We are still learning new information about the horrible shooting that took place in Flordia yesterday and the suspect in the case, Nikolas Cruz, but what we do know so far is chilling.
According to Buzzfeed News, 36-year-old YouTuber Ben Bennight alerted the FBI after receiving a comment on one of his videos from a user named Nikolas Cruz. In the comment, Cruz wrote that “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” Bennight screenshot the comment emailed it to the FBI, and also flagged the comment on Youtube.
Agents quickly responded to Bennight’s email and met with him the next day on Sept. 25. Bennight told Buzzfeed News, “They came to my office the next morning and asked me if I knew anything about the person. I didn’t. They took a copy of the screenshot and that was the last I heard from them.”
Until Wednesday when Cruz committed the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in South Florida killing, as of now, 17 people. The Washington Post is confirming that Cruz is being booked on 17 counts of “murder premeditated.”
Reporters at the Post have been speaking with old classmates and acquaintances at the school to get a better understand of who Cruz was and unsurprisingly, he was considered an “erratic and troubled soul” before he was expelled from the school last year.
Cruz “started progressively getting a little more weird,” said 17-year-old Dakota Mutchler. Cruz, he said, was selling knives out of a lunchbox, posting on Instagram about guns and killing animals, and eventually “going after one of my friends, threatening her.”
“When someone is expelled,” Mutchler told The Washington Post, “you don’t really expect them to come back. But, of course, he came back.”
The gun used in the attack was an AR-15, a semi-automatic. This type of weapon is, according to weapon expert Frank Smyth told the Miami Herald “designed to kill multiple enemy combatants at once” however “in the hands of an active shooter or an individual that was targeting civilians, it’s a tactical weapon. It enables them to target multiple people in a quick period of time.”
AR-15 semi-automatic rifles are technically legal for any adult to buy in Flordia as long as they are not a convicted felon. Wednesday’s shooting was the 30th mass shooting of 2018, according to the Gun Violence Archive, and also the deadliest.
The term”AR-15″ is used as a generic term for a broad range of semi-automatic rifles, it is designed to be tactical version of the original automatic M16 military rifle. AR-15 weapons are often used by SWAT teams and other tactical teams during operations. It is the design change, from automatic to semi-automatic, that makes an AR-15 legal for civilian sale. Despite its destructive power.
Florida’s Valentine’s Day shooting is one of the deadliest mass shootings on record. Concerning mass shootings in schools beginning with Columbine 19 years ago, “more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus”, according to the Washington Post analysis. And those numbers don’t include “dozens of suicides, accidents and after-school assaults that have also exposed children to gunfire.”
This was the second-deadliest at a U.S. public school after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn which left of 20 first-graders and six staff members dead. The college shooting at Virginia Tech still ranks the highest thus far with 32 people.
As we go through the usual political ineptitude surrounding gun control these facts serve as a sobering reminder of the human toll of our country’s inability to commit to gun control and gun regulation. Thoughts and prayers are easier I guess. And since the President could not even find it in himself to say the word “gun” when addressing this incident, but instead made it about “mental illness” it doesn’t look like there is any change on the horizon.
(via Miami Herald, image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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