AI 'interview' with school shooting victim raises question every parent must ask



Jim Acosta’s AI-generated interview with a victim of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, Joaquin Oliver, has stirred the internet. Created from a video made by Oliver’s parents for what would have been his 25th birthday, it’s a reminder of the enduring pain felt by the community, survivors, and victims’ families of atrocities like Parkland.

The ethics behind Acosta’s “interview” may be questionable, but as a father of four preparing for back-to-school, it also raises the question: Are schools ready to protect students if — God forbid — a mass shooter attacks?

If a safety plan can’t withstand basic questions, it likely can’t withstand a real threat.

Every parent knows the mix of excitement and unease that accompanies handing a child over to someone else’s care for the better part of the day. That’s no small act. When we entrust schools with our children, we’re not just dropping them off to learn; we’re trusting that they’ll be protected. As parents, we would die to protect our kids, but do we — and can we — expect the same from their schools?

It’s not enough for schools to say safety is a top priority. Parents must demand to see plans, and schools must actively prepare.

Safety isn’t a job title. It’s a culture. And when it comes to protecting children, it has to be owned by everyone: parents, teachers, school staff, and law enforcement. Every adult in the room. The answer to the question, “Whose job is it to protect these kids?” should be unanimous: Mine.

A true safety culture isn’t vague policies or half-hearted drills, but a shared, lived-out commitment to readiness. Schools often say they have “protocols in place,” but when asked for details, the answer is fuzzy or hidden “for security reasons.” Sometimes that’s necessary, but that reply can mask a lack of preparation.

If a safety plan can’t withstand basic questions, it likely can’t withstand a real threat.

We don’t need policies on paper; we need practiced procedures and real barriers. Teachers can’t hope someone else will act. They must know what they will do if the worst happens. That’s why I founded Able Shepherd, to help everyday people train for real-world crises and build the skills needed to respond under pressure.

Our security assessments and team training courses prepare schools for likely emergencies, emphasizing stress inoculation, team movement, and emergency response, building muscle memory before danger strikes.

RELATED: Christian school arms staff to protect students from active shooter threats

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Training only matters if it can be replicated in real life. People freeze or make fatal mistakes when not trained well. They were briefed, but not in a way that built muscle memory. When tragedy strikes, it’s not the briefed but the trained who save lives.

Schools aren’t alone. Law enforcement has a duty, too. Officers are asked to do a hundred different things, but active threat response is not just another task. It requires a higher level of excellence.

Officers must be fully trained to act decisively, eliminate threats, and safeguard innocent lives, especially children. If they can’t meet that standard, they shouldn’t be the ones stepping through the schoolhouse door during a crisis.

What’s needed is a clear, realistic plan covering every phase of response, from defense to evacuation to medical aid and beyond.

But most of all, what’s needed is a mindset shift.

A protector isn’t just someone with a weapon; it’s someone with clarity, strength, and purpose.

Parents, we can’t just hope someone else is preparing. We must ask hard questions of our school administrators. Visit your children’s schools. Can someone break in within 10 seconds? If so, what’s being done?

Teachers and staff, this isn’t just about reading from a binder. It’s about standing in the gap. If someone came for your students, would you know what to do? Would you do it?

Police officers, we need you to be trained and ready. If you’re willing to go in — trained, capable, and courageous — God bless you. You deserve more than praise. But if you’re hiding behind a badge or a reputation you haven’t earned and will wilt when the moment of truth arrives, step aside. Too much is at stake.

When violence erupts, all other priorities vanish. Physical protection becomes paramount. Readiness means being equipped to act to defend those in our care. When lives are on the line, readiness isn’t optional; it’s our responsibility.

Still, safety isn’t just physical. It's mental, emotional, and spiritual. A protector isn’t just someone with a weapon; it’s someone with clarity, strength, and purpose. We cannot afford to be passive or distracted when it comes to protecting what matters most — our kids.

So let’s make this school year different. Not just with new pencils and planners, but with real preparation. Let’s stop outsourcing responsibility and start owning it. Because when we send our kids off each morning, we should be able to do so with confidence, not because nothing bad will ever happen, but because the adults around them are ready if it does.

'Whitewash': Nashville Police claim race, religion were not factors in trans shooter's massacre at Christian elementary school



The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department released its final report Monday on the 2023 Covenant School massacre.

The 48-page document is replete with details about the transvestite shooter, her butchery, and her firefight with police. While forthcoming about these details, the MNPD has raised eyebrows with the section in its report concerning the shooter's motivations.

Documents previously published by the defiant editor of the Tennessee Star, Michael Patrick Leahy, indicated that the shooter was animated in part by leftist drives — namely her LGBT identity, her hatred of Christianity, and her anti-white bigotry. The final police report on the shooting glossed over these contributing motives, suggesting instead that the transvestite shooter was simply after "notoriety."

Background

A 28-year-old woman, whom Blaze News has declined to name, stormed into a Presbyterian elementary school in Nashville on March 27, 2023, armed with a rifle, a pistol, and a handgun. The trans-identifying shooter proceeded to murder three 9-year-old children — Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney, and Hallie Scruggs — and three adults — teacher Cynthia Peak, custodian Mike Hill, and head of school Katherine Koonce.

