Morning Wire XX
[0] With the nation still reeling in the wake of two mass shootings, many Americans are asking what we can do to prevent future tragedies.
[1] A few tech companies may have some answers.
[2] I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor -in -chief John Bickley.
[3] It's Tuesday, May 31st, and this is Morning Wire.
[4] In what's being labeled a bombshell report, the Southern Baptist Convention has released its findings of an investigation into its handling of abuse claims against pastors and church staff.
[5] What did the investigation find, and what is the SBC doing about it?
[6] And as Hurricane Agatha makes landfall, we talked to an expert about the coming hurricane season and why meteorologists are predicting as many as 20 major storms.
[7] Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire.
[8] Stay tuned.
[9] We have the news you need to now.
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[20] The DOJ is launching an independent investigation into the police response to the school shooting in Yvaldi, Texas.
[21] In the wake of the horrific tragedy, community.
[22] communities, political leaders, and security experts are debating methods of better detecting such threats before they happen in the future.
[23] Some of those methods involve improved detection technologies.
[24] Georgia, we've been looking more closely into this topic.
[25] Tell us about some of these new technologies that schools are using to prevent school shootings.
[26] Right.
[27] So there are a variety of technology platforms that have popped up to try to screen teens for signs that they could become violent.
[28] Wall Street Journal's tech columnist Julie Dargan actually had an excellent article on this topic over the weekend.
[29] And there are a few companies that schools are already using to do this.
[30] For example, there's a company called Gaggle, there's light speed systems, and another one called Bark.
[31] Basically, all of these systems monitor student communication on school devices and or devices that are using the school internet network.
[32] So that could mean looking at Google Docs, school email, or social media sites.
[33] And from there, an AI algorithm looks for certain patterns.
[34] So for example, that could be searches about weapons or searches about different suicide methods.
[35] From there, the threat is reported to administrators, and then the ball is in their court to determine if it's actually a credible concern.
[36] Now, would this work, do we know if the past few shooters displayed these types of warning signs, if something could have been done?
[37] Well, in the case of the 18 -year -old in Buffalo, who killed 10 people at the supermarket, he did have a history of being hospitalized with psych issues.
[38] In his case, actually, that individual posted about harming himself and others in an online economics class and he was brought to the hospital but when he was brought there he said that he was joking so the staff unfortunately sent him home so that was a miss but it really underscores the difficulty in screening these kids because unfortunately emergency departments see a lot of kids like this now the Uvaldi shooter also reportedly posted about guns and self -harm on social media but his most concerning comments were made in a private message to appear overall there is an extremely robust pattern that virtually all school shooters verbalized their intent somewhere before attempting an attack.
[39] So Julie Jargon notes in her journal piece, a U .S. Secret Service study that looked at 67 violent plots against schools found that 94 % of attackers verbalized their intentions in some way online.
[40] So an extremely consistent pattern there.
[41] Right.
[42] And the remaining 6 % usually documented their plans offline in a journal or in audio recordings.
[43] So we're looking at almost 100 % of shooters or would -be shooters.
[44] Another FBI study identified about four or five behaviors that most of these school shooters display in the period leading up to the event.
[45] So they talk about things like changes in mental health, strained interpersonal interactions, and or openly discussing violence with peers.
[46] And about 25 % of school shooters or attempted school shooters also have a formal psych diagnosis at that time.
[47] So is the idea here that parents and teachers should be closely monitoring kids who sort of meet these criteria?
[48] Yes, but often adults aren't actually the ones in the best position to see these red flags.
[49] According to the FBI, for shooters under the age of 18, peers were actually more likely to observe concerning behaviors than were family members.
[50] So in terms of discussing violent intentions, that happens almost entirely within peer relationships.
[51] Yeah, and look, as we all know, there's not going to be one solution to this, but maybe some of these technologies really will.
[52] help prevent some of these tragedies in the future.
[53] Right.
[54] Coming up, America's largest Protestant denomination releases a bombshell report on abuse claims.
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[58] Last year, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U .S., with more than 14 million members, voted to launch an independent investigation into how its executive committee handled claims of abuse against pastors and other church staff.
[59] Here to give us the details on what the report found and how the SBC plans to respond is Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham.
[60] So, Megan, what specifically was the purpose of this report?
[61] I think it's important to point out that the scope of this report, was really very specific, and that seems to have been lost in a lot of the commentary.
[62] So the firm hired by the SBC Task Force was charged with investigating how its executive committee members handled abuse claims over a period of about 20 years.
[63] It wasn't to provide a full investigation into the veracity of those claims.
[64] So with that narrow focus, the investigation found that the committee, and I'm just going to quote here, singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations.
[65] In a nutshell, what it found was that leaders deferred to lawyers' advice to not respond to claims of abuse in order to protect the denomination from lawsuits.
[66] The investigators also said the executive committee kept a secret list of pastors and church staff suspected of being abusers but didn't act on it.
[67] And it found that one former SBC president, has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting another pastor's wife.
[68] Now, that said, the committee members say the list was only a collection of already identified abusers, and they had collated that list from newspaper reports.
[69] So they say it wasn't something secret.
[70] It was already in the public domain.
[71] And the accused former president claims that that sexual encounter he had with another pastor's wife was consensual.
[72] Now, Tom Askell is one of two pastors vying to be.
[73] the next SBC president, and his theme has changed the direction.
[74] I asked him about this report, and this is what he told me. Well, if a person begins to sin and refuses to repent, Jesus has told us how to deal with that person.
[75] We are told to correct them.
[76] If they refuse to be corrected, then we are to remove them from membership.
[77] And where there's sex abuse, there's violence or threat of violence, the civil authorities should be called.
[78] God's ordained the state to him.
