Free Republic

Video story: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C1-OFLsgnOU Watch the first 30 seconds, the shooter is first seen loading his weapon wearing a blue backpack. A few seconds later on the video (not actual time), the shooter and is firing, but he is wearing a black tactical vest. The sequence raises lots of questions.

Broward school district officials admitted Sunday that the confessed Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School gunman was assigned to a controversial disciplinary program, after the superintendent repeatedly claimed Nikolas Cruz had "no connection" to the alternative punishment designed to limit on-campus arrests. Two sources with knowledge of Cruz’s discipline records told WLRN he was referred to the so-called PROMISE Program for a three-day stint after committing vandalism at Westglades Middle School in 2013.

For weeks, the Florida teenagers who became activists after the Parkland school shooting have been subject to harsh treatment by many of those critical of their message for more gun control. First, many of the activists were smeared falsely as “crisis actors” by conspiracy theorists and hoaxers on the Internet in the immediate wake of the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They continue to be lightning rods for some conservative media and politicians, despite some indications that they enjoy wide support nationally. And now, they are being likened to Nazis.

When the big media push behind the pro-gun-control Parkland students was still getting revved up last month, I called it a “Children’s Crusade.” That seemed appropriate because of the reverence the media was showing these often ignorant and occasionally offensive teenagers. Even back then, that impulse was clearly focused most intensely on Emma Gonzalez, the student whose “We call BS” speech CNN transcribed and spread with an evangelists zeal on its homepage. But today, the New Yorker has reached peak-Parkland-adulation with a piece titled “Joan of Arc and the Passion of Emma González.” The author isn’t directly comparing Gonazalez to...

In a wide-ranging interview on Sunday, several Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students said they would not be endorsing any political candidates in this year’s elections and that the gun violence issue extends far beyond preventing mass school shootings. “We endorse ideas not people,” Cameron Kasky, a junior at Stoneman Douglas, told Margaret Brennan, host of CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

I described the teenager-led anti-gun campaign, which has been breathlessly endorsed by the Democratic Party media, as a 21st century Children’s Crusade, referring to the ill-fated 1212 version. But with hindsight, that was unfair to the 13th-century kids. They undoubtedly had a better idea of why they were trying to liberate the Holy Land than the teenagers who demonstrated today have about why guns should be confiscated. Charlie Kirk, the President of Turning Point USA, waded into the D.C. crowd of lefty protesters to ask a simple question: What is an assault rifle? The results were predictably amusing: