Only days before thousands are expected to descend upon Washington for the anti-gun “March for our Lives” on March 24, a new report revealed that officials and school counselors were so concerned about the Parkland, Fla., shooter’s mental stability that they decided that he should be committed to a mental institution.
However, as with so many other things connected to this case, officials and authorities failed to follow through on the recommendation to take seriously the evident dangerous instability of the shooter, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz. Cruz shot and killed 17 people and wounded 17 others at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February.
According to documents obtained by the Associated Press, school officials as well as a sheriff’s deputy recommended that Cruz be involuntarily committed for mental evaluation in September 2016, 17 months before the Parkland shooting, which would have made it almost impossible for him to obtain a firearm legally.
Apart from Cruz getting expelled from school for making threats, the many instances in which law enforcement officers were called to his home, and the tips made to the FBI in the months leading up to the shooting, the documents showed a pattern of alarming behavior that would have justified an involuntary commitment. Cruz wrote the word “kill” in his notebook, told a classmate he wanted to buy a gun and use it, and even engaged in self-harm by cutting his arm voluntarily because he broke up with his girlfriend. He told another classmate that he even drank gasoline and was vomiting.
In addition to the many failures of law enforcement (i.e. FBI tips that weren’t relayed, and the failure of resource officer Scot Peterson to enter the school during the shooting), we’re now discovering that the school system failed the victims and survivors of the Parkland shooting by not acting on a recommendation to have Cruz forcibly committed for a mental evaluation when they had the chance.
Several Parkland survivors have found the national spotlight to share their stories and advocate for stricter gun control laws both in Florida and across the United States. However, by what we’re seeing happen in the aftermath of Parkland, no gun law could have prevented the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. And in fact, the myopic focus on guns is allowing those with positions of responsibility to escape culpability for their role in letting this happen.
Instead of focusing on ways to tighten our gun laws that can only take us so far, we should be examining the roles of law enforcement and school counselors, to ensure that not another innocent life is lost due to their failure to follow through on tips and recommendations that would have stopped the shooting. That so many red flags were missed with respect to Parkland indicates a larger problem with procedures conducted at our schools and our law enforcement departments. We can’t let those points get drowned out in an anti-gun march in Washington that’s purely symbolic and won’t move the needle even a little.
