure it. If you leave your gun in the glove box of your truck and it gets stolen, it is your fucking fault because you are an idiot. If you don't take proper precautions to secure your gun and it gets stolen it is your fucking fault.

Being a responsible law abiding citizen, how could you see it any other way. Owning a gun comes with responsibility. If you can't handle it, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to own a gun.

All guns should be registered to establish a chain of custody and the owner is responsible for that weapon.

Well, let's just apply this to an owner of 40 acres of woods in which a trespasser is hunting. Trespassing is a crime. He walks along and falls over a downed tree and his gun discharges killing him. Better yet, he trips and gets impaled on a branch of a downed tree. The hunter is dead

Is it the fault of the landowner for not securing his land? Or does he have a reasonable expectation of others not breaking the law? Why is the victim of a crime responsible for the future acts of the criminal?

Where this commie line of thought fails every time is that it assumes that lawbreakers are not the persons who are at fault when "proper precautions" are not taken. That is not true. Under this view, an old lady getting mugged at 2:00 is at fault because she should have known better. So too is the hardware store owner who is the victim of a flash mob of shoplifters who steal guns that are used in a crime.

What is correct is that the victim of a crime should report it. "Proper precautions" is so nebulous that it will inevitably lead to the same kind of split we now have between bail-imposing and non-bail-imposing jurisdictions. Too much discretion is left to the court, IMO. And not enough blame to the criminal. I have a right to have a gun in my glove box and to assume nobody will break into the car and steal it. And I'm not at fault if I am carrying and someone hits me over the head and steals my gun.

.

[froot loops]

My anger over this shooting stems from my belief (and Froot properly points out the facts are not yet clear in the public domain) that there was an opportunity for school officials to act in preventing the shooting. Talent makes the case that the parents may not have known (had specific knowledge) the kid was going to kill other students at school. That's an element of the charges the parents are facing that needs to be proven by the prosecutor.

My point is that we've experienced multiple school shootings of late and yet they continue to occur. Candle light vigils and support groups aren't doing shit to end them. The facts suggest, parents of these kids that carry firearms onto school grounds and open fire with them range from responsible and informed about their kids to clueless and uninvolved with these shooters. You can blame them but the reality is that parents aren't likely to call the cops on their kid or send them off to receive psychiatric care.

That line of defense might work. But it hasn't. The next line of defense is school officials and taking advantage of intelligence that's most likely available. There's a decade long debate that teachers aren't responsible for parenting. In general, I suspect most school boards have policies in place that limit the authority of school officials and teachers to act. They may in fact, know of a potentially violent student or who are in receipt of information from other students that there's a kid amongst us sending all kinds of signals that are red flags but they can't do anything about it except convene a conference. - I think this was the case in the MI shooting. I've made the case the intell was there. Hard evidence of the commission of a gun crime was within feet of them when the conference occurred. Yet, the school authorities in this case didn't or couldn't act to derail an impending train wreck.

Active shooter drills, which apparently were undertaken in this school when the kid started firing may have saved lives but 4 people are dead and one is too many. Fences and metal detectors have been put around and in schools. Working? Obviously not. Putting law enforcement in and around school? Not working either. School boards and the state laws that govern them, need to be able to intervene based on reliable intelligence that the potential for a gun crime going down in a school is present. There also needs to be a clear process to do so. Fuck privacy rights here. If I were to use the often miss used line, "the children," this is the place I'd use it. Adults are letting them down and they are dying because of it.

There are certain things that could be done better, but they are bound to come up short as long as these kids with murderous fantasies have access to these weapons.

[Jeff Buchanan]

There are certain things that could be done better, but they are bound to come up short as long as these kids with murderous fantasies have access to these weapons.

So you want more control over access to guns, right? As nice as that would be, the record of state and federal legislators to enact even modest changes fail and if they do pass more strict laws that limit access, there continues to be sufficient loop-holes and get-arounds to allow any type weapon (some are harder to get these days) to fall into the hands of intelligent criminals with intent to use them in a commission of a crime or anyone else for that matter that thinks they need them (and some rightfully and lawfully do) and those that really don't and should not have access to them.

