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What to do about Cruz and the FBI? — 49 Comments

1. From the sound of Cruz’s personality/disorder, he was never going to establish any real friends for very long. That left his parents or authorities to know what was going on with him.

   And apparently there weren’t many consistent threads tying him to anyone.

   Trouble waiting to happen unless something in that equation changed. And it didn’t.

2. “The couple both grew up around guns and are comfortable with them, but they insist on gun safety.

   They made Cruz buy a locking gun safe to put in his room the day he moved in. Cruz had a handful of guns, including the AR-15 and two other rifles that Snead said would be considered assault rifles. Cruz, a hunter, also had knives, BB guns and pellet guns.

   Snead thought he had the only key to the cabinet but has figured out Cruz must have kept a key for himself. The family kept their own rifles, bought after a burglary a couple of years ago, in a separate locked cabinet.

   They told Cruz he needed to ask permission to take out the guns. He had asked only twice since November. They said “yes” once and “no” once.”

   Nikolas Cruz: ‘We had this monster living under our roof and we didn’t know’

3. The article at vanderleun’s link is just tragic. Good people trying their best. Could any of us have done better?

4. Come on it’s so obvious what would happen if the FBI or other law enforcement got very diligent about tracking down every border line threat. We would start seeing all the sob stories about the brutal (probably racist) law enforcement harassing people for just being different.

   So, yes they should do better and may I suggest that they emphasize this instead of obsessing over Russia, Russia, Russia and what their role will be in the next administration but if anybody thinks that they will have a demonstrable impact on these types of events they are dreaming.

5. It seems to me that maybe the school shooters and mall shooters and movie theater shooters and Las Vegas shooters and inner-city Chicago gang-bangers and pressure-cooker bombers in this country are all of a piece with the Islamic murderers shooting up concerts and nightclubs and driving trucks into crowds into Europe and bombing buses in Israel and all the rest of it all over the world. Maybe there’s something larger than Western culture or religious resentments or gun control or poor care of the mentally ill or whatever the usual suspects may be, possibly something ancient, certainly something evil, something awakening worldwide that drives the souls of young men into wanting to murder masses of innocents, whether they use religion or insanity or grief at their mother’s deaths or whatever it may be as their rationalization? Are we focusing too closely on the trees and missing the forest?

6. I don’t agree with those people demanding that Wray be fired. He is an attorney who was hired into the Director’s position. And he has only been on the job for five or six months. And, I am sure that there are still a bunch of upper level management types who are against Trump and his administration.

   When you are new, you have many things to learn about an organization, what’s working and not working and how to implement change. And, you should be thinking about all of the consequences of a change.

   A detailed operational audit needs to be done at every department of the government. For all we know, the office that takes these tip calls may be staffed by low-level or problem employees who views the task as a punishment and not an important part of the job of protecting the US.

   I’m sure Wray walked into a place with many issues. This one just bubbled to the top faster than anyone expected.

   Trump’s plan to change the hiring & firing process of the government needs to be implemented ASAP.

   BTW, in case you don’t remember, Trump issues a bunch of Executive Orders/Memos to the departments to streamline activities. For example, the departments were to figure out how to get major projects approved so things can get done. With the infrastructure push, there should be an easier path to success. Or, we can hope.

7. Mrs Whatsit:

   It’s hard to accept the possibility that certain situations are so terrible that there is no way to prevent that person from causing violence, short of having a crystal ball to see into the future and know exactly which persons need to be preventively detained, and for how long. If we locked up every young man like Cruz before anything had actually happened, we’d be a police state.

   Seems to me, though, that at the very least the school should have had an armed guard or two around the premises.

8. I have a hard time understanding why are the liberals being so upset about the shooting and death of children. Children are nothing more than fetuses that weren’t aborted, if they don’t give a darn about fetuses, and feel they could be easily disposed of without remorse for inconveniencing their mothers, why do they pretend to care so more about what unaborted fetuses eventually become? Half a million abortion a year no democrats were ever upset about that insane number.

