Like so many of us here in Coeur d’Alene, I had an indirect connection with one of the firemen who was murdered by that madman on June 29, 2025. My connection was much less intimate than most. One of the slain was father to a student whom I taught for two years and knew for more.

The world was a better place with men like this among us. We are diminished by their absence. Family, friends, loved ones, and brother first responders are now endeavoring to endure the unendurable. Words cannot encompass such grief. May God stand between them and harm in all of the dark places they must walk.

When I first learned of the situation as it developed, I feared that it was the beginnings of something far more organized and purposeful than it turned out to be. This is because we Americans have many enemies overseas. Tens of millions of military-aged foreigners, many from those enemy nations, have been permitted to illegally enter U.S. territory. To expect some kind of Fifth Column or Guerilla Army to unmask itself in the event of a conflict with one of these foes is not unreasonable.

This local ambush happened only eight days after President Trump struck down Iran’s nuclear hopes. Facing an avenging Iranian militia striking civilian targets from our local mountains would be a nightmare the likes of which Americans have not seen in living memory. Not since Quantrill’s Raiders and the bloody Kansas-Missouri raids during the American Civil War have Americans faced organized large scale guerilla warfare.

I thank God that my fears were baseless.

However, the reality of yet one more broken, suicidal murderer is merely a different flavor of hell-on-earth. How could such a person be permitted to walk freely until their psychoses exploded in needless murder and suicide?

In no way am I advocating any form of gun control. My experiences living in the Bronx in the 1970s make it utterly clear to me that more armed citizens of sound mind and body make for safer streets and neighborhoods. It is not the tool that is at fault. Rather, it is the broken mind that employs any tool for an evil purpose that we must face.

In 1967, filmmaker Frederick Wiseman wrote and produced “Titicut Follies”. This avant-garde film was cobbled together from weeks of filming that was done inside an insane asylum. Edited carefully to tell a specific story, the film illustrated a contention that all such institutions were inherently brutal and needlessly cruel.

Along with the far more famous “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, “Titicut Follies” was part of a wave of propaganda that helped convince a critical mass of influential Americans that insane asylums were no longer acceptable in our progressing society.

From the mid-1970s, America de-institutionalized. Most of those whose special needs had been served in asylums were shifted from residing in large-scale mental health and retardation institutions into small scale community-based group homes.

Therapeutic, psychiatric, and pharmaceutical services were radically decentralized. Most people with special needs were scattered into neighborhoods across the United States. This was intended to be a humane remedy to the perceived cruelty of large-scale insane asylums.

In some cases, this shift was beneficial. For higher-functioning people with developmental disabilities, living in small scale homes where they were served by direct care workers who knew them personally offered a better life.

However, for those with more profound developmental disabilities (mental retardation), their physical setting was far less relevant to their quality-of-life than their mental characteristics.

Further, serving those with mental illness is a wholly different task than caring for those with developmental disabilities. Whether temporary or more permanent, those with certain mental illnesses can pose a deadly threat to others. For the safety of all, those plagued by such conditions need to be contained.

The new community-based model for care stresses the imagined benefits for individuals with special needs over the safety of others within society. While asylums-by-any-other-name are maintained at a small scale for those with the most dangerous diagnoses, the vast majority of dangerously troubled people have not been contained by this new system.

I was personally involved in de-institutionalizing residents from Pineland Center in Maine during the early 1990s. I was hired to develop and manage a brand new residential program for adults with developmental disabilities. While I saw much good, I also saw just how much could go wrong in this community-based model.

Large-scale homelessness began to appear simultaneously with deinstitutionalization. This is no coincidence. Modern homelessness is a direct result of de-institutionalization. For the past fifty years, Americans have been taught that it is heartless and hateful to recognize this connection.

Advocates for the homeless question: who are parents and other citizens to insist that their communities should not abide the mentally ill homeless taking over streets, libraries, parks, and other public spaces? How dare anyone assume that the standards of their “sanity” trumps the rights of those with mental illness to live their lives within and beyond the least restrictive
environment.

None of this is normal. None of this is inevitable. Federal and state governments should reinvest in new, large scale insane asylums. These should be revived with sufficient resources to insure genuinely humane treatment.

New vagrancy laws should also be instituted. Law enforcement needs such laws in order to protect communities from dangerous transients. Such vagrants could then be moved out of the locality. As part of this process, each transient could be assessed for dangerous mental illness. If found to be at risk or a risk to others, these individuals could be institutionalized for their own good as well as for the common good.

Treatment and safety are better remedies to those with broken minds and spirits than languishing on the street to die alone. Re-institutionalization coupled with a revival of vagrancy laws would be nothing less than prudent, compassionate, and humane. In future, people like the local murder-suicide might be stopped, contained, and treated before the murder of innocents.

Lives could be saved.

BOISE, Idaho — Attorney General Raúl Labrador won a unanimous Idaho Supreme Court victory affirming his authority to investigate alleged misuse of government grants issued to charitable organizations in the state of Idaho. The Court reversed the ruling that blocked the Attorney General from obtaining information from 19 grant recipients. The Court affirmed his authority to issue civil investigative demands (CIDs) under the Idaho Charitable Assets Protection Act (“ICAPA”), the Idaho Charitable Solicitation Act (“ICSA”), and the Idaho Consumer Protection Act. Under this investigative authority, the Attorney General may issue CIDs to any person who he has “reason to believe” possesses relevant information regarding a suspected violation of ICAPA and ICSA. 

— ADVERTISEMENT —

“The Idaho Supreme Court unanimously confirmed we have full authority to investigate potential misuse of charitable funds and to seek information from anyone who may have relevant knowledge,” said Attorney General Labrador. “We have worked cooperatively with many entities throughout this process. Those who have worked with us understand that our goal is not to punish grant recipients but to ensure taxpayer funds were used according to state law. We will continue to defend the investigative powers the Legislature has entrusted our office.”

