While Parkland has kicked the gun control debate up into high gear, it wasn’t the gun’s fault. We all know this.

We also know that there were countless failures along the way that permitted a 19-year-old with a history of being troubled to purchase a firearm and shoot up his former school.

As Glenn Reynolds (better known to some as Instapundit) notes, if we want to be serious about stopping mass shootings, law enforcement failures need to start being punished [shooters’ names redacted].

Law enforcement keeps failing, and people keep dying.  Where are the consequences? Where is the accountability?

Despite receiving a warning directly from the Russian government, the FBI failed to stop the [redacted] brothers from staging the Boston Marathon bombing. Despite having plenty of resources, the Charlottesville police failed to stop a car attack that left a woman dead. The FBI interviewed [redacted], the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter, and considered criminally investigating him. They didn’t — possibly because his father was an FBI informant.

The FBI also missed numerous “red flags” before the San Bernardino shooting. And despite having lots of warning, the FBI, the Broward County schools and the Broward Sheriff’s Department under Sheriff Scott Israel all failed to stop [redacted] from shooting up a high school.

And yet these repeated failures — among others — keep getting swept under the rug as we look for “solutions” to the problem of violence. No doubt Israel and the others whose incompetence made it possible for [redacted] to kill his classmates were relieved to see our national discourse veer into questions of whether Laura Ingraham should lose sponsors for mocking David Hogg’s college-admissions failures, instead of their own failures to do their jobs.

But now comes a hero to remind us what it’s really all about.

Parkland student Anthony Borges, who used his body to shield 20 fellow students from the gunman, emerged from the hospital over the weekend to remind us that the shooting resulted from the failures of the sheriff and school superintendent to protect students.

In his statement, Borges said the school’s Promise program — designed to keep student offenders out of the criminal justice system — created a permissive atmosphere and gave [redacted] a pass on behavior that, if prosecuted, would have left him ineligible to purchase a gun.

According to Borges, Israel and school superintendent Robert Runcie “failed us students, teachers and parents alike on so many levels.”

Borges was the last survivor to be released from the hospital. He was shot multiple times as he protected his classmates from the maniac stalking their school halls.

He’s one of the true heroes of Parkland.

He’s also dead on right about the failures. So is Reynolds.

Time and time again, government officials keep dropping the ball, failing to act on the information they’ve been given, and then people die. When the weapon used is a gun, the initial response by many is to take away our guns, to infringe on our sacred and constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms.

But those who screwed up? Nothing happens to them.

If they’re decent sorts, they have to live with the guilt of their mistake, but that does nothing to prevent another such atrocity, nothing at all.

Those who screw up like this, though? They need to be punished or fired at the very least. Others need to see and hear about what happened when a threat wasn’t taken seriously, when the ball was dropped, and people died. They need that to remind them to do their jobs.

It’s time to put heads on pikes (metaphorically) when people don’t do what they’re supposed to do, especially when it costs kids their lives.