9. I do have a question: At what age was Cruz when the sheriffs were called to the home, what age when he was receiving treatment (for what?). If he was a minor then i doubt that any information on him would be in a system that was accessible for a background check. There are no easy answers here. Do we lock up people that say bad things just in case they may cause harm? Do we take guns away if someone reports someone, without a legal/mental health hearing?

10. What is forgotten is that the sheriff’s office was called to the home several times on “domestic violence” calls. They NEVER filed a report according to the news we have at this time. This is important because according to Florida law those who are convicted of domestic violence can’t have a weapon. 39 calls to the home should have elicited a greater response than it did. The other aspect not talked about is that if law enforcement had done their jobs it could have helped the mom (prior to her death) get greater mental health intervention for her son. Look at your own health insurance. How many sessions do you get? What happens when you need more? You need financial help and oftentimes that only comes with documentation of the gravity of the problem. What was not done was harmful to everyone and we need to start holding people accountable. Especially since the media wants to hold innocent gun owners responsible who had nothing to do with this situation.

11. School shootings rarely happen at private schools. They tend to have smaller enrollments so teachers know all the kids and spot problems. They have two parent homes with a father present, and they can kick kids out for the public schools to handle.

    The Florida school had 3,200 students. That’s way too big.

12. lightning:

    You are making some assumptions that he didn’t receive therapy.

    But he apparently did. See this:

    Officials said the teen had received treatment at a mental health clinic for a while, but stopped getting help more than a year ago.

    The sister-in-law of the teen’s adoptive mother also revealed that he was taking medication at some point for ’emotional difficulties’ but didn’t elaborate on what kind of drugs.

    Reports are that he was not on any drugs by the time of the shooting. Also:

    Paul Gold, 45, who lived next door to the family from 2009-2010 told the New York Times that Cruz ‘had emotional problems’ and may have been ‘diagnosed with autism’.

    He said he knows that Cruz was sent to a school for students with special needs at one point.

    ‘He had trouble controlling his temper. He broke things. He would do that sometimes at our house when he lost his temper. But he was always very apologetic afterwards,’ Gold said…

    Citing reports that Cruz had been in mental health therapy, Lipman said that if he continued treated ‘it’s more than likely this would never have happened.’

    For depressed shooters, Lipman said there’s usually a triggering event that causes them to break.

    ‘This person, who already sees their life as having no value, now feels it’s even more worthless, and they look to express their rage in the most violent way possible,’ Lipman said.

    Those who knew the family say the loss of Cruz’s mother would have been difficult, since she was the only one close to him.

    ‘His mother was his entire life and when he lost her, I believe that was it for the boy’s peace of mind,’ Gold said.

    If he had stopped going to therapy, no one could have compelled him to return unless he was involuntarily committed. That was the only possible route, and it’s not an easy one.

13. “There are limits to our ability to help someone as deeply troubled as Cruz, and limits to our ability to lock up someone dangerous who hasn’t yet done anything except threaten.” neo

    Yes, which is why Pres. John Adams was right;

    “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is entirely inadequate for the governance of any other.”

    The problem is cultural in nature. The liberal/leftist side of our society is willfully blind to the actual underlying reality of these issues.

    Flashback 30 Years: Guns Were in Schools … and Nothing Happened

    The Left Is Reaping the Whirlwind of the Culture They Made

    Liz,

    “I don’t agree with those people demanding that Wray be fired. He is an attorney who was hired into the Director’s position.”

    He should be demoted. Besides the legal aspects, what the hell does a lawyer(!) know about the investigation that field agents pursue? It’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    Put a field agent in charge, one committed to law enforcement and limit lawyers to advising on legal aspects.

14. 1. We need make it easier for families to get a court order to involuntarily commit someone to a mental health inpatient facility.

    2. We need to have laws on the books requiring mental health hospitals and the courts report the involuntary commitment to the FBI to have it entered into the NICS system, so we don’t have anyone slip through the cracks like the church shooter in Texas (USAF failed to report the shooter’s dishonorable discharge).

    3. We need to stop overmedicating boys. It seems like every time something like this happens, the boy had been diagnosed with ADHD (this one also was diagnosed with autism and depression). Another term for “Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder” is “being a boy.” Unfortunately now that most teachers are women, and they know how to deal with girls, they simply don’t know how to deal with boys who have more physical energy than girls. So they conclude there must be something wrong with boys and consequently schools demand that troublesome boys be medicated. And the medication is usually amphetamines.

