On the afternoon of Valentine’s Day, a 19 year old man walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and murdered seventeen people and injured fourteen more. This was one of the most deadly school massacres, and it went down on the watch of an incompetent, cowardly, arrogant sheriff named Scott Israel. The number of mistakes his department made are mind-blowing.

The sheriff’s department had been told repeatedly that this shooter was a potential threat. Just three months ago, a tipster said this nineteen year old was potentially a “school shooter in the making.”   The shooter himself even called the police to tell them he was suffering after his mother died. Even though the sheriff’s department (and the FBI) should’ve known this person was possibly planning a school shooting, they did nothing.

And that’s what the officer at the school did as well. Senior Brandon Huff saw an armed school resource officer behind a stairwell wall in a bullet proof vest. He was “just standing there, and he had his gun drawn. And he was just pointing it at the building. And you could — shots started going off inside,” Huff said. “You could hear them going off over and over. And he was just talking on the radio, and he never did anything for four minutes.” It was later reported that three other Broward deputies showed up and stood behind their patrol cars instead of going inside to help fight the shooter.

Not only did the police refuse to go in after the shooter left the building, they reportedly even prohibited first responders from entering the school. As children were bleeding out inside the building, no one came to their aid. “Everything I was trained on mass casualty events says they did the wrong thing,” one first responder told WSVN. “You don’t want wait for the scene to be cleared. You go in immediately, armed, retrieve the victims. You can’t leave the victims laying there.”

But that’s what they did. The shooter ambled out of the school along with the other students. Then he walked into a fast food restaurant and ordered a drink. He meandered around the neighborhood, walked past an elementary school, and finally surrendered to a Coral Springs police officer with whom he crossed paths.

So how did the Sheriff respond?  With humility?  Um… not quite.  Please enjoy the rest of my article on The Daily Caller.

Image Credit: By Broward County Sheriff’s Office [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia

About The Author

Mark was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and served as the national coordinator. He left the organization to work more broadly on expanding the self-governance movement beyond the partisan divide. Mark appears regularly on television in outlets as diverse as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, Bloomberg, Fox Business and the BBC. He’s highly sought after for the tea party perspective from print and electronic media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Examiner, Politico and the The Hill. Mark blogs at MarkMeckler.com, and his opinion editorials regularly run in many of the leading political newspapers both on and offline. Mark has a BA in English from San Diego State University and graduated with honors from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1988. He practiced real estate and business law for almost a decade. For the last eleven years of his legal career he specialized in Internet advertising law. When not fighting for the future of our nation, Mark is an avid horseman, and lives in rural northern California with his wife Patty and two children.

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