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Former Student Opens Fire at Florida High School, Multiple Deaths Reported
A 19-year-old gunman attacked students at his former high school in Broward County, Florida. The story is still developing, but officials have reported “numerous fatalities” at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Fourteen injured victims have been transported to local hospitals. From the Miami Herald:
According to law enforcement sources, the shooter, former student Nicolas de Jesus Cruz, is in custody. Helicopter footage shortly before 4 showed police frisking a handcuffed young man outside a squad car. Dressed in a maroon shirt and dark trousers, he was placed in the squad car as TV choppers filmed the scene. He gave no visible sign of being injured, but authorities have said Cruz was transported to Broward Health North.
A teacher at the school told the Miami Herald that Cruz, 19, had been identified as a potential threat to fellow students in the past.
“We were told last year that he wasn’t allowed on campus with a backpack on him,” said math teacher Jim Gard, who said the former student suspected in the shootings had been in his class last year. “There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus.”
Gard says he believes the school administration had sent out an email warning teachers that the student had made threats against other in the past and that he should not be allowed on the campus with a backpack. Another student interviewed on the scene by Channel 7 said the student had guns at home.
A Broward schools spokesperson could not confirm any information about the shooter, and said Runcie was currently meeting with the Broward Sheriff’s Office.
JUST IN (warning, disturbing video): Cell phone video inside the school as shots were going off at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High https://t.co/wHWo6XjccX pic.twitter.com/3ovf5LhzBs
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) February 14, 2018
#UPDATE In an interview, a student said: "everyone predicted this." >https://t.co/OkO5hke2za pic.twitter.com/ZyPFw0AcQL
— FOX5 Las Vegas (@FOX5Vegas) February 14, 2018
Update (6:30 pm ET): Sheriff confirms 17 fatalities. He also says that the suspect was previously expelled from the school for disciplinary reasons.
Published in General
I just heard about this minutes ago and again, devastating. Yet another situation where people say it was predictable, loose cannon, had guns, banned from the school, made threats. My gosh! And he finds a way to make it into the school…
Honestly, as terrible as these things are does this change anything? If it doesn’t is it really news? In another few months we will have this story again more or less and all the same arguments, complaints, and accusations will fly about and then we will wait for the next one.
These things have the feel of natural disasters about them now. You know they can happen, and dread the possibility, but ultimately you accept their existence.
Valiuth, Isn’t that question-begging? I mean, we had guns in the 1950s and 60s but didn’t have these routine mass murders. We should try to find the causes- divorce, less religion, etc, to see if this pattern can be minimized.
?
I hate it when Liberals start off with “Shouldn’t there be a law….” but shouldn’t there be a law that Principles, Vice-Principles, Coaching Staff, and Gym teachers all be Armed? A few armed, responsible people at each school, and these events would end much more quickly with fewer innocent deaths. And news reports of “Active Shooters” being shot dead rather than captured for trial would put a damper on the spirits of would be copy cats.
I think it’s news, just like if there were packs of wolves attacking innocent people in rural America or great white sharks attacking innocent tourists on the coast. People dying all at once is news, even if nothing can be done about it.
After the fact, everyone was a prescient genius who predicted it. Hindsight is 20/20 and people project their hindsight back as predictions they never actually made. Let’s see any documentation of these ‘predictions.’ Moreover, false positives need to be counted too. How many people predicted shootings than never happened?
Sheriff Israel just confirmed 17 dead; two of them died in the hospital. Others are in surgery.
If any of those are the cause, though, there is no solution other than cultural change. That cannot be imposed from up top.
He appears to have lost his middle name.
Couldn’t Valiuth ask if you are answer begging? Hey, I answer beg all the time by posing open questions. We are a country of 330 million, with 400 million guns, a pervasively violent and pornified culture, and instant celebrity notoriety on offer for the most despicable acts of mass slaughter. Are you proposing the end of no-fault divorce, mandatory religious observances, gun confiscation (with attendant deaths that would be mind boggling) or a united effort to put all the cultural rot back in Pandora’s box.
Maybe Valiuth is being realistic. Perhaps the best we can do is try to harden obvious targets (which just opens up others sometimes), respond with decisive police action, and maybe, must maybe, not throw 24 hour national news coverage at every act of mayhem in a continental nation of 330 million. Perhaps we need to follow the Israeli example of having many more highly trained men and women with guns throughout our civic space.
The cause is it happens enough that it becomes a thinkable option for disgruntled teens. You can’t do much to break this cycle.
I haven’t read Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life yet, but reportedly he has a chapter that covers the Columbine shootings.
Coincidentally, I read this today:
Frontpage Mag: The destructive feminist legacy of Kate Millett
We accept it because we accept the false narrative and refuse to think outside the box. Any high school could pick a half dozen of the most responsible, mature seniors and deputize them, perhaps secretly, and have them carry a concealed weapon. This could be done even more easily on college campuses. Everyone would know the school is protected. Attacks might occur but casualties would be lower. It will never happen of course because we prefer to remain in our comfort zones more than we would like to actually change things and save lives.
Yeah, wow. That’s a pretty unserious response.
I predict the next phase in these incidents will involve liability suits against schools, police, etc. Someone must pay for the irresponsibility and negligence that allows these people to walk into schools and slaughter kids. Whatever happened to involuntary institutionalization? To “he’s a danger to himself and others?”
I totally believe people could see this coming. Some people are obvious menaces.
The stories emerging here have a very modern and disturbing aspect as a result of the smartphone proliferation. Fearing for your child without knowing details is terrible enough. But seeing and hearing the rampage unfold through your child’s phone in real time seems uniquely horrific.
And they apparently did nothing at all to enforce this. This is nothing more than a verbal, “Gun free zone,” sign.
I’m with WC here. The school administration saw it coming, and they did nothing. Someone needs to lose their pension over this.
But, no, we’re just gonna argue about guns for the umpteenth time.
In a school
With strict security procedures
Including all doors locked
Single entry supervised access,
double locked office foyer, with intercom and a camera.
No entry without appointment or parent ID
Cameras at every entrance and stairwell, and key hall intersections.
Security guard
[The only thing missing is doors with alarms that ring when they are opened.]
It only takes ONE foolish person to put a pencil in the door while they sneak to their car or go outside to vape
Or
one pair of collaborators
to destroy the security in place.
Too many people prioritize their convenience over a plan, that while not failure-free, is the best we can do.
This is the speech to my HS students tomorrow
It is not hard for me to stand in front of you, and dispassionately tell you where you should hide. I’ve done it twice a year since 1999.
I’ve found every possible shelter point in this room. [They snicker in the fall when I tell them to think about this.]
I’ve thought about the kinds of things in this classroom I would use, and what I would do, to protect you from some murderous individual, who I pray never comes here.
[This is where I would start to cry]
But I loose it when the selfishness of one or two people destroys every effort we make on your behalf.
Stop putting f’ing pencils and rocks in the doors.
Stop covering for your peers who make bad choices.
Don’t open the doors for your friend, or anyone else.
I don’t want to hold your sobbing mother when some a$$ whole gets inside and tries to kill you.
I would die protecting you, but it pisses me off that I need to think about taking a bullet for you, and pray for the courage to stand my ground,
because some jerk inside wants to sneak outside.
There is truth in this.
Every school has at least one potential
And we do get emails with a picture sometimes. Not often…but not never.
Condolences to the families, and community. Every time this thing happens its heartbreaking.
Tomorrow we’ll find out the list of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, or anti-psychotic drugs his ‘doctor’ had him on.
They’ll be no uproar over the drugs – it’ll be all about the gun.
Sadly, it sounds like this Miami event happened at the end of the school day. The early morning and after school hours are the LEAST secure, and LEAST supervised hours in a high school.
This is not “disgruntled.” This is seriously mentally ill, believed by his teachers and schoolmates to be dangerous.
It’s likely that he was on the loose because in the 1960s and 70s the ACLU successfully used “gold-plating the ‘right to treatment’”* as a Cloward-Piven style tactic which “would force the states to shut down most of their hospitals” to achieve the ACLU’s true goal of the general deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill.
* Cramer, Clayton E.. My Brother Ron: A Personal and Social History of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill (Kindle Locations 2816-2817). . Kindle Edition.
The only solution is the one that, sadly, will never be allowed in this country. Arm the school staff, and train them. We entrust the schools with our children and then refuse to give them the tools that could keep them safe.
How long would this “active shooter situation” have lasted if the school staff had been armed? Not long enough for seventeen deaths, you can be sure.
I don’t know why I seem to be the only one worried about this, but why are there still five unidentified dead kids at 11:30pm? Where are their parents?
Someone I know who is from Scotland said this afternoon, “There are too many guns in this country. They need to confiscate all the guns and only let the police have them.” She works at a university. Yes, that’s the ticket. Confiscate. All. The. Guns.
Who is this “they” of which you speak?
I would like to know how this kid with a troubled background, who had been expelled from school and referred to counseling, was allowed to buy this gun to begin with.
Terrible news, in stark contrast to the story out of Washington today, where an engaged grandmother prevented another murderous rampage.
https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/27858198_10204418113449939_3437694417666759642_n.jpg?oh=46badbfe64adf05c2af08e68d174185b&oe=5B0AED04
https://gellerreport.com/2018/02/fla-schol-shooter-islamic-left.html/
So do we just call all Antifa or radical muslims “mentally unwell”? Which is the symptom and which is the disease?