The suspect (red shirt) being led away by police. Reuters/WSVN.
A mass shooting at a school in Parkland Florida has left 17 dead and many wounded. Reuters. The attack began shortly before school released. The suspect, Nikolas Cruz, was allegedly armed with a rifle, gas mask and smoke grenades and pulled the fire alarm during the attack. Cruz was expelled from the school for unknown reasons and was a member of the ROTC. Cruz was unpopular at school and was supposedly obsessed with weapons.
My Comment:
There is a lot of speculation about this man's motives. I won't go into too much but he has been accused of everything ranging from a member of antifa, an ISIS sympathizer or a alt-right supporter. So far none of those accusations have been backed by actual proof. There are social media accounts on there but none of them have anything like a manifesto so unless he tells the cops why he did this, we aren't going to know for awhile. Either way, I don't think anyone should be scoring political points off of this. As of this writing no motive has been released.
I personally don't see this as being politically motivated. You don't attack your old school on Valentines Day because you want to make a political statement. You do it because you are pissed at your old school or your teachers or your former classmates. My guess is this guy was just pissed off, not a terrorist. Given the date chosen it's possible that this was due to woman problems but I doubt it was because it was Ash Wednesday though.
Furthermore, this doesn't have the hallmarks of a terror attack. Most terror attacks come with a claim of responsibility or a release a manifesto or something. This guy did none of that. Indeed, it seems very unlikely that this was a terror attack at all and is likely just a run of the mill school shooting.
It's been quite a while since we had a traditional school shooting. Sure there are occasional incidents where someone kills themselves at school or commits a typical murder for typical reasons and just happens to do it at school. Those incidents are often included by dishonest people to try and inflate the number of actual school shootings where someone shows up to kill as many people as possible. Since Newton there really hasn't been a shooting at a public school that has had more than 10 deaths and only a couple where a large number of people were shot.
Why has this happened? My guess is that the rise of ISIS style terror attacks has had a memetic effect. People see mass shootings as a thing that Muslim terrorists do, or, at the very least, people do for political reasons. The disgruntled loner style shooter doesn't want to be associated with that, which makes me think that this guy may have been politically motivated after all, despite what I said above. People usually seem to have a reason for these kinds of attacks these days beyond typical "i hate everyone" angst.
It seems like there were some pretty clear warning signs about Cruz. I saw a student saying that people said to him that he would shoot up the school someday. That seems like a pretty bad idea to say to somebody regardless, but you would think if Cruz was that well known and had been expelled, he would have been on law enforcement's radar. Everyone seemed to know Cruz was a threat but nothing was done about it.
The question is if he did anything before hand that could have been actionable. Simply being weird isn't enough to throw someone in jail. If he did anything like threaten people or any criminal behavior than something should have been done. Given that he was expelled he may have done some criminal activity and if so, someone should have thrown the book at him. If not though, there is probably nothing that could have been done.
Of course the usual suspects are already trying to push gun control. It looks very likely that expanded gun control wouldn't have done anything to prevent this. Either he didn't do anything wrong before he committed this attack and would have passed any background checks anyways or the checks failed and expanded gun control wouldn't have done anything anyways. Almost all of these mass shooters have passed background checks or stole their guns anyways. Gun control wouldn't have helped.
What could have helped is a good guy with a gun. The children and adults killed in this attack were unable to defend themselves due to the law. Had a teacher been carrying a gun, he or she could have stopped the attack or, at the very least, bought time for people to escape. We have seen that happen several times before, including a case in Pakistan where a hero professor armed with a pistol held off a pair of rifle wielding terrorists long enough for his students to escape. That wasn't even an option in this case and is at least part of the reason why 17 people had to die.
It is utterly disgusting to me that we allow our most vulnerable citizens to be completely undefended. Sure their are some cops that are at schools, but the teachers themselves are unarmed. I don't think all teachers should be required to own and carry firearms, but there is no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to carry if they choose to do so.
As for this case, I expect it to fade away from the news soon. Cruz is Hispanic and doesn't fit the profile of a suspect that the media wants to focus on. If it comes out he is some kind of white supremacist or he did it because he is racist, then we will get 24/7 coverage. But that likely isn't going to happen so I expect the media to go back to complaining about Donald Trump. After all, it's not like there wasn't a huge mass shooting in Las Vegas a short time ago that has completely fallen off of the radar. Stephan Paddock wasn't a useful tool to attack Republicans so his actions can be safely ignored. I am guessing Nikolaus Cruz will end up being in the same category...
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