After a disturbed former student shot and killed at least 17 people yesterday afternoon at a Miami-area high school, the gun-grabbing Left demanded even more regulation of firearms, which, despite constitutional protections, are already the most heavily regulated consumer good in America.
President Trump expressed sympathy for the victims. “My prayers and condolences to the families of the victims of the terrible Florida shooting. No child, teacher or anyone else should ever feel unsafe in an American school,” Trump tweeted.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) described the attack as “absolutely pure evil.”
The Valentine’s Day massacre took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. At least 14 people have been hospitalized.
The alleged spree killer is Nikolas Cruz, 19, who had previously been a student at that high school but was expelled because of a fight. After using what was described as an AR-15-style rifle on those in the facility, Cruz walked out of the school with other students and was briefly at large before he was captured by law enforcement, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel (D) told reporters. Cruz was reportedly in the school’s Junior ROTC program and was apprehended wearing an ROTC shirt.
Students who knew Cruz described him as a volatile loner whose odd behavior lost him friends.
Authorities are looking at Cruz’s social media activity in an effort to piece together a motive for the deadly atrocity.
His Instagram account registered under the user name “cruz_nikolas” was taken down soon after the incident. One of the photos there displayed a screen shot of a Google search for “what does Allahu akbar [mean],” as well as what appear to be photos of Cruz, his face covered, posing with weapons.
On a second Instagram account under the user name “nikolascruzmakarov” the profile photo showed a person wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, his face covered by a bandana. Makarov is a semi-automatic pistol that was the Soviet Union’s standard military and police sidearm.
“Nicolas Cruz” reportedly registered as a Democrat to vote in Oakland Park, Fla., but it may not be the same person. Apart from the spelling of the first name, Cruz is, after all, a popular Latino surname in a state with a huge Latino population.
On social media, some claimed Cruz was a so-called DREAMer who benefited from President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) deportation-withholding program but this is unproven.
On cue while the bodies were still warm and the dead still unidentified, left-wingers across America ghoulishly welcomed the death and suffering in Parkland as a convenient opportunity to push their policy agenda.
One of the most disturbing and contemptible comments came from Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), a member of the Communist-linked Congressional Progressive Caucus and a close ally of the terrorist-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Instead of focusing on the real problem, that is, the fact that the high school in question was a gun-free zone that left 3,000 students at the mercy of a crazed killer, the lawmaker insinuated that Republicans were somehow responsible for the murders, tweeting:
Republicans should pray for forgiveness, for not only their complacency and dereliction of duty, but in contrition for the men, women and children we continue to lay to rest because of senseless gun violence and the cowardly inaction from Congress.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), pretended to care about gun safety because the concept is a left-wing crowd pleaser. At 5:32 p.m., he tweeted:
Another day, another shooting, indeed, multiple shootings today, while Congress sits in the grip of the NRA, incapable of making the slightest gesture toward reasonable gun safety.
On CNN, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said “enough is enough,” adding people need “to start thinking about such things as background checks.” Background checks, of course, are already mandatory, but this deceitful talking point never seems to go away.
Sen. Chris Murphy, (D-Conn.), long an enemy of the civil rights protected by the Second Amendment, dusted off tired old statist arguments on the Senate floor as he lamented the mass shooting that no new anti-gun regulation could have prevented.
“This happens nowhere else other than the United States of America,” he said. “It only happens here not because of coincidence, not because of bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction. We are responsible for a level of mass atrocity that happens in this country with zero parallel anywhere else.”
The attack in Florida came hours after shots were fired when the driver of an unauthorized vehicle attempted to enter the secure campus of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., about 30 miles outside the nation’s capital.
An NSA police officer, a civilian bystander, and the vehicle’s driver were injured but not by gunfire, Gordon Johnson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore field office, told reporters outside the National Cryptologic Museum. “I cannot emphasize enough that we believe there is no indication that this has a nexus to terrorism,” Johnson said.
The investigation is ongoing.
This article by Matthew Vadum first appeared Feb. 15, 2018, at FrontPageMag.