In 2021, the Idaho Legislature established the Community Partner Grant Program using American Rescue Plan Act funds provided by Congress to help states address COVID-19’s impact on school-aged children, including learning loss. The Legislature appropriated a total of $72 million—$36 million in 2021 and $36 million in 2022—with specific restrictions requiring the funds be used only for in-person educational and enrichment activities serving children ages 5 through 13.

In 2023, Attorney General Labrador received reports alleging certain grant funds were improperly used contrary to statutory requirements. He issued Civil Investigative Demands to grant recipients and others who the Attorney General believed might have knowledge of the alleged misuse of charitable funds. 

The Court determined that grant funds fit within the statutory definition of charitable donations, giving the Attorney General clear authority to seek information under Idaho’s charitable protection laws. The Court ruled that the Attorney General can demand information from anyone he has reason to believe possesses relevant knowledge about suspected violations.

The Court held that a single request for information within one of the 35 investigative demands was overbroad and remanded it to the district court, while upholding the Attorney General’s authority to seek relevant information. The Court declined to award attorney fees.

Idaho Supreme Court Opinion Here.

— Advertisement —

Recently, I’ve been closely examining the rapid rise of artificial intelligence in education, both through reading and listening to thought leaders in the field. We now live in an age where voice assistants and instant-response tools are seamlessly embedded in daily life. The promise of AI lies in its speed and convenience, delivering immediate answers, polished summaries, and seemingly effortless solutions. But that very convenience comes with a cost we’re only beginning to understand, particularly when it enters the classroom.

The price is subtle but steep. Genuine critical thinking maybe slipping to the margins. Are classrooms that once thrived on inquiry and debate now risk becoming echo chambers where students accept the algorithm’s output as gospel, trading intellectual struggle for friction-free convenience?

I do believe that real rigor still begins with disciplined questions, why, what if, and what is the trade-off, and thrives on verifiable facts and spirited dissent. When AI platforms prepackage every explanation, that rigor withers.

Predictive text replaces argument, tidy summaries overshadow nuance, and the hard work of wrestling with complexity is quietly outsourced to a machine. The deeper danger is not the technology itself, but it is more our willingness to let it think for us.

It is my opinion, that artificial intelligence adds a new layer of risk.

Used judiciously, AI can broaden research much as the early internet did, scanning vast archives in seconds and surfacing obscure sources. Yet when students hand off the heavy lifting of analysis to predictive text and auto-generated summaries, intellectual curiosity is muted.

Algorithms supply tidy conclusions, students bypass raw data and conflicting viewpoints, and the unspoken lesson becomes clear. We do not probe, we do not challenge, we let the machine decide. Over time, speed of retrieval replaces depth of understanding, laziness masquerades as efficiency, and easy answers mask the hard mental work our young people desperately need.

I believe this danger is not abstract. AI tools are already embedded, sometimes openly, sometimes quietly, from elementary classrooms to graduate seminars. We have little idea how deeply they influence local schools here in Kootenai, and that ignorance is itself a warning.

The Scholarship Owl survey conducted in May 2025 surveyed 12,811 high school and college students, and found that 97% of Gen Z respondents, those between the ages of 13 to 28, reported having used one or more AI tools in connection with their education. The usage was targeted for essays, homework, scholarship applications, test prep and note taking.

The information begs the question, do students still wrestle with “why” and “what if,” or are they turning to an algorithm the moment uncertainty arises?

Are classroom debates giving way to AI-generated talking points delivered in seconds? Slick, “good-enough” summaries now arrive so quickly that slow, deliberate reasoning rarely gets a chance to form. That shift should be every parent’s warning signal.

The purpose of this article was not meant to be a critique on our teachers or school’s adaptiveness; it was written as an opinion ‘warning shot’.

Responsible oversight begins with new questions. First, “What AI tools are sanctioned in each course or class?” and second, “Are teachers verifying that ideas come from students, not from predictive text?”

Polite acceptance of automated thinking may feel efficient, but it is a hollow substitute for real intellectual growth. When we protect students from grappling with messy data, contradictory sources, and the discomfort of forming their own arguments, and when we let software streamline that struggle, we leave them ill-equipped for the complexity of adult life, civic duty, and leadership.

If AI has become a necessary tool, then parents and school administrators should install guardrails and demand explicit guidelines on when to consult the machine, when to do the work oneself, and how to verify automated results. Tools such as GPTzero, Turnitin, and Originality AI may assist in toning-down the shortcuts and plagiaristic tendencies.

As a learning companion, idea generator, and research starting point, artificial intelligence can be an invaluable asset for students, teachers, and parents. It can become an issue when it begins to ‘mask’ learning weaknesses and suppresses reading and writing skills. I believe that when the ‘tool’ suppresses one’s developing ability to do analysis and build real understanding, then the ‘tool’ becomes a real danger to mental development.

A generation capable of defending freedom and challenging injustice will not emerge from obedience and shortcuts. It will come from classrooms that reward thought, not compliance. Teachers should demand original reasoning, not algorithmic paraphrase.

The previous arguments do not mean AI tools should be banished from the classroom. Like calculators and search engines before it, AI has legitimate uses. But its power must be matched with clear boundaries. Students must be taught not only when to use it, but when not to. They should learn to verify its claims, challenge its logic, and recognize that technology is a tool, not a substitute, for thinking.

The moment we let programs such as ChatGPT and Gemini and other large language models, replace struggle, reflection, or original thought, we’re not nurturing our students, we are undermining their education and impairing their critical thinking opportunities.