From the FBI to local law enforcement to the schools, every institution failed. We have more government than ever, but it isn’t working.
The chief problem facing America today is the decline of its institutions, coupled with the denial of that decline by the people in charge of its institutions.
The latest example of this problem is the Parkland school shooting in Florida. From the FBI, to local law enforcement, to the schools, everyone failed. There was failure early, there was failure in the middle, and there was failure late. And no one has taken responsibility.
It’s not as if there weren’t warning signs. The Miami Herald has published a chilling list of the times authorities were warned about shooter Nikolas Cruz. Not only was the FBI told about a YouTube post in which Cruz said he wanted to be a professional school shooter (but failed to make the connection to Cruz despite him using his real name in the post), the FBI also received a phone call in which a woman warned that he would “get into a school and just shoot the place up.” She also said that he dressed as a ninja or ISIS member.
And over two years ago, on Feb. 15,2016, local authorities were warned: “A Broward Sheriff’s Office deputy is told by an anonymous caller that Nikolas Cruz, then 17, had threatened on Instagram to shoot up his school and posted a photo of himself with guns. The information is forwarded to BSO Deputy Scot Peterson, a school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.”
But nothing was done.
Then, when Cruz finally began shooting up the school, the failures became even more outrageous. A Broward County sheriff’s deputy — weirdly, the same Deputy Scot Peterson who apparently ignored the Instagram threat and also refused to cooperate with investigators — was on the scene, but cowered in the parking lot instead of taking action. As the Herald reports:
Then CNN reported that not only did Peterson stay out of the building, three other deputies hid behind cars instead of intervening. Four armed, trained deputies stayed outside instead of moving forward to protect young people who were being killed essentially in their presence.
It was police from the nearby town of Coral Springs who eventually entered the school, and reportedly are angry at the nonperformance of the Broward deputies. And they should be.
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Despite Broward Sheriff Scott Israel’s all-out attack on the NRA the night before Peterson’s inaction became public, this debacle illustrates why so many Americans want to own guns, and aren’t comfortable relying solely on “trained professional law enforcement officers” like Scot Peterson. As Jim Geraghty writes in National Review, “the Parkland shooting is proving to be a colossal cascading failure of both local and federal law enforcement. We know the world has plenty of good cops and good FBI agents. But as American citizens, we never know when we’re going to roll snake-eyes and find that the threat in our midst was missed by cops and that they will not come quickly to our rescue. This is why we need the option to protect ourselves — a right which is in the Constitution. What is the point of changing our laws if the police cannot rise to the challenge of enforcing them?”
In Sheriff Israel’s case — as with Harvey Weinstein’s promise to » give the NRA my full attention » after he was exposed as a sexual predator — blaming the NRA is an attempt at deflection, and a way of rallying Democrats to his side. It didn’t work for Weinsteinand it’s not likely to work for Israel, either.
But the bigger question is this: We have more government, at all levels, than we’ve ever had before. Yet failures like this keep happening. The FBI, after all, missed the Tsarnaevs (who committed the Boston Marathon bombing) despite being warned by the Russian government. It missed the 9/11 attacks even though it was investigating Zacarias Moussaoui — agents investigating Moussaoui hit so many roadblocks that they joked that Osama bin Laden must have had a mole in the Bureau HQ. And, of course, the San Bernardino shooters and Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen escaped the net as well.
People are being asked to trust the government to keep them safe, when the government is patently unable to do so. And then, when the government fails, it engages in blame-shifting deflection. Why should people listen? Increasingly, they won’t.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @instapundit.
