Did Parkland Shooter Get A Pass Due To A Disability?

While Second Amendment advocates continue to battle with gun control activists in the wake of Parkland, we’re still finding failure after failure after failure that contributed more to the massacre than any lack of gun laws ever could. In addition to the failures by both the FBI and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, there are the numerous failures by the administration at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Advertisement

However, now it seems that part of the problem may have been the shooter suffering from a disability, and the screwed up rules surrounding that.

Could accused Parkland shooter …have slipped through the cracks of the Broward County school system because of a developmental disability he has? Months after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting took the lives of 17 students and faculty members, questions remain about why obvious signs of the alleged gunman’s activities prior the deadly day were ignored.

Despite multiple red flags that were raised about [the shooter’s] violent behavior from the time he was in middle school in November 2013 up through the beginning of 2018, school officials bounced him between mainstream schools and alternative educational facilities that provided him with therapy services.

[The killer], according to a report by WLRN, was as diagnosed with a developmental delay as a small child and during a radio interview last month, Broward County Superintendent Robert Runcie last talked about the difficulties when it came to the legal aspect of discipline procedures and students with disabilities.

Federal law mandates that school officials, WLRN notes, to review whether a student’s misconduct is a result of a disability. If that is what is concluded, the school cannot punish the behavior but must give assistance for the student with the disability instead.

“Because there’s been so much speculation about what [the killer] may or may not have done, or what the district should have or should not have done, we’ve asked for an independent review by experts in the field to review his entire academic record and his experience within Broward County,” Runcie said, adding that the report will be available to the public in June.

Back in March, the Associated Press reported local Florida officials once suggested they wanted [him] forcibly committed to a mental institution via Florida’s Baker Act two years before the Stoneman Douglas massacre, but their advice was never heeded.

A staffer from Henderson visited [the killer], a school counselor later revealed to the Florida Department of Children and Families investigators, and “found him to be stable enough [to] not be hospitalized.”

Nevertheless, the school counselor was suspicious about the department’s decision and wanted to “ensure that the assessment of Henderson was not premature.”

Advertisement

In other words, part of the problem is that, because of this developmental disability, he was able to proceed with school on and on. When it finally got to be too much, it seems officials finally brought someone in to see about committing the kid–which would have made him ineligible to purchase a rifle–but they gave him a pass.

Look, we have a ton of rules surrounding the sale of firearms already, but those rules broke down here. There’s no way the shooter should have been legally allowed to buy a gun under those rules, but he was because pretty much everyone involved seemed to have dropped the ball. Everyone except for, potentially, a single school counselor.

But because of all of these people’s failure, my almost 18-year-old son who is about to head off to college should not be allowed to purchase a weapon for self-defense?

Yeah. I don’t think so.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Advertisement
Advertisement