Guns Don’t Kill People, Incompetence Does: Unpacking the Parkland Shooting Facts
Whenever a mass shooting occurs in our country, there are many questions to be asked. Who was behind the attack? How did they orchestrate said attack? Did anyone have advanced knowledge of the attack?
The Democrats forego these questions in favor of immediately pushing for more restrictive gun legislation. They rush to distort the truth about the events to support their agenda.
Get Great Guns and Ammo Deals!
It’s been just over a week since 19-year old gunman Nikolas Cruz took the lives of 17 students and faculty members at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Already the liberal media are exploiting survivors like the grieving and fragile Cameron Kasky as the face of gun control and ignoring what really went down.
Fortunately, the facts are still coming out and it will be hard for the Dems to plug this one up. Yesterday, it was revealed that the Broward County Sheriff’s Office had received no less than 18 phone calls admonishing them about the threat posed by Cruz. These calls included concerns that he would shoot up the school.
None of these calls resulted in any intervention on the part of either the Sheriff or his deputies. This tells us that local law enforcement had nine years to prevent the shooting from occurring and failed to do so.
It will be easy for some to chock this up to simple oversight or to argue that police have their hands full with other cases, but it won’t be nearly as easy to brush off the facts about Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School resource officer Scot Peterson.
Peterson was on duty outside the high school on the day of the attack and did nothing to stop Cruz from mowing down his schoolmates and teachers. Security footage reportedly shows Peterson arriving at the west side of building 12, taking up a position and then…never entering the school.
Upon learning of Peterson’s inaction, Sheriff Scott Israel decided to suspend him without pay. In a move that was clearly an admission of guilt, Peterson chose instead to resign and subsequently retire. Two additional deputies are under investigation, pointing to further misconduct.
Peterson was armed at the time and should have entered the school, engaged Cruz and taken him down. Instead, he cowered outside while 17 people were murdered and others injured.
It isn’t just the local authorities that are culpable in this horrendous crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation also bungled things prior to the shooting. After being alerted to a comment Cruz left on a YouTube channel in which he brags about how he’s going to be a “professional school shooter,” the FBI failed to pass this information on to their Miami field office.
In an official statement, the FBI’s National Press Office said, “Under established protocols, the information provided by the caller should have been assessed as a potential threat to life. The information then should have been forwarded to the FBI Miami Field Office which uses the latest surveillance technology, and where appropriate investigative steps would have been taken.
“We have determined that these protocols were not followed for the information received by the PAL on January 5.”
This news comes in the aftermath of a wave of new and revised gun bills by House Democrats who want to restrict access to the AR-15, ban bump stocks and other AR-15 scopes and accessories, and grant courts the power to strip Americans of their guns at the behest of friends or family members.
Bolstered by the Never Again Movement and the planned March For Our Lives demonstration in Washington, the liberals are putting pressure on President Trump and Florida Republicans to sign off on their draconian legislation.
As the saying goes, a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch. That appears to be the case when it comes to the gun control debate. Every time a mass shooting occurs, we see the same knee-jerk reaction from the Dems. Suddenly, responsible gun owners should be denied the right to concealed carry. Assault rifles should have to be featureless. Yada yada yada and so on and so forth.
But this time there’s a good reason for the Dems to reconsider enacting stricter gun laws. What the failure of the FBI and Broward County Sheriff’s Office demonstrates is just how much damage can be done not by firearms alone but by people failing do their due diligence.
There are armed police officers patrolling high schools all over the country. If they do their jobs, no lives will have to be lost. If the FBI bothers to do their job by launching a thorough investigation into all reports of suspicious behavior, people like Nikolas Cruz will never reach their end game.
Of course, the blame can’t be placed only on law enforcement. Faculty at Stoneman Douglas High School are also at fault for not taking measures to keep Cruz from returning to their school. In the past, they had suspended him for bringing bullets to school in his backpack.
Rather than facing expulsion, Cruz was allowed to return to campus sans a bookbag. Even after he was eventually expelled, students told teachers that he was stalking a girl who went to the school, indicating that he had been on school grounds after he got booted.
In a painful stroke of irony, the school was supposedly planning an active shooter drill in the next few weeks, but Cruz struck before the drill could be performed. Furthermore, the school’s Code Red procedure was able to be easily overridden by Cruz who simply pulled a fire alarm.
According to the mainstream news, Cruz allegedly took an Uber to school on the morning of the shooting which begs the question, “How did an Uber driver not notice a teenage boy carrying a semi-automatic weapon into his vehicle and into a high school? And if he saw it, which is fairly likely, why didn’t he alert the police?
At least one witness said that Cruz was seen wearing black clothing and carrying a duffel bag on the morning of the attack. This could account for why the Uber driver may not have seen a gun or recognized Cruz as a threat. Nevertheless, further details need to be forthcoming.
The Associated Press reported that Uber is helping law enforcement with their ongoing investigation, which suggests a commitment to figuring out how the shooting could have been prevented.
These are the questions we should be asking as a nation instead of asking for stricter gun laws. Yes, guns can be used to harm innocent people… but they can also take out a killer before he kills anyone else. But don’t take it from me, take it from the cowardly Officer Scot Peterson who is no doubt going over that fact in his head as he looks for another job.
Anytime someone dies at the hand of a firearm is horrible but I completely agree that we can’t ban guns because of it. The phrase you mention “one bad apple ruins the bunch” is most definitely what they’re trying to do with guns in the media and it’s sad.
There are just too many examples of what happens when a government enforces more gun control. It’s never been a positive outcome.