Rant of the Week: The Biggest Takeaway From the Parkland School Shooting

In this Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2018 file photo, teens, who walked out from the direction of the high school, are escorted by police following a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla. It was the final period of the day at the school and Jonathan Blank was in history class, learning about the Holocaust. Across campus five of his friends, pals since grade school, sat in different classrooms watching the clock, when a former student opened fire at the school, killing more than a dozen people and injuring others Wednesday afternoon. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP, File)

I honestly didn’t think anyone could be more delusional than Amy Schumer who believed her threat to leave the country if Donald Trump won would sway voters. (Well, in a way she was right. I think that alone picked up a couple hundred thousand votes for Trump.) But it turns out there’s someone even more delusional than Schumer: corporate America.

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Hertz pulled its corporate ties with the NRA this week, and now I won’t get a discount anymore. Well, that does it – I’ve changed my mind. I want more gun control! Heck, if we allow total gun confiscation, maybe we’ll get an even better car rental rate!

There’s currently a raft of companies deserting the NRA in the hopes of gaining some points in the marketplace. I suggest these companies look up Smith & Wesson to see the effect that supporting gun control will have on their business. That’ll be a lesson learned for sure.

It turns out there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the recent mass murder in Parkland, Florida.

The very first “lesson” being shoved in the public’s face was that we need more gun control. This was to be expected. After every mass murder, the liberal press immediately begins pushing the idea that new “sensible gun laws” are the only way to prevent the next tragedy.

But we know that’s not the real lesson here, especially since the shooter should never have been able to get his hands on a gun, to begin with.

This whole tragedy was preventable if not for the total incompetence of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI. Both organizations had more than enough advanced warning that the shooter was likely going to commit such a crime, and no one acted on it. It turns out the gunman was well known to the Sheriff’s Department. Police allegedly received 45 calls regarding the shooter or his family since 2008, yet no action was ever taken in response.

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Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel reacted strongly to the allegation that his department responded to at least 45 calls about the shooter, saying it only responded to 23. Oh, well if it was only 23, no big deal, right?

According to records obtained by BuzzFeed News, several of the visits involved domestic disturbance issues between the shooter, his brother and their adoptive mother. There were also curfew violations, neighbor complaints and various accounts of other violent acts. We also learned that the Broward County Sheriff’s Office was told in November that the gunman “could be a school shooter in the making,” but deputies didn’t bother to write up a report. Even more astonishing, that interaction occurred weeks after a relative urged the Sheriff’s Office to seize the shooter’s weapons.

Regardless of the actual number, be it 45 or 23, you’d think somewhere around call 20 someone in the Sheriff’s Department would realize the kid was struggling with some real issues and was a potential threat to others. But the blame doesn’t just fall on the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. The FBI was warned about the shooter twice and also did nothing.

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Despite all this, anti-gunners want to enact new guns laws and give even more authority to the very government that totally botched this case. They had an opportunity to prevent it, they had an opportunity to stop it, and they failed miserably on both fronts.

But according to liberals, the solution is still more gun control. Perhaps the biggest takeaway here is that liberals haven’t actually learned anything at all.

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