The shooter reportedly fired a total of 152 bullets during the attack — including several into a stained glass window in the sanctuary depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden — and had 272 live cartridges on her person at the time of her death. In their search of the shooter's car, police found five fully loaded magazines containing 5.56mm ammunition, two notebooks containing handwriting, and two thumb drives.

The shooter, who was eliminated by the MNPD officers roughly 12 minutes after firing her first shots, left behind what Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake initially characterized as a "manifesto."

In the wake of the shooting, the MNPD and FBI were tight-lipped about the shooter's motivation and unwilling to cough up the shooter's writings.

'Bunch of little f****ts with your white privileges.'

Risking potential legal consequences, Leahy published the shooter's apparent manifesto, which the Tennessee Star obtained from an unnamed source. The document appears to shed some light on why the shooter may have wanted to target Christian children at a predominantly white private school.

Blaze News previously reported that on the first page of the 90-page "manifesto," the transvestite shooter wrote, "Why does my brain not work right? Cause I was born wrong!!! Nothing on Earth can save me. Never-ending pain. Religion won't save."

"Parents actually believe religion can change nature," the shooter wrote. "That could explain why I don't practice religion anymore. Let kids think for themselves, listening to parents does no damned good but to mold their premature minds into a pre-formatted program."

In addition to writing about how her "penis exists" in her head, expressing envy for "children who were able to successfully take puberty blockers," discussing how she realized that "changing one's gender is possible," and condemning parents who prefer "conservative religion," the trans shooter lashed out at men and God, noting in one instance, "If God won't give me a boy body in heaven then Jesus is a f****t."

The shooter also echoed the anti-white rhetoric popular among critical race theorists.

"Kill those kids!!! Those crackers Going to private fancy schools with those fancy khakis and sports backpacks with their daddies mustangs and convertibles. F*** you little s***s," wrote the female shooter. "I wish to shoot your weak ass d***s with your mop yellow hair, wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little f****ts with your white privileges. F*** you f****ts."

Final report

According to the final report, detectives found numerous items of possible interest in the shooter's bedroom and elsewhere in her residence, including:

  • a 12-gauge shotgun, which had the male name she went by written on the side along with the words "dark abyss";
  • a T-shirt whereon she wrote, "Endless saddness [sic] and despair," "dark abyss," and "time 2 die";
  • a handwritten note for her parents indicating her intention to die and instructing them to care for her belongings;
  • 14 notebooks containing 1,299 pages of content; and
  • five cellphones, eight thumb drives collectively containing 379.6 GB of data, and three laptop computers.

The report claims "a manifesto didn't exist" but that "what did exist were a series of notebooks, art composition books, and media files ... documenting her planning and preparation for the attack, the events in her life that motivated her to commit the attack, and her hopes regarding the outcome of the attack."

The shooter's writings furnished police with some sense of how she may have been radicalized over time. However, in their synopsis, police did their apparent best to downplay the shooter's gender dysphoria, anti-white racism, and hostility toward Christianity, focusing instead on her apparent obsession with mass shootings and desire for recognition.

The shooter attended the Covenant school between 2001 and 2005. According to the report, the shooter's writings indicate that her time at the Christian school were the "happiest of her childhood" as "she felt safe and accepted at The Covenant and made friends with other students."

She subsequently attended Isaac T. Creswell Middle Magnet School for the Arts, the Nashville School of the Arts, and Nossi College of Art.

At Creswell Middle, the shooter apparently experienced "culture shock" when classmates, predominantly from minority groups, allegedly bullied her, thinking she was a "rich white girl and worthy of derision." Police indicated this race-centered stigmatization greatly impacted her self-esteem.

The shooter's mother took her to a therapist in 2011 for help when her anger and isolation gave way to suicidal ideation. The therapist, whom the shooter continued visiting for years, concluded the shooter "suffered from major depressive disorder, dysthymic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, social phobias, anger-management issues, and was underdeveloped both emotionally and socially."

In recent years, the transvestite shooter's feelings of rage and isolation began to snowball. She began cyber-stalking peers, obsessing over school shootings, rating mass killers on the number of people they killed, decrying her mother's "traditional Christian" values, and writing about killing children.

According to the report, the shooter began planning an attack at Creswell Middle by December 2018, mapping out locations of classrooms, common areas, and exits. She continued planning the attack into the next year but slipped up, divulging her homicidal fantasies during therapy sessions in spring and summer 2019, which resulted in a psychological assessment at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in June of that year. The shooter subsequently took part in an eight-week outpatient program then acquired a new therapist.

'The transgender ideology and her focus on her transgender nature was a key element in everything that drove her psychologically.'

Despite enjoying a period of emotional stability in the wake of the eight-week program, the shooter resumed her evil plotting, albeit with a different target in mind.

The shooter began to express doubts about shooting up Creswell Middle because there were apparently too many black students and she was "afraid" of being posthumously branded a racist.