15. Mr. Frank:

    He was not a student at a public school, however. He had been kicked out. And he was certainly “spotted” as a problem by the school system and just about everyone else from the time he was quite young.

    See my comment above this one, plus this history. It’s extensive, and there were many interventions, including the fact that when Cruz was suspended rom the regular high school, he ” bounced between three alternative schools, most recently Rock Island OCLC in Oakland Park..”

    Alternative schools are very small and the teachers are trained in dealing with “at risk” kids.

    The day he became a mass murderer, Cruz was AWOL from Rock Island OCLC.

    More:

    As early as 3 years old, Cruz was diagnosed as developmentally disabled, the school district documents state.

    After attending Westglades Middle, he moved in February 2014 to Cross Creek, a Pompano Beach public school that offers a program for emotionally and behaviorally disabled children.

    State records from the Department of Children & Families show Cruz was afflicted with a brain disorder marked by bouts of hyperactivity and a difficultly paying attention. The 2016 records also show him struggling with autism and depression.

    He took medicine and had counselors who worked with him in school and at his home, the records state.

    Gordon Weekes, one of Broward County’s chief assistant public defenders, said although Cruz had a supportive mother, who died a few months ago, “he needed more.”

    At one point, according to the 2016 state report, crisis workers from Henderson Behavioral Health, a major mental health center, were called to the high school and determined that Cruz was “not at risk to harm himself or others.”

    Weekes said Henderson workers should have hospitalized Cruz at that point. He’d gotten into a fight, records show, around Sept. 20, 2016 and was suspended. A week later, the state received a report he was cutting his arms on Snapchat, a mobile application.

    The Department of Children & Families, however, concluded that “no referrals or services were needed” for him.

    “If someone would have caught it and acted on the red flags we not would be here today,” Weekes said. “There were tragic red flags, and they just didn’t catch them.”

    DCF Secretary Mike Carroll on Saturday night issued a statement saying that mental health services and supports were in place for Cruz when the agency’s investigation closed. The state only investigates whether an adult is safe and has access to help.

    I don’t think it would have mattered one iota if Cruz had gotten a bit more help at various times. He was already a very recalcitrant case. By the time of some of the more recent events he was also an adult, technically speaking.

    But everyone who is crying out and asking why there was never any intervention is barking up the very wrong tree. There had been plenty of mental health intervention at many points along the way, but there’s a limit to what can be done.

    There is no question that his mother’s sudden death was likely to have been a huge emotional trigger, though, and something should have been done at that point. However, he seemed to be taken in by some very good Samaritans; it just wasn’t enough.

    Also, do not discount the fact that he was adopted at 2, and no one seems to know his history until that time. It may have been very traumatic, which could easily have affected him for life.

16. I’m not optimistic it would have made a difference if the FBI had investigated Cruz as their protocols required.

    Nonetheless, protecting American citizens is a core FBI mission and I would like to see them doing their basic job as opposed to pursuing political agendas, often in illegal ways, like pressuring Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide or or all the current shenanigans to prevent Trump’s election or harass his presidency.

    Likewise the recent abuses, illegal or questionable, by the IRS, DOJ, EPA, DOE and NASA to push the progressive agenda.

    These agencies have real important work to do and I would like to see them stick to it, not fantasy missions like having NASA reach out to Muslims.

17. “Cruz had a handful of guns, including the AR-15 and two other rifles that Snead said would be considered assault rifles. Cruz, a hunter, also had knives, BB guns and pellet guns.”

    I must live on a different planet from the Sneads because I’d be a tad worried if someone I didn’t know and came to live at my house showed up with all that stuff.

18. Mrs Whatsit— You’re right, there is a common thread: fatherless boys. Virtually all of these characters are fatherless boys. (The Columbine shooters had what amounted to being non-existent parents, who didn’t notice their son and his friend building an arsenal and “death room” in the basement or garage.) 70% of the men in prison are fatherless. The Las Vegas gunman’s father was in prison virtually the son’s entire life. And so forth.

