At least 17 dead in Florida School Shooting

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Cars are a privilege and guns are a right.

Because those regulations do nothing to prevent violent crimes and only negatively affect those who abide the law. In most instances turning many hard working Americans into overnight felons. Criminals have a complete disregard for the law and will only ignore them... America’s biggest problem in recent years, is going soft on violent criminals. Allowing them to plea down to a lesser charge and in some instances, they can still come out and leagaly buy a firearm.

Florida school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz had swastikas ammunition magazines he brought into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, a federal law enforcement source with direct knowledge of the investigation told CBS News on Tuesday. Cruz has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder.

Cruz had 180 rounds of ammunition left, a source confirmed to CBS News.

Sources told CBS News that Cruz broke a third-floor window, possibly to fire upon people from above. Sources say he tried to create a "sniper's nest" by shooting out the window, firing 16 rounds into the glass, CBS News correspondent Manuel Bojorquez reports. But the hurricane-proof glass appeared to have stopped it from shattering, Bojorquez reports.

Investigators believe the suspect tried to reload, but after changing magazine clips, his gun may have jammed, Bojorquez adds. Cruz then allegedly put down his weapon and left the building, blending in with other students.

Police said Cruz told them he had "brought additional loaded magazines to the school campus and kept them hidden in a backpack until he got on campus to begin his assault."

Jordan Jereb, the leader of white nationalist group Republic of Florida, had initially claimed Cruz was a member of his group but later walked back the claim and local law enforcement said there was no proof that Cruz and Jereb ever met.

Duvaney, who lived next door to the family from 1999 to 2002, said Nik displayed signs he was deeply troubled even as a toddler and that “everybody dropped the ball on him.”

“He threw my 4-month-old into the pool. My son was crawling on the back patio and he threw my son into the pool. And Nikolas was only 2 then,” she said.

But there weren't no such thing as "assault rifles" back then.

Before the Gun Control Act of 1968 there was no law in regard to minimum age and guns could be bought and received though the mail. Where there mass shootings in schools back then?

Could it be that the answer lies elsewhere or should we just pretend that it's because of guns since guns are icky and scare us?

School shootings are not a new thing. The first one happened in 1764.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States



Well ... guns have come a long way since the olden days.

One should not put too much faith in the accuracy of memes. Although I'm sure far too many do.

More than 30 people knew about disturbing behavior by Nikolas Cruz, including displaying guns, threatening to murder his mother and killing animals, but never reported it until after he committed the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Two students did report Cruz’s disturbing and threatening behavior but said they were brushed off by the school’s administration, according to testimony Tuesday to the commission. A detailed tip to the FBI also went unheeded, and on Tuesday, the parents of one of the murdered students sued the U.S. government over the FBI’s admitted failure.

In the years before the massacre, Cruz reportedly killed a duck with a tire iron, shot squirrels with a pellet gun, killed frogs and decapitated a bird, Pinellas County Sheriff’s Detective Chris Lyons said in a presentation to the commission, based on statements from students, neighbors and co-workers of Cruz and his mother. Cruz displayed a photo to a student of a decapitated cat.

He repeatedly made racist and anti-gay remarks,using the term “white power” and drawing swastikas on desks and his backpack. He remarked on the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and “said he was glad they killed all those gay people,” the detective said.

A student said he “made bad jokes about Jewish people, Nazis and Hitler and wished all Jews were dead,” he said. One 11th-grader reported that Cruz “told him he did not like black people and would like to shoot them,” he said.

Photos on Cruz’s Instagram account showed guns and knives. They showed a masked Cruz wearing a Make America Great Again hat and camouflage gear.

A bank employee who regularly saw his mother heard her phone conversations, in which Nikolas Cruz screamed that she should kill herself and that he would kill her and burn their house down.

Although his mother, Lynda Cruz, consistently defended him to school authorities, once calling him a “gentle soul,” her conversations with the bank employee told a different story, according to Tuesday’s testimony.

Lynda Cruz described her adopted son as “evil” and manipulative, complaining of being lonely and depressed to elicit sympathy. And she feared him. “If anything happens to me,” she told the bank employee, “it was Nik.”

But two students did say something in December, 2016, and they said Stoneman Douglas administrators ignored them, according to the Pinellas County detective’s presentation.

One student described a series of menacing actions by Cruz. He smashed a class project. He looked up firearms on a school computer. He posted Instagram photos of firearms. He had heard Cruz brought either a knife or bullets to school. Cruz told him he had two shotguns.

“He said Cruz said that he liked to see people in pain,” the detective said.

The student went with another student to report their concerns to assistant principal Jeff Morford, the detective said.

The student said Morford told them to google the word “autism” and told him Cruz was being taken out of the school by his parent so he shouldn’t worry about it. The other student in the meeting said it had been with Stoneman Douglas Principal Ty Thompson, not Morford, but Gualtieri said the consensus among investigators was that it had been Morford.

The student’s mother went to the school the next day and said she spoke with Stoneman Douglas Principal Ty Thompson, despite the other student’s claim it was Morford, the detective said. She said Thompson told her that if she wasn’t happy with the way the school was run, she could withdraw her son, he said.

Interviewed by the commission’s investigators, both Morford and Thompson deny that the students or one of their mothers had reported Cruz’s behavior to them.

But Gualtieri said the students accounts appeared credible, despite their confusion about who they talked to.

“They both corroborate each other,” he said. “It’s our consensus that they went to Morford, they did not go to Thompson. This is the same instance. You have two kids that are seeing this. They go together, and there’s a lot of corroboration for their version of this.”

ruz might have said frightening things to students, but Maxwell said his comments didn’t rise above those of other troubled kids.

“Unfortunately, there’s some very scary kids within the community,” she said, “and they’re numerous and it’s the public school system’s job to educate them. They don’t have a choice.”

“There was no reason to focus on Nik Cruz and zero in like he was capable of this. Had the administration been told specifically that he was threatening to shoot up the school, there would have been a very specific reaction.”

“Kids say crazy things every single day. They threaten to kill other kids. They see things on TV and just blurt it. If you jumped at every utterance made from a kid it would be impossible,” she said.

In a related development, the parents of one of the dead students, Jaime Guttenberg, sued the U.S. government Tuesday over the FBI’s failure to investigate a detailed January 2018 tip warning that Cruz could become a school shooter.

As they were planning their daughter’s funeral, Fred Guttenberg received a text message to call the FBI, according to the family’s lawsuit.

During the call, an FBI agent told him the bureau’s mistakes were about to become public, and he wanted to make sure he heard before that happened.

“Are you telling me that if the FBI did not make a mistake and did their job a month sooner, my daughter would still be alive today?” he asked, according to the suit.

“I’m afraid so, sir,” the agent said