[79] handle crimes, and he's ordained the church to handle sin.
[80] I'm seeing some media coverage comparing this to the Catholic sex abuse scandal.
[81] Does that feel like a fair comparison to you?
[82] Well, you know, we would never want to minimize any instances of assault or abuse.
[83] Even one is too many.
[84] But I think it would be pretty hard to claim that what this report found so far is the equivalent to what happened in the Catholic Church for a number of reasons.
[85] So first there's the question of degree.
[86] There are around 20 ,000 Catholic churches in the U .S., and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found allegations from about 11 ,000 individuals against about 4 ,400 Catholic clergy.
[87] A grand jury investigation identified 1 ,000 victims in Pennsylvania alone.
[88] Now, the SBC has 47 ,000 churches, and the executive committee's secret list named 409 alleged abusers, that were connected to the denomination at some point in time.
[89] The independent investigation found that only two of those accused are still active in an SBC ministry.
[90] So the SBC investigation wasn't carried out through the legal system, and these accusations largely have not been adjudicated because it was done by a private company.
[91] And we also have to add that these are the numbers so far.
[92] And there's also a difference in kind.
[93] All of the alleged victims in the John Jay report on the Catholic Church, were under the age of 17.
[94] By contrast, many of the accusers in the SBC report were adults at the time of the alleged abuse.
[95] So what happens next now that this report is out?
[96] Well, first off, the executive committee is promising to release that list.
[97] And then the SBC is, as we said, getting ready for its annual meeting where it will elect new leaders.
[98] So we'll see what the denomination decides to do at the end of June when it meets again.
[99] All right.
[100] Well, thanks for breaking down those details, Megan.
[101] Absolutely any time.
[102] That was Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham.
[103] Hurricane season officially starts in June and will run through November with the peak typically occurring in mid -September.
[104] For the seventh consecutive year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting an above -average hurricane season.
[105] Matthew Capucci is an atmospheric scientist and meteorologist who works in the nation's capital, and he joins us today to discuss what to expect this hurricane season.
[106] Matthew, thanks so much for joining us.
[107] Hey, thanks so much for having me. So first off, what is an above -average season and how much above -average are we talking?
[108] So when we talk about averages, what's normal, we're referring to 30 -year averages.
[109] In this case, the period 1990 to 2020.
[110] During that time frame, an average hurricane season had roughly like 14 .4 name storms each year, 7 .2 hurricanes and 3 .2 major hurricanes, a major hurricane being a cat 3 plus.
[111] Now, keep in mind, that's what's average.
[112] But for the past six years in a row, we've had above -average hurricane season.
[113] So this year, knows forecasting 14 to 21 name storms well above average, six to 10 hurricanes, and three to six major hurricanes.
[114] Personally, I'd lean towards a higher end of that.
[115] I think the dice are sort of loaded this year for another active season and summer and fall in the Atlantic Basin.
[116] I guess we'll kind of see what we get.
[117] Now, why are scientists predicting an above -average hurricane season this year?
[118] Well, hurricanes are heat engines.
[119] They feed off of oceanic heat content, meaning the warm waters of the Gulf Mexico and the Atlantic and the hutter they are, the stronger these storms can get.
[120] Already, water temperatures are extra warm across the Gulf than much of the Atlantic, which is a bad sign.
[121] Then we also have a leninia, which is basically a chain reaction process that starts with cool waters in the eastern tropical Pacific.
[122] That induces sinking in the atmosphere there.
[123] When something goes up, something goes down, so that makes it easier for air to rise over the Atlantic, which is more favorable for storms.
[124] And why are we seeing an uptick in hurricane activity over the past few years?
[125] So we have a couple overlapping things.
[126] One is the cyclicality of how storms behave in the Atlantic.
[127] We usually see about these 25 to 40 -year flurries of activity.
[128] And those can lead to more cyclones in any given year.
[129] But nowadays, water temperatures are warming kind of a breakneck pace.
[130] And so that makes it easier for storms to undergo what we call rapid intensification.
[131] or jumping 35 miles per hour or more in strength in 24 hours or less.
[132] Now, we're very good at predicting the track of hurricanes, but we're not all that great at predicting when storms will undergo rapid intensification.
[133] It's kind of still something that, yeah, we know it might happen, but it's kind of random when it does.
[134] Now, you mentioned that flurries of storms appear in cycles of 25 to 40 years.
[135] Do you anticipate that we are in the midst of one of the peaks of these cycles?
[136] That's a question that climate scientists are really kind of struggling to grapple with at this point.
[137] On the one hand, if we get to sort of the back half of one of these peaks over the course of several years, we'd see a natural decline in hurricane activity, which will likely happen anyway.
[138] But will that be balanced out by the warming waters, by the increasingly favorable atmospheric conditions, by other cycles that are overlapping in weird, wonky ways, we just don't really know at this point.
[139] So we can't stay this busy forever.
[140] Gosh, I hope not.
[141] Well, Matthew, thanks so much for coming on today.
[142] Thank you for having me. That was Matthew Capucci, meteorologist with the Capitol Weather Gang.
[143] Other stories we're tracking this week.
[144] Thousands of flights worldwide were canceled over the holiday weekend, creating chaos for travelers and heightening criticism of airlines.
[145] According to flight tracking website Flight Aware, more than 6 ,000 flights were canceled over the course of the travel -heavy weekend.
[146] And Top Gun Maverick grossed 151 million in its open.
[147] weekend, making it Tom Cruise's highest domestic opening ever.
[148] The film brought in 248 million worldwide, another record for Cruz.
[149] In the film, the 59 -year -old star reprises his role from the blockbuster hit Top Gun, which debuted 36 years ago.
[150] Thanks for listening to Morning Wire.
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