    Of course, the general breakdown of society, morality, religion, education, in-person connections among people, patriotism etc. are general contributors, as are overprescription of Ritalin and similar drugs, but they are necessary but not sufficient.

19. If we locked up every young man like Cruz before anything had actually happened, we’d be a police state.

    neo: Too true.

    I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of kids today but just from family and friends I can tell there are a lot of lost teens, especially boys, out there and I don’t know how they’re going to build satisfying lives from where they are.

    And if they don’t, they will suffer and many will take their suffering out on the rest of us.

20. Cruz was banned from entering the school with a backpack because he might have a gun in it. How does this not get reported to the police?

21. I’m sure Adam Schiff’s response to the shooting will be: “This kid was adopted from Russia. Trump is in collusion with Russia. Therefore, it’s TRUMP’S FAULT!”

22. Thank you, Neocon. Good thoughts here. You are right, even with curtailed liberties and freedoms we can never stop all threats by evil or insane people.

    However, Mr. Wray is Director of the FBI. They failed and people died, he needs to go to his cabin and fall on his sword. Or resign, or be fired. Then, among those he directly supervises, the one most responsible needs to do the same. This process needs to continue until the agent who actually took the call and did nothing is removed. This would be honorable.

    Then we need to stop the “Gun Free Zone” nonsense. The shooter was so poorly educated he couldn’t read that. Or could read and didn’t care. Any institution or company putting up such nonsense needs to be responsible for any and all shootings for which they failed to protect people there. So, let teachers, willing and trained, to pack heat.

    The shooter, when he was a student, and the victims, mostly students, were there because of mandatory school attendance laws. We need to decriminalize school truancy, or legalize school nonattendance. Then perpetrators and victims are not brought together, and both could avoid socialist-marxist propaganda from the school.

23. Mrs. Whatsit’s comment reminds of the surprising success that ISIS had in recruiting soldiers and supporters to their cause in Raqqah Syria, from western nations. When interviewed some of them said that they were thrilled to be there and suggested that it was like Disneyland for murders and rapists. Are they just the inhabitants of a distant wing of the bell curve?
    ______

    We know that the school had made some effort to disrupt “the school to prison pipeline” which probably means that they didn’t press criminal charges in many cases.

    I’m with Lightning. In CA a misdemeanor domestic violence rap will get you banned from purchasing weapons. It’s not like that will get you sent to the superMAX, and it might have actually stopped this tragedy without any prosecution of pre-crimes. It seems to me that there is a large gulf between enjoying the full rights of a citizen and being locked in a cage. Although a couple months of the latter can be educational.
    _______

    In many cases, the withdrawal from SSRI meds is the trigger for violent episodes and it may not happen immediately. The meds could have continued beyond the psych visits, though probably not beyond perhaps 6 months.

24. It’s a tragedy, but rare and I doubt that much can be done to stop such things. I remember back in early 60’s there was a college student at the University of Texas who climbed the campus tower and wound up shooting and killing 17 people before being shot to death himself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman

    The problem we have today is a hyperpartisan press corps that amplifies anything that serves the totalitarian left and its causes, in this case gun control. The death toll in Florida is about a week’s worth of killings in Chicago, but that’s never brought up. If the black on black murder rate, mostly committed in Democrat controlled big city slums with strict gun control, could be brought down to the white on white murder rate, the number of murders in the US would drop by half. About three thousand lives a year would be saved. But discussing that is racism and makes the Democrats look bad so we can’t say anything at all.

25. One characteristic of successful endeavors is the discipline of participants to “stay in their lane”, to “clean up their side of the street”, or stay within the scope of their practice. This “the school to prison pipeline” is magical problem above the paygrade of the schools. Schools should have as their mission the education of the children. Having a single-mother is probably more likely to lead to a boy growing into prison. Schools take on that problem as they over reach for authority and funding. Boys who grow up with their fathers have fewer prison problems than those who don’t.

26. Richard Saunders:

    It is a myth to think that Dylan Klebold’s parents were uninvolved. There’s been a lot of garbage put out by news media, etc., about the Columbine killers and their parents.

    There’s much less information about Harris’ parents, but the Klebold’s were very involved with their son. See also this as well as this.

