Administrators at a Virginia elementary school were warned on three separate occasions about a first-grade student carrying a gun but failed to act before he shot his teacher, the teacher’s lawyer said Wednesday.

Diane Toscano, the attorney for Richneck Elementary School teacher Abigail Zwerner, alleged that school administrators were warned multiple times about the gun, but were “paralyzed by apathy” and refused to call the police or lock down the school, the Associated Press reported. Toscano also revealed that her client will sue the Newport News school district after she was shot by a 6-year-old boy while teaching on January 6.

“On that day, over the course of a few hours, three different times — three times — school administration was warned by concerned teachers and employees that the boy had a gun on him at the school and was threatening people. But the administration could not be bothered,” Toscano said.

Newport News Public Schools Superintendent George Parker told parents at a meeting earlier this month that “at least one” school official knew of a potential gun on the school’s campus before the shooting.

Zwerner first approached an administrator around 11:15 a.m. the day of the shooting and said the 6-year-old threatened to beat another student up. Toscano said that the school official did not take any action after Zwerner expressed her concern.

According to the lawyer, one of Zwerner’s colleagues told a school administrator around noon that she searched the boy’s bookbag and said that she believed he put the gun in his pocket before recess. The administrator “downplayed” the teacher’s suspicion, saying that the boy “has little pockets,” Toscano said.

An hour later, yet another teacher told a school administrator that the boy showed one of his classmates the gun during recess and threatened to shoot him if he told anyone. The classmate who was threatened came to his teacher “crying and fearful,” according to Zwerner’s lawyer, but school officials still did nothing.

Another school employee warned the administration for a third time that the 6-year-old student might have a gun and asked an administrator to search the boy, but the administrator allegedly refused.

“What did administrators do?” Toscano asked at a news conference Wednesday. “Did administrators call the police? No. Did administrators lock down the school? No. Did administrators evacuate the building? No. Did they confront the student? No.”

At around 2:00 p.m., the 6-year-old student aimed the gun at his 25-year-old teacher and fired one round into her chest in front of the whole class. Zwerner continues to recover at home after being hospitalized for two weeks, the AP reported.

“Three weeks ago, Abby was a cheery young woman with a big heart and loved educating young people — she had a very bright future and a career she loved,” Toscano said. “Today, she is between surgeries and physical therapy appointments, with a career in question. How could anyone find the courage to confidently face a class of students again?”

The Twitter Files revealed that one of the most important content distribution platforms on the internet had been corrupted by severe ideological bias. Leaked documents reveal Twitter staff suspending accounts and tinkering with distribution algorithms for purely political reasons. The Right always suspected Twitter wasn’t a fair forum; the Twitter Files proved it.

The Right has long held similar suspicions about YouTube, which has an estimated monthly user base of 2.6 billion compared Twitter’s estimated 368 million monthly users. Critics tend to focus on obvious acts of censorship: Banning videos or shutting down channels for no apparent reason other than they offend liberal sensibilities. Alternative video hosting sites like Rumble have emerged to provide Right-wing and heterodox voices a censorship-free platform, but the audiences for those sites remain a microscopic fraction of YouTube’s.

My company, Good Kid Productions, has just been victimized by what appears to be a more subtle means of YouTube censorship, a way for the site to shut down dissident voices under the guise of “community safety.”

Late last year, our channel released documentary investigating two famous viral incidents centered on Kenosha, Wisconsin: The summer of 2020 shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man, by a white police officer, and, in the midst of the subsequent violent BLM riots, the killing of two people by Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who came to Kenosha with an AR-15-style rifle to help protect private businesses.

For the first four weeks after its release, the video was untouched by YouTube management, allowing it to steadily rack up views. Then, suddenly, in late December, without warning, YouTube designated the video as “age-restricted.” 

This is supposed to be a yellow-card punishment. Videos get slapped with this designation for violating “community guidelines,” vaguely defined rules supposedly intended to prevent violent, sexual, dangerous, or otherwise inappropriate content from polluting the platform. The “age-restricted” designation doesn’t fully nuke the video: It gets to stay up, but under restrictions that, in theory, simply prevent it from reaching an underage audience.

In practice, age restriction is a death knell: The video can’t be embedded on external websites; viewers have to sign in before they can watch it; and it receives scant – if any – boost from YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which is a crucial source of views.

A documentary deconstructing the media’s coverage of a police shooting and the resulting mass riots is, admittedly, going to contain some mature themes. But all the “mature” visuals come from publicly available news pieces that are themselves available unrestricted on YouTube. The violence isn’t graphic. It’s the sort that might make PBS News. There’s no blood, guts, or sex, and there’s just a single use of profanity (by a BLM activist). And YouTube’s community guidelines explicitly carve out exceptions for news pieces, which is exactly what our documentary is.

The original age restriction notification did not specify what part or parts of the video were problematic, so we were left to guess how to fix it. YouTube has native editing tools that allow channel managers to modify videos after they’ve been published. We used them to blur out some gun violence and then formally submitted an appeal, which is supposed to be overseen by a flesh-and-blood human being.

On January 1, we received a reply from “Emman” at YouTube support informing us that “a human reviewer re-evaluated your content and determined that it does violate our Community Guidelines. We know this is probably disappointing news, but it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all.” 

That’s it for the explanation. Emman didn’t provide specifics. He (she? it?) didn’t tell us what triggered the original designation or what doomed our appeal. Presumably, YouTube gets thousands of appeal requests every day. We’re not expecting a detailed report; we just want to know what specifically the human reviewer saw that made them rule to retain the restriction.

We responded by asking what specific parts of the video would need to be modified to drop the restriction. On January 12, Emman replied: “I understand that you would like to blur out your video, and have them [sic] be reviewed again. Unfortunately, if the video is already reviewed by our internal team the decision is final regardless if the video is edited or not.”

And that’s it. There is no next step. Views on the video have dropped to a trickle. It’s been shared by several large social media accounts, each with millions of followers, but the age restriction is a traffic choke point, substantially squeezing down the audience generated by those shares.

There’s no definitive proof this restriction is political, but it’s hard not to be suspicious. Our documentary deconstructs the lazy, leftist lies about race and police that saturate Silicon Valley. What would a Twitter Files-like revelation of the internal communications of YouTube reveal? How many of these restriction decisions are arbitrary? And how many are driven by an agenda?

Rob Montz, co-founder and CEO of Good Kid Productions. His latest online documentary is The Broken Boys of Kenosha.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.