NOT the NRA’s fault: Local police had grounds to detain Florida school shooter Cruz before he killed, but failed to do so, say experts

03/05/2018 / By JD Heyes / Comments

The Marxist Left in conjunction with the American Pravda media has completely abandoned any semblance of rationality and reason following the most recent, horrific school shooting in Parkland, Fla., by blaming exactly the wrong people and organizations — namely, the National Rifle Association, Republicans in general and President Donald J. Trump.

Of course, it is patently obvious as to what the Left’s motives really are: Complete politicization of this latest tragedy for the purposes of advancing their anti-Second Amendment, gun-ban agenda; they don’t give a you-know-what about the kids who were killed or taking real measures to prevent the next shooting.

But the fact is, the real failures occurred on a much more local level, as reported by the Miami Herald; there was an epic failure of ‘the system,’ as yet another mentally unstable American was denied the help he so obviously needed:

Nikolas Cruz threatened classmates, posted photos of himself holding guns, made violent statements online and was repeatedly described to authorities as a potential “school shooter.”

His troubling behavior gave law enforcement plenty of opportunities to investigate and arrest him — and even take away his guns — long before he shot up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland last week, according to interviews with former South Florida prosecutors and legal experts.

In recent years, South Florida police detectives have arrested a slew of young men in unrelated cases who exhibited similar, troubling behavior on a variety of charges. Cops took them seriously.

But unfortunately, this didn’t happen with Cruz. And yet, experts said his behavior definitely qualified for law enforcement and mental health intervention.

The question is, why?

“There’s no doubt there was a failure,” former Miami-Dade prosecutor Marshall Dore Louis told the paper regarding how law enforcement dealt with tips regarding Cruz. “The idea that they were aware of it and could do nothing is absurd. … We can’t let this happen again.”

So how come, in the days since the state’s worst school shooting, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel — whose first-arriving deputies, along with a deputy serving as a school resource officer, failed to enter the school as Cruz was killing kids and staff — is claiming that his officers were legally “handcuffed” from intervening regarding Cruz? Why is he calling for more power to do just that when the legal experts say the state already does that in other cases?

To be fair, it wasn’t just the sheriff’s office that failed; the FBI was tipped off twice with two very strong pieces of information but the bureau, too, failed to act. In one instance, Cruz posted on the Internet that he wanted to become a “professional school shooter.”

Also, the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office was told that the troubled Cruz had “put [a] gun to others’ heads in the past.”

What’s more, the Florida Department of Children and Families actually decreed him stable in spite of evidence that he could engage in self-harm or harm to others.

“And officials at Stoneman Douglas High, where Cruz killed 17 people on Valentine’s Day, knew that he was cutting himself, threatening students and taking pictures with guns and that he may have ‘ingested gasoline … in an attempt to commit suicide,’” the Herald reported.

And still, Israel claims his department’s hands were tied. The FBI claims — something — and the other agencies involved flat-out whiffed on Cruz’s diagnosis. (Related: The buck stops… elsewhere: Broward County Sheriff Israel REFUSES to accept responsibility despite multiple leadership failures during Parkland shooting.)

But experts told the paper none of that should have happened.

“The standard isn’t whether that information itself was ‘arrestable’ but whether law enforcement had an obligation to investigate a violation of the law,” John Priovolos, a former Miami prosecutor, told the Herald. “A detective should have been assigned. Subpoenas should have been sent to Instagram to locate the IP address and verify it was Cruz.

“Cruz could have been arrested — maybe he would have been diverted to a mental-health court, but he would have been under some sort of supervision,” he said.

None of this, then, is the fault of the NRA, the Republican Party, or the president. The experts have spoken.

Read more of J.D. Heyes’ work at The National Sentinel.

Sources include:

Shootings.news

MiamiHerald.com

Submit a correction >>

Alt-Left, epic fail, gun rights, law enforcement, Nikolas Cruz, nra, Parkland Florida, Police, school shootings, shootings, violence

This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author