FBI Whiffs on School Shooting [semi-satire]

This week, Nikolas Cruz killed 17 and wounded another 13 in an assault on the students and faculty of Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida. By law, the school is a designated “gun free zone.” This ensured that Cruz would be able to fire at will until off-site police arrived, which they did within five minutes of being called. By that time the 19-year-old Cruz had ditched his weapon and blended in with the fleeing students.

Cruz’s heinous plan was months in the making. Back on September 5, 2017 Cruz posted a YouTube boast “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” The FBI was alerted to this threat by Ben Bennight, but professed themselves unable to identify the poster despite the fact that he used his real name.

Meanwhile, Parkland police acknowledged that officers had made 39 visits to Cruz’s residence over the last several years responding to 9-1-1 calls complaining of a “mentally ill person.” Marjory Stoneman High School authorities had also previously expelled Cruz for violent behavior and threats. Nevertheless, Cruz was able to pass an FBI background check and purchase the AR-15 rifle he used in his killing spree.

On January 5 of this year, a person close to Cruz alerted the FBI and provided information about his gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, disturbing social media posts, and potential to carry out a school shooting. The FBI failed to follow up on this tip.

Fresh from his testimony to congress in which he hailed the FBI as “the finest group of professionals and public servants I could hope to work with,” Director Christopher Wray admitted that “I am at a loss to explain this breakdown in the Agency’s protocols. It is our responsibility to act quickly and properly when members of the public call our tip line with information regarding a threat of personal harm.” Wray promised to “work tirelessly to get to the bottom of this mystifying dereliction of duty.”

A possible explanation was offered by FBI Deputy Director Rod Rosenstein’s announcement that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had just indicted 13 Russians for meddling in the 2016 election. The meddling is reported to have included using false names while making FaceBook posts denigrating the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and the staging of simultaneous pro and anti Trump post-election rallies.

“While we certainly understand and sympathize with parents whose children were allegedly murdered by Mr. Cruz, the FBI doesn’t have unlimited resources.,” Rosenstein said. “We have to prioritize and deploy our manpower to deal with what the Agency determines is the greater threat. For more than a year we have been investigating Russian interference in our elections. That more than a dozen Russian-backed Internet trolls dared to make snide comments about a presidential candidate was, in our estimate a more dire peril than the possibility that a deranged lunatic might massacre a few dozen relatively unimportant teenagers.”

Whether the indictment of these Russians will accomplish anything seems dubious. The individuals are currently outside the US jurisdiction and are unlikely to be surrendered to US authorities to be prosecuted for posts that would appear to be covered by the Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. Besides, the normal punishment for obnoxious behavior by a foreigner is to expel him from the country.

However, Rosenstein insists that “it’s the principle that matters. The Russian government’s refusal to allow us to extradite these men will be an indelible and embarrassing stain on their reputation. Even if they do permit extradition, the ultimate formal expulsion of these men will shame them before the whole world.”

“The bigger issue is how we will prevent this type of foreign interference in the future,” Rosenstein contended. “We have already been working informally with FaceBook, Google, and Twitter to try to get them to screen out unwarranted political content. While this is an encouraging beginning, I think we need to move toward some sort of government procedure that could review all political comments before they are posted to the web. That way we could head off destructive and antisocial remarks before they can damage our democratic processes.”

In related news, Attorney General Jeff Sessions absolved himself of any culpability for the FBI’s failure to avert the Florida shooting, asking people to “remember that I’ve recused myself from anything involving law enforcement” and sought to reassure Americans by saying that “I’ve asked Deputy Rosenstein to handle any further actions related to the FBI’s neglect to follow protocols of its various and sundry responsibilities, whatever those might be.”

if you missed any of this week's other semi-news/semi-satire posts you can find them at...

Nikolas Cruz was a known threat by the administrators of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.....but was not reported to the police. Why?

Because in 2013, the Broward County School Board adopted a program where they don’t relay information to police about troubled students.......a move away from so-called “zero tolerance” policies that require schools to refer even minor misdemeanors to the police.

AKA the “school to prison pipeline.”

Under a new program adopted by the Broward County School District, non-violent misdemeanors — even those that involve alcohol, marijuana or drug paraphernalia — will now be handled by the schools instead of the police.

Sure, 17 kids died...but the important thing is liberals still “feel good” about themselves.

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