27. It will be very difficult to incarcerate, in a jail or mental health facility, an individual before they break the law. It should be difficult. Wray shouldn’t be fired, but someone in the FBI should be disciplined for not following the established protocol and process when receiving the sort of reports they got on Cruz.

    Taking guns away from people that haven’t committed a crime won’t help either. Why there isn’t a broader call for eliminating “Gun Free Zones’, aka: optimal target zones, is baffling to me. A moderate amount of security – similar to what they do at sporting events – would make a huge difference. Having armed people on site would too.

    I’m reading about a lot of bipartisan support for some measure to improve and strengthen the background check system. Has anyone asserted that it would have prevented Nikolas Cruz from legally acquiring guns?

28. Paul in Boston
    That University of Texas shooter scored most of his kills in the first few minutes. The men in the dorms got out their hunting rifles and started shooting back. Their cover fire forced him to keep his head down until law enforcement could reach him. Good guys with guns stopped a bad guy with a gun.

    That is one of the things men do, they protect the innocent. Peggy Noonan–you want more “gentlemen”? The men who died protecting innocent were there.

29. TommyJay:

    It is notoriously difficult to do research on whether SSRIs trigger more violence, have no effect, or help prevent violence, and if so in what populations.

    It’s an internet meme that they trigger violence, but the evidence is not at all clear that that is so, and as I said it’s very difficult to design a good study. One obvious reason is that such people are often at higher risk for violence in the first place, and drugs are not given randomly (there is probably something already different about the at-risk people who get them and those who don’t).

    This is one of the better-designed studies, and as you can see if you read it it’s very hard to tell what it means, if anything.

    Cruz was at risk for violence, period, whether or not he was taking medication.

30. I apologize if I gave the impression that he did not receive treatment. I know he did. I am a former therapist and I worked with teenage boys. The care he received was the basic intervention one gets with a teen who has been kicked out of school and whose parents reports anger or mood issues. The information you gave to other commenters illustrates this. In order for more intensive services the clinicians need documented behaviors. A police report would have given the mom proof that his issues we’re not being controlled in the community setting. He needed an escalation of care that was not substantiated by existing documentation.

31. This is one of the better-designed studies, and as you can see if you read it it’s very hard to tell what it means, if anything.

    neo: Yeah. I’ve been following the SSRI story since the 90s and it remains murky.

    Clearly SSRIs aren’t penicillin for depression. Some people benefit, some don’t, some get worse, and a few get violent or suicidal. I don’t know how that washes out.

    I remain skeptical of psychiatric drugs and I suspect SSRIs are way over-prescribed, but I don’t believe SSRIs are quite the danger some claim.

32. “If we locked up every young man like Cruz before anything had actually happened, we’d be a police state.”

    I disagree.

    Many events short of the actual murders had happened with Cruz over a very long period of time.

    We can take such young men off the streets for a time (Judicially), take away their weapons, make it illegal for them to acquire new ones. Fix them medically? No, likely impossible.

    Or we can have cops in every school, who will never intercede in time to prevent the slaughter.
    Plus teachers with concealed carry. Though that would make teachers the obvious first targets.

    Which do you want, Neo?

    This is not a case for the ACLU, though their take on it would likely be grotesque.

33. From David French at NRO — “A Gun-Control Measure Conservatives Should Consider”:

    What if, however, there was an evidence-based process for temporarily denying a troubled person access to guns? What if this process empowered family members and others close to a potential shooter, allowing them to “do something” after they “see something” and “say something”? I’ve written that the best line of defense against mass shootings is an empowered, vigilant citizenry. There is a method that has the potential to empower citizens even more, when it’s carefully and properly implemented.

    It’s called a gun-violence restraining order, or GVRO. …

    The concept of the GVRO is simple, not substantially different from the restraining orders that are common in family law, and far easier to explain to the public than our nation’s mental-health adjudications. Moreover, the requirement that the order come from people close to the respondent and that they come forward with real evidence (e.g. sworn statements, screenshots of social-media posts, copies of journal entries) minimizes the chance of bad-faith claims.

