Baltimore City will pay to send 60 busloads of kids to anti-gun demo

Taxpayers will shell out $100,000 so the city of Baltimore can bus public school students to an anti-gun rally. And that’s only the start of what’s wrong here, I write in a new Cato post. “A protest outing that is ardently enabled or even meticulously organized by the authority figures in your life can be like the ninth-grade English course that ruins Macbeth or Moby Dick for you.” I quote Lynda C. Lambert in the Baltimore Sun: “Part of protesting is finding your own way, for your own reasons….. Government sponsorship is destructive to these ends.”

My parting shot: “As for the separate question of whether compulsory attendance and truancy laws should be enforced against students for skipping school in a favored cause, I’ll see and raise: don’t enforce those laws against anyone period.”  [cross-posted from Overlawyered]

On gerrymandering: “…the gold standard for reform…”

“Our coalition considers the work of the Redistricting Commission [MRRC] to be the gold standard for reform.” — Tame the Gerrymander Coalition, on Facebook, on the Maryland Redistricting Reform Commission (report). Thanks! The hearings this year, at which I testified, were Feb. 26 (House side) and March 1 (Senate).