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--:-- Host (John Bickley): With the nation still reeling in the wake of two mass shootings, many Americans are asking what we can do to prevent future tragedies. I'm John Bickley, Daily Wire editor-in-chief, and I'm here with my co-host Georgia Howe. It's Tuesday, May 31st, and this is Morning Wire.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): A few tech companies may have some answers.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. We have the news you need to know.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): This show is sponsored by Epic Will. Do you have a will? You might be shocked to learn how many people don't. Creating a will is fundamental to protecting yourself and your family. Because if something happens to you and your spouse, the state will decide what happens to your kids and your assets. Take control. Go to EpicWill.com, promo code WIRE. EpicWill.com, where you can secure your future in as little as five minutes with a complete will package starting at $119. And when you use promo code WIRE, you'll save 10%.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): The DOJ is launching an independent investigation into the police response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. In the wake of the horrific tragedy, communities, political leaders, and security experts are debating methods of better detecting such threats before they happen in the future. Some of those methods involve improved detection technologies.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Georgia, we've been looking more closely into this topic. Tell us about some of these new technologies that schools are using to prevent school shootings.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Right. So there are a variety of technology platforms that have popped up to try to screen teens for signs that they could become violent. Wall Street Journal's tech columnist Julie Dargan actually had an excellent article on this topic over the weekend. And there are a few companies that schools are already using to do this. For example, there's a company called Gaggle. There's Lightspeed Systems and another one called Bark. Basically, all of these systems monitor student communication on school devices and or devices that are using the school internet network. So that could mean looking at Google Docs, school email, or social media sites. And from there, an AI algorithm looks for certain patterns. So, for example, that could be searches about weapons or searches about different suicide methods. It's 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.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Now, would this work? Do we know if the past few shooters displayed these types of warning signs, if something could have been done?
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): 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. 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.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Right. Now, the Uvalde 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 verbalize their intent somewhere before attempting an attack 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. So an extremely consistent pattern there. Right. And the remaining 6% usually documented their plans offline in a journal or in audio recordings. So we're looking at almost 100% of shooters or would-be shooters. Another FBI study identified about four or five behaviors that most of these school shooters display in the period leading up to the event. So they talk about things like changes in mental health, strained interpersonal interactions, and or openly discussing violence with peers. And about 25% of school shooters or attempted school shooters also have a formal psych diagnosis at that time.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): So is the idea here that parents and teachers should be closely monitoring kids who sort of meet these criteria?
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Yes, but often adults aren't actually the ones in the best position to see these red flags. According to the FBI, for shooters under the age of 18, peers were actually more likely to observe concerning behaviors than were family members. So in terms of discussing violent intentions, that happens almost entirely within peer relationships.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): 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 help prevent some of these tragedies in the future. Right.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Coming up, America's largest Protestant denomination releases a bombshell report on abuse claims. You can get this show and all of the content you love wherever you are, all on the Daily Wire app. Even if you're not a Daily Wire member, you'll be first to know what's trending with mobile notifications for the latest news. And you'll get content from all your favorite Daily Wire shows. Download the Daily Wire app and keep up with the facts no matter where your day takes you.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): 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. 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.
--:-- Host (Megan Basham): So Megan, what specifically was the purpose of this report? 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. 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. It wasn't to provide a full investigation into the veracity of those claims. 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.
--:-- Host (Megan Basham): 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. 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. And it found that one former SBC president has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting another pastor's wife. 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 So they say it wasn something secret It was already in the public domain And the accused former president claims that that sexual encounter he had with another pastor wife was consensual
--:-- Host (Megan Basham): Now, Tom Askell is one of two pastors vying to be the next SBC president, and his theme has changed the direction. 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. We are told to correct them. If they refuse to be corrected, then we are to remove them from membership. And where there's sex abuse, there's violence or a threat of violence, the civil authorities should be called. God's ordained the state to handle crimes, and he's ordained the church to handle sin.
--:-- Host (Megan Basham): I'm seeing some media coverage comparing this to the Catholic sex abuse scandal. Does that feel like a fair comparison to you?
--:-- Host (Megan Basham): Well, you know, we would never want to minimize any instances of assault or abuse. Even one is too many. 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. So first, there's the question of degree. 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. A grand jury investigation identified 1,000 victims in Pennsylvania alone. 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.
