A six-year-old boy shot his first-grade teacher and then cursed at police officers with language that would make a sailor blush — and the real crisis isn't the firearm, it's the void where a soul should be.
Newly unsealed body camera footage from the January 2023 shooting at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, shows a child who has already been abandoned by every institution meant to form him: family, church, community. Teacher Abby Zwerner, shot in the hand and chest with a gun the boy admitted stealing from his mother, survived. She still carries a bullet fragment in her body and will deal with her injuries for life, her attorneys say.
The footage is staggering. Seated on another teacher's lap, the child — his face blurred — unleashes a torrent: "If you want a piece of me, come get it all, b***." Then: "Ya'll want a fng piece of me b? It's over there w****. F*** you, f*** you, f*** you." When asked about the weapon, he was matter-of-fact: "My mom had that, I stole that from my mom." And: "I don't care if you call backup, I don't care about going to jail b***."
This is not a child. This is a child who was never given a chance to become one.
His mother, Deja Taylor, told ABC's Linsey Davis in 2023 that the boy has ADHD and is "off the wall, doesn't sit still ever." She denied knowledge of reports that he had chased kids with a belt, cursed at teachers, or inappropriately touched a girl on a playground. Taylor served prison time for child neglect and gun charges. She was released in May.
A jury found Assistant Principal Ebony Parker grossly negligent for ignoring warnings that the boy had a gun. Zwerner was awarded $10 million in her civil case. The criminal case against Parker was thrown out by the judge.
KABC-TV covered the footage and the legal fallout in detail. What went unspoken in their framing: how a six-year-old arrives at school with a stolen firearm and a vocabulary of pure violence, and nobody in his life noticed — or cared enough to intervene before a woman nearly died.
Meanwhile, the breakdown is everywhere. In Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, a student fired an airsoft gun at a high school football game on October 2, striking two students before law enforcement intervened, according to the Mechanicsburg Patriot News. District spokesperson Troy Portser said it was the only weapons-related incident this school year. The same week, a student brought a large kitchen knife to McCaskey High School in Lancaster, and another brought an outdoor knife to Lampeter-Strasburg High School.
The Pennsylvania stories are treated as policy items — notification requirements, board disciplinary procedures, a new state law mandating parent notification within 24 hours of any weapons incident on school grounds. The bureaucratic response to children bringing weapons to school is now so routinized it reads like a press release.
The question neither outlet asks: What kind of society produces six-year-olds who steal guns, shoot their teachers, and dare police to arrest them? What kind of society needs a state law to force schools to tell parents when weapons show up in classrooms?
A republic that removes God, discipline, and the family doesn't get gun control. It gets feral children. It gets teachers with bullet fragments and principals who look the other way. It gets airsoft guns at football games and kitchen knives in hallways.
The footage from Newport News is a window into what happens when the moral architecture of a nation collapses. The gun was the instrument. The void was the cause.