    The great benefit of the GVRO is that it provides citizens with options other than relying on, say, the FBI. As the bureau admitted today, it did not respond appropriately to a timely warning from a “person close to Nikolas Cruz.” According the FBI, that person provided “information about Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.”

34. The sheriff had first-order of responsibility by virtue of proximity. Given a known progressive risk, the FBI should have failed his background check. While this would not have prevented a mass abortion, there are other readily available means, it would have increased the opportunity cost, which may have been sufficient to reduce the toll.

35. I’m with Steve Walsh on the Wray firing issue. Recall that Wray has been FBI Director all of ~6 months: barely enough time to hang pictures in his office.
    In all fairness, whatever failures there were of process and procedure w/r/t the Parkland shooter should be attributed to Wray’s 2 predecessors, who ran the FBI since 2001: James Comey and Robert Mueller.

36. Still, the first order of concern is the administration of psychotropic drugs that are known to cause liberal (i.e. divergent) and even abortive reactions in his age class.

37. Milwaukee Says:
    February 19th, 2018 at 5:35 pm
    Paul in Boston
    That University of Texas shooter scored most of his kills in the first few minutes. The men in the dorms got out their hunting rifles and started shooting back.
    * * *
    Many had them close at hand in vehicles, although some did retrieve them from dorms and frat houses nearby.
    Also the teachers in surrounding buildings returned fire from their offices.
    Although some people complained that the vigilantes endangered people, and the police did have to take their fire into account, they are credited with making it difficult for Whitman to target more victims. Most were hit before anyone realized what was happening, and it took a long time to get to him; the Tower case was one of the precipitate causes of SWAT development.

    Wikipedia has a fair article, but this is a more personalized account, especially about the civilian hero that went to the top with the police.

    https://apps.texastribune.org/guns-on-campus/allen-crum-helped-stop-ut-tower-shooter-charles-whitman/

    BTW – the Tower was still part of the library system and open to graduate students when I was there in 1974, before being closed again, although the windows were locked tight and the observation deck inaccessible until redesigned some years later.
    Now, those were real library stacks: plain pine boards, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, narrow aisles, dusty tomes, and not a copy machine in sight.

38. n.n.:

    The only reaction that’s ever been demonstrated is in people under 21 (such as Cruz), but it’s in suicidal ideation rather than suicidal behavior. As for violence, see my comment here.

39. The arguments are going back and forth about whether Wray deserves to be fired for the snafus in the Florida shooting, and that the problems started before he was appointed.
    That may be so, but there are other reasons why he needs to be shown the door.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/911-syndrome-fbi-little-accountability/

    “Even though he has been on the job only six months, FBI director Christopher Wray has already shown a reflexive desire to evade congressional oversight by ignoring House subpoenas to the FBI in the Steele-dossier matter. The FBI turned over the documents, after months, only when the House said it would to hold Wray in contempt of Congress. That attitude shows that Wray has little desire to cut to the heart of the FBI’s problems and may even be an accessory to them.

    It’s time for the 9/11 Syndrome to be purged from the FBI.”

    RTWT for an explanation of the final sentence; it’s very cogent.

    Kevin Williamson is less charitable.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/florida-shooting-fire-fbi-chief-christoper-wray/

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    U.S.
    Fire the FBI Chief
    By KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
    February 18, 2018 4:00 AM

    FBI director Christopher Wray testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee, February 13, 2018. (Leah Millis/Reuters)
    Did a preventable massacre go unprevented because of bureaucratic failure?
    American government is supposed to look and sound like George Washington. What it actually looks and sounds like is Henry Hill from Goodfellas: bad suit, hand out, intoning the eternal mantra: “F*** you, pay me.”

    American government mostly works by interposition, standing between us, the free people at whose sufferance it exists, and the things we want to do. Want to drive a car? “F*** you, pay me.” Own a home? “F*** you, pay me.” Want to build an extension on that home? “F*** you, pay me.” Got a job? “F*** you, pay me.” Business good? “F*** you, pay me.” Business bad? “F*** you, pay me.”

