The attack committed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School in Parkland, Florida ignited one of the largest politically based anti-gun movements our nation has seen in quite some time. After the event students who hadn’t even been at school at the time came forward to talk about what it was like to be shot at and calling on greater gun control to save their lives. Criticism of the current (at the time) President, House and Senate was freely publicized and focused on in a big way by the mainstream media. Several highly-rated talk shows invited the students – already proven to have not even been at the school during the attack – to talk about their experience during the attack. “Fifteen minutes of fame” because weeks and months of fame and the students sucked it up in a big way. Then the schools actually took some actions to help minimize the risk of future attack events – things like restricting students to clear plastic backpacks – and those same students who had been loudly and very publicly asking for “some action! ANY action!” were all of a sudden complaining about how their right to privacy was being violated. While the event is no longer in the spotlight like it had been (as of this writing), there are still articles being written about it, guns, the response, training, tactics, police protocol, politics and more – all related to the active shooter event.
On February 14, 2018 a 19-year old former student at the school took a rifle to the school and began to shoot students in a seemingly random fashion. The gunman was later identified as Nikolas Cruz and that he had posted on a social media site as much as five months earlier about becoming a school shooter. The local sheriff’s office is reported to have received repeated calls about Cruz’s threats to attack the school near the end of 2016 and into 2017. In January 2018 an unidentified person called the FBI and reported that Cruz had made a threat to kill, but that report was never forwarded to the local FBI office for investigation. As a result of the failings to properly investigate these numerous complaints, Cruz was able to take a rifle to his former high school where he shot a total of 34 people, students and school staff members, 17 of whom were killed or died as a result of the injuries.
- - - - - - - - - -
The remainder of this article is part of the book "Active Killers and the Crimes They Perpetrated," available in print or ebook via Amazon.