--:-- Host (Megan Basham): The independent investigation found that only two of those accused are still active in an SBC ministry. 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. And we also have to add that these are the numbers so far. And there's also a difference in kind. All of the alleged victims in the John Jay report on the Catholic Church were under the age of 17. By contrast, many of the accusers in the SBC report were adults at the time of the alleged abuse.
--:-- Host (Megan Basham): So what happens next now that this report is out?
--:-- Host (Megan Basham): Well, first off, the executive committee is promising to release that list. And then the SBC is, as we said, getting ready for its annual meeting where it will elect new leaders. So we'll see what the denomination decides to do at the end of June when it meets again.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): All right. Well, thanks for breaking down those details, Megan.
--:-- Host (Megan Basham): Absolutely. Anytime.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): That was Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Hurricane season officially starts in June and will run through November, with the peak typically occurring in mid-September. For the seventh consecutive year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting an above-average hurricane season. 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.
--:-- Host (Matthew Capucci): Hey, thanks so much for having me.
--:-- Host (Matthew Capucci): So first off, what is an above average season and how much above average are we talking? So when we talk about averages, what's normal, we're referring to 30-year averages. In this case, the period 1990 to 2020. During that time frame an average hurricane season has roughly like 14 named storms each year 7 hurricanes and 3 major hurricanes A major hurricane being a cat three plus Now keep in mind that what average But for the past six years in a row we had above average hurricane season So this year no is forecasting 14 to 21 name storms well above average six to ten hurricanes and three to six major hurricanes. Personally I lean towards a higher end of that. I think the dice are sort of loaded this year for another active season and a summer and fall in the Atlantic basin. I guess we'll kind of see what we get.
--:-- Host (Matthew Capucci): Now, why are scientists predicting an above average hurricane season this year?
--:-- Host (Matthew Capucci): Well, hurricanes are heat engines. They feed off of oceanic heat content, meaning the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and the hotter they are, the stronger these storms can get. Already, water temperatures are extra warm across the Gulf and much of the Atlantic, which is a bad sign. Then we also have a laninia, which is basically a chain reaction process that starts with cool waters in the eastern tropical Pacific. That induces sinking in the atmosphere there. 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.
--:-- Host (Matthew Capucci): And why are we seeing an uptick in hurricane activity over the past few years?
--:-- Host (Matthew Capucci): So we have a couple overlapping things. One is the cyclicality of how storms behave in the Atlantic. We usually see about these 25 to 40 year flurries of activity, and those can lead to more cyclones in any given year. But nowadays, water temperatures are warming kind of at breakneck pace. And so that makes it easier for storms to undergo what we call rapid intensification or jumping 35 miles per hour or more in strength in 24 hours or less. 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. It's kind of still something that, yeah, we know it might happen, but it's kind of random when it does.
--:-- Host (Matthew Capucci): Now, you mentioned that flurries of storms appear in cycles of 25 to 40 years. Do you anticipate that we are in the midst of one of the peaks of these cycles?
--:-- Host (Matthew Capucci): That's a question that climate scientists are really kind of struggling to grapple with at this point. 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. 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.
--:-- Host (Matthew Capucci): So we can't stay this busy forever. Gosh, I hope not. Right.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Well, Matthew, thanks so much for coming on today.
--:-- Host (Matthew Capucci): Thank you for having me.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): That was Matthew Capucci, meteorologist with the Capital Weather Gang.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Other stories we're tracking this week. Thousands of flights worldwide were canceled over the holiday weekend, creating chaos for travelers and heightening criticism of airlines. According to flight tracking website FlightAware, more than 6,000 flights were canceled over the course of the travel-heavy weekend. And Top Gun Maverick grossed $151 million in its opening weekend, making it Tom Cruise's highest domestic opening ever. The film brought in $248 million worldwide, another record for Cruise. In the film, the 59-year-old star reprises his role from the blockbuster hit Top Gun, which debuted 36 years ago.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Thanks for listening to Morning Wire. We created this show to bring more balance to the national conversation. If you love our show and you stand with our mission, please consider subscribing, leaving us a five-star rating, and most importantly, sharing our podcast with a friend. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back tomorrow with the news you need to know. I'm out.