This is America and as often as gun crimes happen, the political circumstance is unlikely to produce what gun opponents, and I assume you are among them, are advocating for,

Gun control is not a solution to stopping the killing of kids in our schools - for a ton of reasons I'm not debating here. It just is. So, the next step is broadening the powers of people in a position to know about or have a reasonable suspicion that a gun crime is going to happen in a school. I believe, although I have never seen this seriously discussed, that intel is available to know about and intervene to stop school shootings. Use the legal sources of gaining this kind of intel already available, expand it if necessary and then fully exploit it by empowering school and law enforcement officials to act.

[THE_WIZARD_]

This is why I usually have this fucktard on ignore.

Secure your fucking guns. Be responsible. If not you don't deserve to own guns.

Back to ignore.

Dumbass

That's a fucktard...calling a fucktard...a fucktard...

[CGVT]

That's a fucktard...calling a fucktard...a fucktard...

As identified by a fucktard

[THE_WIZARD_]

Correct.

[Jeff Buchanan]

“The school should have been responsible to relay that to the sheriff’s office. It looks like this could have been prevented,” said Robert Jordan, founder and director of St. Louis-based Protecting Our Students. “People died because of those mistakes.”

A teacher of the shooter in the days before the shooting noticed he was searching for ammunition on his cell phone, he had also drawn a picture of two people who were shot with blood dripping on the surrounding floor from them. A picture was taken and sent to the front office (I assume the principle).

This was an entirely preventable shooting due to the lack of action from school administrators when the strong suspicion of an in-school shooting was or should have been present. Sure, there are other failures here, the parents among them but, FFS, this failure was criminal ..... they've charged the parents. I thought Talent's take earlier today showed it is going to be slog for prosecutors to make their case.

As a minimum school authorities who convened and participated in the parent conference should be placed on administrative leave with an eye toward removing them on whatever criminal charges might work (caveats on making the case). I'm also advocating for a thorough review of the MI school boards procedures and processes that may or may not have hindered what intelligent people in leadership roles, knowing this kid was first nucking futz and one dangerous mo-fo. I cannot think of a more stupid thing to do than to let this kid back in the classroom.

https://apnews.com/article/crime-shootings-education-michigan-detroit-90c9cd22e68a483166b6a902aa4b8170

[Hannibal]

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[Hannibal]

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[Fraquar]

“The school should have been responsible to relay that to the sheriff’s office. It looks like this could have been prevented,” said Robert Jordan, founder and director of St. Louis-based Protecting Our Students. “People died because of those mistakes.”

A teacher of the shooter in the days before the shooting noticed he was searching for ammunition on his cell phone, he had also drawn a picture of two people who were shot with blood dripping on the surrounding floor from them. A picture was taken and sent to the front office (I assume the principle).

This was an entirely preventable shooting due to the lack of action from school administrators when the strong suspicion of an in-school shooting was or should have been present. Sure, there are other failures here, the parents among them but, FFS, this failure was criminal ..... they've charged the parents. I thought Talent's take earlier today showed it is going to be slog for prosecutors to make their case.

As a minimum school authorities who convened and participated in the parent conference should be placed on administrative leave with an eye toward removing them on whatever criminal charges might work (caveats on making the case). I'm also advocating for a thorough review of the MI school boards procedures and processes that may or may not have hindered what intelligent people in leadership roles, knowing this kid was first nucking futz and one dangerous mo-fo. I cannot think of a more stupid thing to do than to let this kid back in the classroom.

https://apnews.com/article/crime-sho...b6a902aa4b8170

Ugh. You can't even discipline your OWN kids without risk of being charged for a crime.
Blow the whistle on someone elses kid? Really? That is a rational thought in today's society?

[Jeff Buchanan]

There's a long article in the NYT this morning on the culpability of the school officials who were in a position to prevent the shooting but didn't. It's pay walled and not worth posting a link here. We've already discussed this and are way out in front of the press. I feel pretty sure that the MI prosecutor was looking at charging school officials for negligent homicide from the start of her investigation.

Fine. That's an unwinnable criminal case and talent has explained why it would be.

No problem and again as talent made perfectly clear, for the fucktards that did not remove Mr. Crumbley from the school and put him into a safe place - appropriate actions in accordance this school board's protocols and procedures and in accordance with MI law according to the NYT's article - this will be a civil case with millions involved. They will pay and be ruined ...... a fitting punishment for those involved with this insanely inappropriate actions.