Within months of obtaining her first firearm, the shooter instead began considering the Covenant School as a potential target. Not only were the demographics of the student body more to the shooter's liking, she indicated its geographic isolation would afford her more time to kill and its private, Christian nature would mean "she would receive more notoriety." Additionally, the opportunity to kill young children would enable her to maximize the cruelty of her act.

The report noted:

She openly expressed a desire to primarily kill children, though she believed only the older children (over 7 years of age) were viable targets. She felt the younger children were too young to understand the difference between good and evil or how the world was structured, which made killing them especially cruel.

Identifying as an alum who wanted to reminisce about her time as a student, the shooter toured the Covenant School on Sept. 14, 2021, taking pictures to later map out the building's layout. In subsequent months, she stockpiled ammunition and attended formal firearms training classes.

Motive

Police ultimately reduced the shooter's motive to "notoriety," omitting mention in its section summary of her LGBT identity, anti-Christian animus, and racist outlook.

"Even though numerous disappointments in relationships, career aspirations, and independence fueled her depression, and even though this depression made her highly suicidal, this doesn't explain the attack," said the report.

"She believed that by simply committing suicide, she would be quickly forgotten and not even worthy of a footnote in history," said the report. "She craved the notoriety Harris and Klebold attained following Columbine. This can be seen clearly with the frequent references in her writings and videos of how they became 'gods' following their attack. This led to a deep desire on her part to become a 'god' like them and other mass killers who attained notoriety, even if it meant infamy."

The report noted in a subsequent section that while the shooter "raged" about race, religion, and economics in relation to her targets at the private Christian school, "none of those motives impacted her decision to attack The Covenant."

Michael Patrick Leahy, who is a plaintiff in two cases seeking to compel the MNPD and FBI to release the shooter's full writings, said of the report, "I don't see the term transgender here at all or any reference to how her identification as a transgender male was a contributing part of the motive here."

"That looks to me like a bit of a whitewash," added Leahy. "As we know, because we legally obtained about 90 pages of her journal that she wrote from January 1st until March 27th, the day of her death and the day in which she killed six innocent Tennesseans, that the transgender ideology and her focus on her transgender nature was a key element in everything that drove her psychologically."

"How can you write a 48-page report about a self-identified transgender male whose writings that we've seen all indicate anger around the issue of transgenderism and her desire to be fully transgender?" continued Leahy. "How can they issue a report and not mention the word transgender? That is one of the fatal flaws I think of this report."

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How School Chaos From Lax Standards Can Lead To Teens Bringing A Gun

A school is like a city. When a city reduces law enforcement and relaxes laws, crime proliferates and the general quality of life declines.

Hero teacher who disarmed school shooter hugged child until police arrived: ‘This little girl has a mom somewhere that doesn’t realize she’s having a breakdown and she’s hurting people’



An Idaho teacher is speaking out for the first time on how she disarmed a sixth-grade girl during a school shooting that took place earlier in May, ABC News reported.

The teacher, Krista Gneiting, said that she grabbed the child and enveloped her in a hug when she realized what was happening.

What are the details?

Gneiting spoke in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" about the May 6 shooting in which a sixth-grade girl reportedly opened fire in a school hallway, striking a janitor and two students.

All three victims sustained wounds that were not life-threatening.

Gneiting said that she immediately went into protective mode and told students in her class to exit the building as quickly as possible.

"So I just told my students, 'We are going to leave, we're going to run to the high school, you're going to run hard, you're not going to look back, and now is the time to get up and go,'" she recalled telling her students.

Gneiting said she went out into the hallway and saw a young girl.

"It was a little girl, and my brain couldn't quite grasp that," Gneiting recalled. "I just knew when I saw that gun, I had to get the gun."

Gneiting said she approached the girl and quietly asked, "Are you the shooter?"

"I just walked up to her and I put my hand over her hand, I just slowly pulled the gun out of her hand and she allowed me to," the math teacher added. "She didn't give it to me, but she didn't fight. And then after I got the gun, I just pulled her into a hug because I thought, 'This little girl has a mom somewhere that doesn't realize she's having a breakdown and she's hurting people.'"

Gneiting was able to call 911 while embracing the child.

"After a while, the girl started talking to me and I could tell she was very unhappy," Gneiting recalled. She said that the girl eventually calmed down. "I just kept hugging her and loving her and trying to let her know that we're going to get through this together."

When authorities arrived on the scene, they were able to take the girl into custody without incident.

"[The arresting officer] was very gentle and very kind, and he just went ahead and took her and put her in the police car," Gneiting added.

The young girl is still in custody

In a statement, the Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney's Office told the outlet that the unnamed girl is "still in custody and has been charged."

The outlet noted that Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney Mark Taylor previously told reporters that the girl could face three counts of attempted murder.

Gneiting said she hopes the child can find forgiveness in herself and in others for what happened.

"She is just barely starting in life and she just needs some help. Everybody makes mistakes," Gneiting added. "I think we need to make sure we get her help and get her back into where she loves herself so that she can function in society."