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Around 2 p.m. on January 6, 2023, at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, a black 6-year-old boy pulled a 9mm Taurus handgun from his jacket and shot his first-grade teacher, Abby Zwerner, in the middle of class. There was no provocation whatsoever. The bullet entered Zwerner’s hand and lodged in her chest, nearly killing her. When police arrived, another school employee (a “reading specialist”) was holding the child — almost as if she was trying to protect him from the police, even though he clearly posed a danger to her (and everyone else in the room). And then the boy started talking.
This is bodycam footage that took more than three years to release to the public, supposedly because of routine bureaucratic holdups. As you watch this, you can come to your own conclusions about the actual reason they withheld it. Watch:
“F*ck you, n-word. Shut the f*ck 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.”
That’s a 6-year-old child talking to police officers and a “reading specialist.” And how does the specialist handle all this? She tells the police, “He’s on a modified schedule!” Then she tries to inform the child, “That’s not how we speak to each other.” She politely checks his hands to make sure he didn’t injure himself while he was trying to murder his teacher. If you didn’t know the context, and the police weren’t there, just based on how the woman is dealing with the boy, you’d assume he got in trouble for throwing a paper airplane in class, or maybe shoving a kid in the hallways or something. In fact, 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.
Meanwhile, everyone with a pulse understands exactly what’s going on here. This child almost certainly cannot be reformed. Barring miraculous intervention of some kind, he will just become even more dangerous and volatile as he gets older. He’ll murder someone before long if he’s allowed to roam free. He’s already — at 6 years old — a menace to society. Is that his “fault”? No, not really. He’s 6 years old. He’s just a few years past toddler. 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. So if any bleeding hearts out there want to say that this poor little boy is a victim of his circumstances, and it’s not his fault he turned out that way, I will agree. If you were born to his mother, and raised in his home, and had his brain and his rock-bottom IQ, you would have ended up exactly like him, and you would have done exactly what he did, because you would be him. So we don’t even need to get into the nature vs nurture debate. The fact is that, obviously, both nature and nurture factor into the kind of person you become. And he didn’t choose either of them — his nature, or how he was nurtured. He is a victim in a very real sense. That’s extremely sad. It’s a tragedy. It’s a terrible thing.
But we live in reality. And we have to deal with reality. Questions of fault and blame and victimhood are all academic. In real, practical terms, the fact is that we’re left with a child who is wildly dysfunctional, dangerous, destructive, and unstable. He is not going to wake up tomorrow or the next day, or next year, or a decade from now, and have magically transformed into a civilized, well-behaved young gentleman. You can feel sorry for him all you want, but while you’re feeling sorry, you have to decide what to actually do with kids like this. And you have two choices. Either keep him in the system and allow him to continue disrupting the education of every other kid in the school, and stand by and wait until he decides to harm or kill someone else, offering innocent kids and adults up as sacrifices for the sake of giving this kid unlimited chances — or you can remove him. You can take this kid and every kid like him and remove them from the system, and from civilized society, and consign them to an institution somewhere. If they commit violent crimes, you can put them in jail or juvenile detention. The benefit of this second strategy is that it protects innocent, civilized, well-behaved people, and allows society to function, and our systems to operate as they’re supposed to. And that benefit vastly outweighs the downside, which is simply that the dysfunctional, dangerous kids suffer the emotional distress of being expelled from civilized society. That’s unfortunate, but either they suffer the emotional distress of being expelled from civilized society, or everyone else suffers the distress of watching civilized society be destroyed. And that’s really not a hard choice at all.
Besides, this kind of kid is better off in an institution. It can’t possibly be any more nightmarish than his home life. The boy’s father is a career criminal who was not living with him at the time of the shooting, if you can imagine that. Actually, in 2023, his father was a fugitive with an active arrest warrant (having skipped multiple court hearings on an assault charge). He also had multiple convictions, including one for breaking and entering, and one for violating a protective order after he allegedly hit the boy’s mother in the jaw. The school was apparently unaware of all this, and allowed him to attend classes with his son on occasion.
That’s not to say the mother — a woman named Deja Taylor — was much better. Just a month before the shooting at the school, Taylor used the same Taurus handgun to shoot at the boy’s father. This is from The Washington Post:
Prosecutors cited a series of text messages between Taylor and the boy’s father, which appear to show that Taylor opened fire on him with the same weapon about a month before the shooting at Richneck Elementary. … The shooting followed a dispute over whether the father was cheating on Taylor with another woman. … The father was not hurt in the incident. … [Additionally,] Taylor’s son had twice taken her car keys from her purse and gotten into her car. On one occasion, he crashed the vehicle, and on the other he refused to leave. … Police had to break a window to get him out. Following the school shooting, investigators found copious amounts of marijuana in Taylor’s residences and vehicle during searches.
So she shoots a firearm at the father of her child, in a public setting of some kind, and nothing happens to her. And before that, her child stole her car and wrecked it. And evidently, despite this very alarming series of events, no one did anything — to her, or the kid.
This is nothing new. You might remember that, in 2008, there was a viral story about a black kid who stole his grandmother’s car. He damaged a bunch of property and