    The guiding principle of American law enforcement is that it is easiest to enforce the law on law-abiding people, while enforcing the law on outlaws is something that looks terrifyingly close to hard work. That’s why gun control so ensorcels the bureaucratic mind. (Which is to say, the progressive mind: The essence of progressivism is replacing organic institutions with permanent bureaucracies.) If you are a federal law-enforcement agent with a comfy desk chair, you probably cannot imagine a more attractive anticrime program than gun control. Gun dealers have federal licenses, and they have to apply for them: You don’t have to go tracking them down – they come to you. They fill out paperwork. They generally operate from fixed addresses with regular business hours. Convenient! What you have is the power of political interposition, which is a mild form of terrorism. Want to operate a sporting-goods store? “F*** you, pay me.” And – mirabile dictu! – they pay. Sometimes, they even evince gratitude that you’ve done them the great favor of taking their money and allowing them, generous fellow that you are, to dispose of their own property as they see fit.

    Chasing down fleet-footed 18-year-old criminals through the rough parts of Chicago on a cold February evening? That’s work. And that’s why we don’t do squat to prosecute actual gun crimes – the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago won’t even look at a straw-buyer case unless it’s a major organized-crime enterprise – but we twist ourselves into knots to figure out how to create new hoops for federally licensed firearms dealers and their customers to jump through every time some pasty-faced virgin shoots up a school.

    Chasing around pasty-faced virgins is work, too. Sometimes, you have to go so far as to pick up the phone.

    As was reported on Friday, the FBI had been alerted that a particular pasty-faced virgin down in Florida was probably going to shoot up his old school. He had put up social-media posts to that effect, cleverly shielding his identity from the steely-eyed G-men by signing his legal name to those public threats. The epigones of J. Edgar Hoover may not be Sherlock Holmes, but presumably they can read, and some public-minded citizen took some screen shots and sent them to the FBI.

    The FBI of course did what the relevant authorities did in the case of Omar Mateen, the case of Nidal Hasan, the case of Adam Lanza: nothing.

    We could replace these guys with trained monkeys, if we could train monkeys to be self-important.”

40. Frog:

    I actually have a draft of a post for tomorrow that takes on the question of more laws to keep guns from someone such as Cruz, at least temporarily. The short answer is I’m for it, but with great reservations.

    Preventive detention is different and a much graver threat to liberty. There are an enormous number of people either like Cruz or at least substantially like Cruz, not just young people but older people as well. When the crazy neighbor finally goes off the deep end and kills someone, everyone points back and says they knew it would happen. But a much vaster number of people are felt to be dangerous in a similar way and to a similar degree, and yet they never do anything. The number who turn serial killer are very very small.

    Yet you would sacrifice the liberty of the many to protect us from the few, without any way to distinguish between them. Perhaps you think therapists could do it effectively? No, they could not.

41. Lightening:

    Clearly he did not get enough help. But I’m not at all sure that more help would have changed anything. It certainly would have been worth a try.

    Also see this for a description of his recent mood, as observed by the people with whom he was living. It didn’t seem all that bad, considering.

42. Hi Neo & other guests,

    I’ll take a stab at your question: What to do about Cruz & the FBI? And I’ll confess to more than a wee dram of anger at this point…

    Cruz…fullest extent of the law. He seems to have a declared intent to do gross harm. Prosecute according to whatever statutes apply. What’s the worst punishment he could get in FL. That.

    Other folks like him…armed guards at every school & restricted access points. OR arm & train specific teachers in every wing of every school. No more dumbass “gun free zone” shooting galleries.

    The FBI…close it down. Fire them all. Assign all open cases to US Marshals or Homeland Security or the appropriate local jurisdiction. If field agents want jobs, they can apply to Homeland or Marshals or local LEOs. After this & after the 0 administration RussiaRussiaRussia debacle, who’s going to trust them to investigate anything? Not me. Have the National guard immediately confiscate weapons & shields. Buh bye. And start at the FL field office then do DC. Fire them all.

43. Recall that Trayvon Martin might not have been in the position he was in if the school system hadn’t been active in changing actual reportable “crimes” to something anodyne in the school system. They’d wanted to reduce the number of black boys being sent to the criminal justice system. So Martin escaped whatever might have put him in some other life path.
    It’s been said that Cruz was in the same position due to the school system’s interest in reducing the criminal numbers coming from the students. But if he had been crimed for something, he’d not have been eligible to buy the AR. So if it turns out that he had done something which was statutorily a crime and didn’t get reported due to the school system’s hot idea, it might be the system’s fault.

