Florida’s ‘Bloody’ Valentine’s Day: Are Donald Trump Government and Agencies to be Blamed for School Shooting?

At 2:30 pm U.S. Eastern Standard Time, Nicholas Cruz a 19-year-old former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida massacred 17 people (students and teachers) of his alma-mater using an AR-15 assault rifle. The now confirmed premeditated attack took place on the school’s campus just minutes before the school was to close for the day. Parkland, Florida was the 18^th gun shooting at a school campus in the U.S. since the start of this year.

Like other school shootings before it, the Parkland school massacre’s fact sheet highlights how the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment allows tragedy to strike again and again and again on parents, children, teachers, and regular Americans alike. It is indeed a tragedy, irony, missed chances, political greed and the reality that a 19-year-old, albeit an adult yet a disturbed teen had an easy access to and owned semi-automatic weapons.

The Tragedy

17 innocents, children and teachers were killed either trying to escape or protect each other from the volley of bullets from Cruz’s assault rifle. Five victims are reportedly still in critical condition at the local hospital. Jaime Guttenburg, one of the teenage victim’s death shows the harrowing and excruciating time her family went through before she was confirmed a victim and dead at the scene. A lookout was posted on social media and was shared thousands of times. Fred Guttenberg, her father later wrote on Facebook, "My heart is broken. Yesterday, Jennifer Bloom Guttenberg and I lost our baby girl to a violent shooting at her school. We lost our daughter and my son Jesse Guttenberg lost his sister. I am broken as I write this trying to figure out how my family gets through this. We appreciate all of the calls and messages and we apologize for not reacting to everyone individually," he added. "Hugs to all and hold your children tight."

The Irony

This incident took place in a neighbourhood that had just hours before been named as one of U.S.’s safest cities to live in by an American survey. Reports say that the township was created to resemble a park and was popular among affluent Americans to raise families and children. