Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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’m afraid you’re right. This subject isn’t about gun control, both sides know it and for the most part are tired of arguing about it. There’s something deeply disturbed in our society yet the motivations are different and the perpetrators have different backgrounds.
This problem can’t be fixed in a free nation. Sadly our only choice is to learn to accept it.
You know my relatives ?
As to the murderer’s possible Antifa affiliations, it will be interesting to see if his online profile is scrubbed and whether he is described as “right wing.”
Given the descriptions from those who knew him, it seems likely that the Florida shooter is mentally ill. Whether he was medicated and not stabilized, or whether he is unmedicated, it seems likely that this is one more bloody mark on the page that should be ascribed to those who made civil commitment almost impossible; many innocents have died since that happened.
While only a small percentage of what used to be called paranoid schizophrenics commit mass killings and spree killings, a disproportionately high percentage of mass/spree killers are fit that diagnosis. Before the ACLU triumphed, people such as that would likely have been institutionalized.. and states with more difficult civil commitment have more of these types of killing.
Whether Islam spreads mental illness is an intriguing question. It is notable that the religion’s founder was referred to as a “madman” by a highly experienced physican. Certainly today’s jihadis have found a socially productive way to make use of the developmentally disabled, severely mentally ill, and dishonored women.
I wonder if we need some kind of a “super court” that is over-resourced with the best judges, psychiatrists, and social workers etc. When people get worried about some kind of weirdo like this it would be highly intrusive but at the same time highly sensitive to constitutional issues. It would need some kind of special oversight as well.
Also people need to get realistic. Private insurance isn’t going to have the resources to help this guy and protect society. It goes back to the deinstitutionalization stuff that is already been talked about.
I well remember fellow students coming into school with their morning’s bag of ducks and their shotgun. They’d place them in their locker and go about their school day. My how things have changed.
We didn’t have rapid fire assault weapons in civil society in the 50’s and 60’s, we had respect for parents, teachers, law enforcement, businesses were closed on Sunday and you went to church, we didn’t have a culture immersed in social media, violent video games – disconnected from reality, two-parent homes, you had neighbors that talked to each other and knew your children. We can’t become numb to these occurrences –
I’m not an expert, but I think that semi automatics were plenty dependable back then, too.
What didn’t we have back then? Phancy Pharmaceuticals. Why isn’t it discussed in the mainstream media? Look at where they get the lions share of their advertising revenue.
It should be about guns – where does a 19 year old get an AK weapon with loaded magazines? How does he get into the school with it? It should be about the parents, friends, neighbors, authorities who all knew this guy – but it begs the question, whether Las Vegas or a church, or theatre or school or nightclub – you can’t do this much damage with a gun that fires once – rapid fire weapons that anyone can get their hands on is insane. Metal detectors in every school, stun guns in every teacher’s drawer, whatever it takes, but it’s not addressing the big picture of a sick society becoming sicker.
You mean to say “outlaw all semi-automatics and their magazines.”
Personally I’d like to know why less than lethal solutions can’t work many times. Pepper stun grenades. Stuff like that.
I lived 20 minutes from Sandy Hook when madman Adam Lanza shot up the school there. I saw first-hand how that atrocity was turned into a spectacle by cynical political players.
How leftist groups tried to co-opt grieving parents, finally promoting one who seemed, at best, compromised.
How the Westboro Baptist Church threatened to protest the funeral of the school principal, which took place about 2 miles from where I lived, and how that protest was thwarted by the good people of Woodbury and Waterbury.
How the CT Democrat dominated legislature held a dog and pony show gun hearing as a pretext to violate CT’s citizens’ rights and then mocked those same citizens online while they plead for those rights.
I personally stayed from the 7AM start of that hearing until almost 2AM the next morning in order to be heard – for what little good that did. CT passed their draconian gun control laws – laws which I’m convinced began the mass exodus from the state. I no longer live in CT.
The similarities between Sandy Hook and the Florida school shooting are too stark. The same political opportunists, banging the same drums of demagogue, won’t be able to restrain themselves from turning atrocity into spectacle.
And so, I’d like to ask the President and the Republican congress to ignore the demagogues and to protect our children in the only way that preserves the peoples’ rights: allow armed personnel in our schools.
May the victims of the Florida school shooting rest in peace. May their families, the injured, and their families find peace.
Here’s a take from a social worker with twelve years in the trenches. I got to her blog from her father’s blog, also worthwhile. He’s Clayton Cramer, whose book on how we deal with mental illness in the USA is very good.
Murder is already outlawed. However this young man seems to have ignored that one at least 17 times. If making things illegal stopped them, hen we would have less drugs in the country and less frequent shootings in Detroit as well.
This incident happened very close to where I live; and I know (older) people who went to this school. The neighborhood is upper middle class, and generally a very low crime area.
I would love to find out what the stats of shootings are in private vs. public schools, or even if any shootings have ever occurred in any charter schools.
I would like to propose that public schools are a nuisance and should be disrupted. We are raising a generation of children that are shooting up schools or destroying properties in college. Either way, there seems to be a greater “anger” in some of the kids. The issue is more fundamental that laws, tools or meds. The issue is providing the correct culture and sense of purpose to these kids.
This social worker is describing some of the kids I got to know when I was volunteering in public schools twenty years ago.
I would agree with her that there are many reasons these kids “disconnect.” Too many to solve with some single solution.
I imagine quite a few of them are disappearing in the heroin overdose death notices now.
I have wondered too if the number of young people being pulled out of these schools in favor of charter and private schools and homeschooling has further concentrated this population within the schools now.
What a godawful tragedy we have created in the last thirty years. So much loss.
For those children who have a diagnosable condition of psychopath, there have been some gains in treatment.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right.
Kids like that are also prime candidates for cults, including political ones like BAMN, Antifa, and religious cults of various flavors, some of which like armed militancy. Street gangs, too. Some of these groups also use drugs in their indoctrination (think ecstatic group bonding) and mission preparation. One such jihadi group gave us the term assassin.
Also, the psychiatric drugs we’ve been giving these kids and the mass media-desensitizing gruesome and way too often suicidal imagery that surrounds them all the time . . .
it makes my head and heart hurt.
Not to mention that many of the body care products and sports oriented supplements marketed to guys that age have clinically significant amounts of the hormone DHEA (that’s dehydroepiandrostene, not the omega 3 fatty acid DHA (docosohexanoic acid)).
DHEA is in those products as a testosterone precursor, which it is, but it also has much more wide ranging and complex actions.
Everyone was so concerned over this guy. For it seems like a year. Why did nobody call Dr Cahill?
I believe that a few hours of talking with someone is worth far more than a boatload of any drugs.
Even if he hadnt committed a crime why cant the police, FBI refer someone to a dr? No judicial involvement – lets not create waves that could later ruin someone’s life – but lets get him some help. Maybe an ounce of prevention could be worth a pound of cure?
Is it against the law for law enforcement to be helpful? Is it too much to ask them just to look him in the eye “I see you’re traveling a dark and lonely path – you dont have too go alone.”
I agree. Having spent a great of my free time as a volunteer in public schools, I can vouch for the fact that many of our children are walking around our schools not connected in any meaningful way to anyone in the building.
School is a wonderful opportunity for us as a society to make a friendly contact with young people. I’ve never been sure it is lawful to detain these kids against their will :), but since we are, why are we not making the most of it and connecting with them in a positive way. Just “Hi, how are you?” humanitarian contact.
I was really saddened and shocked to see so many teenagers who were clearly isolated emotionally, mentally, and socially. Human beings fall apart in isolation. In schools, the isolation is made much worse by the feeling of rejection along with it. So it’s much harder to bear.