Bodycam footage was released last week of a six-year-old boy being restrained in a bear hug, cursing a blue streak at cops. This first grader had stolen his mother’s 9mm and taken it to school, where he, unprovoked, pulled out the weapon and shot his teacher. His attack wounded her hand and her chest. She was nearly killed.
This incident occurred in 2023 in Newport News, Virginia, but what has shocked the world in recent days is the new video — and just how vulgar, horrific, and damaged this little boy was. How is it that a little boy felt so entitled and out of control that he decided to steal a gun and shoot his teacher, then yell at the cops? “F**k you, [n-word],” the young black child said. “Shut the f**k up, ho. I stole dat gun from my mama. I don’t care if I go to jail. If you want a piece of me, come get it.”
This instance is extreme, but as an educator, I regret to say many teachers have horror stories that could rival it. This author has personally been punched and had to prevent a stabbing — and that was while working in the private school sector, where administrators have more power to turn away students with those dangerous tendencies.
This all points back to one thing: There is something rotten in the state of parenting and a culture that sees violent child behavior as something to be endured and accommodated rather than confronted.
We need to address a societal conundrum.
We need to discuss education as a right versus education as a privilege. In the United States, we firmly believe, and have laws that back this belief, that education is a right. What does that mean? It means every child should have an equal opportunity to pursue an education regardless of wealth, status, or background.
However, education is also a privilege. It is something of value that is its own form of currency. Where do we draw the line between the right and the privilege for children who behave in such an antagonistic manner? Their behavior and choices affect those around them. This little boy’s classmates witnessed their teacher being shot. They had to put up with this child’s disruptive and violent behavior for months before this particular incident. At what point do their rights matter?
Their right to an education is stymied by a disturbing commitment to keep the most broken children in class without the tools to do so. It is also worth mentioning that this child faces no consequences for his actions. He is back at school, and the family who has custody of him blames the government for not providing the help his mother needed with him. Pretty sure it wasn’t a lack of government services that turned that little boy feral.
The boy’s mother got a slap on the wrist — even though it was her poor choices, abuse, and neglect that raised such a child. Only the school district and the administrators faced consequences. They had to pay the first-grade teacher $10 million for her troubles. This was deserved because they failed everyone in that school that day. Multiple teachers warned them that the child was threatening to shoot other children and possibly had a weapon in his schoolbag. Yet they did nothing and hoped any incident would happen after school hours.
While this case is an important anecdote, it reflects a larger parenting trend that produces children with similar tendencies, whether they go to public or private school and regardless of race or social class.
Some parents choose a path like gentle parenting that puts the child in the driver’s seat of their decisions. Children do not have fully developed brains; by age six, they can barely regulate emotions or control their impulses. They are not qualified to make decisions. Parents should guide, mold, and shape their children. Leaving them to their own devices is a form of abandonment.
This six-year-old who shot his teacher was raised in a rotten, degenerate environment where language and behavior like that were acceptable and shooting at other people was modeled. Not too long before the incident, the child’s mother shot at his father. No one was injured, but the behavior was modeled. In some ways, one could argue that gentle parenting and this sort of abuse and neglect are similar. In both cases, parents are abdicating their roles as guides and leaders.
Revisiting the bodycam footage, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh makes some interesting observations. In the video — if you have the stomach to watch it — the child is snarling, cussing, and acting like a thug all while being restrained in a bear hug by an older white lady teacher who is a “reading specialist.” She talks to him like he is not in trouble, like he is a normal, functioning child instead of an unrepentant attempted murderer who just shot his innocent first-grade teacher.
Walsh observes:
Based on her demeanor and how she’s treating him, you might think that the boy isn’t in trouble at all. You might think that the teacher is comforting him because he got bullied on the playground and now he’s sad and has a tummy ache. It’s a microcosm of America, post-civil rights era. On the one hand, you have a barbaric, dangerous criminal, and then you have the clueless, coddling white woman who’s acting as if she’s talking to a normal, functioning human being. There’s a 100% chance that this woman — and every other woman in the public school system — thinks she can “save” this child. She can make everything better. She can sit him down on the carpet and read him “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” And then he’ll be off to Harvard, and Fortune 500 companies will line up to give him jobs he’s not qualified for. And we can all pretend he’s actually successful. That’s the liberal fantasy, playing out in this footage.
This delusion isn’t limited to kids of color, but to every kid whose parents have the audacity to send them to school and think acting like a thug and vicious degenerate is appropriate for any setting.
More broadly, the Left’s abhorrence of excellence and acceptance of whatever behavior, no matter how abusive or dangerous, is the problem. We live in a participation trophy society. If you get a prize for just showing up, how are important things like school supposed to matter?
Then these parents and family members have the audacity to blame the system when they know darn well that it’s their own failings that have created the entitlement and viciousness that the child displays.
As Walsh further points out, “You don’t become a cold-blooded killer at six except by being conditioned that way in an absolutely horrific, hellish environment. This child has been raised — to the extent that we can say he’s been raised at all — by barbarians. And now he is one himself.”
Cultural decay won’t improve unless we raise the standards. That could mean stronger consequences for parents and students who act that way and make school unbearable and dangerous for their classmates. Putting the Bible and Ten Commandments back in schools wouldn’t hurt either. This is, at least, a time-tested standard for behavior that has helped guide how we should live peaceably with one another.
However, as a society, we need to hold the line on behavioral standards. Teachers on the front lines are already feeling the consequences of this parental and cultural failure; it’s only a matter of time before there are no more good, or even halfway decent, teachers.