44. Richard Aubrey…what you said.
    If the School District was punking the criminal justice system to get their crimes stats lowered & thought for some minute not giving juveniles a criminal record was some “white knight” do-gooder thing…bring on the wolf pack of lawyers. Every parent should sue them corporately & if possible personally.

    Did I mention I was a tad angry about all this. And the damn fools using frightened kids for political point scoring. Now there’s some folks who need a good shooting…pinkie toes only. Make ’em hobble so we can see ’em coming.

45. RE: “The FBI will be investigating its own error, but I wonder at this point if anyone has faith in the investigation, either.”
    What’s wrong with that picture? A bureaucracy investigating itself.

    The real issue here in the FBI’s handling of this case is that we, the public, are being asked to give up our right to privacy and to ignore the obvious dangers of building powerful bureaucracies that are not accountable to anyone. We are being asked to do this based on the theory that an all-knowing FBI will be able to predict a crime before it happens and swoop in to save us.

    This is a total crook. Even without reading everyone’s on-line footprint, you can point the FBI directly at dangerous people plotting mass murder, and they are impotent. And this isn’t the first time. The FBI had the Boston marathon bombers right in front of them, and they failed do act.

    They have all the resources in the world to attack people for their political views (e.g. Catherine Engelbrecht and Carter Page), but they fail to take action to prevent mass attacks.

    Given the incompetence of the FBI, we need to seriously reconsider which is the greater danger to the republic: terrorists or the FBI/DHS/NSA/DNI cabal. Clearly surrendering our privacy rights is a foolish idea involving serious and unnecessary risks.

46. Neo @2/19/18 5:33 PM Perhaps the Klebolds and Harrises were the exception, or perhaps cluelessness and dithering are another form of bad parenting. Note that neither put their son into involuntary psychiatric confinement, and that Harris was on, or just coming off, an SSRI.

47. I’d be curious to read a solid assessment of the FBI’s effectiveness, past and present.

    I hear tell the workaday agents are doing their jobs and doing them well, though the Cruz tip failure isn’t encouraging. I had a friend who was a Treasury agent and he routinely disparaged FBI agents as the “Feebs.” That could be the usual organizational rivalry.

    The FBI has caught a number of serious Soviet spies. Though that is counterbalanced by Robert Hanssen who spied for the Soviets, then the Russians, over a 25-year period while he was an FBI agent.

    Twice Hanssen delivered lists of of all American double-agents to the Soviets. It took 12 years for the FBI mole hunt to locate Hanssen. They ignored a tip from Hanssen’s brother-in-law, who also worked for the FBI!

    We need something like the FBI. I don’t think folding its functions into the US Marshals, who are basically law enforcement not investigation, is the solution. Nor the Dept of Homeland Security, which I would like to see go away. (Lotsa luck.)

    There have already been several high-level resignations, firings and demotions at the FBI. These should continue and the penalties should go farther. For instance if ex-Director McCabe really altered Strzok’s 302 report on the Flynn interview, McCabe should be looking at jail time and the loss of his pension.

    Who watches the watchers?

48. Yes, the FBI screwed up in dealing with the Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz before the murders were committed, according to its own protocols for investigating the sort of tips and warnings it received about Cruz from several sources.

    The Deep State interpretation is that the DS has the power and intent to order the FBI to “drop the ball”. Just as police were ordered to stand down in Demoncrat fiefdoms and Benghazi CIA and ex military response teams were told “Stand down, let them die”.

    I believe the answers are probably “not long,” and “no.”

    Would the DS have taken that risk that the false flag op would be uncovered or interrupted? I say no. It was within their means to order the FBI to let it go, which they most likely did.

    The FBI had the Boston marathon bombers right in front of them, and they failed do act.

    Another potential false flag op where the FBI “dropped the ball”. Are Americans capable of connecting the dots? Too many instances of incompetence isn’t incompetence any more.

49. Once is happenstance. Twice may be bad luck. Three times, it is enemy action.

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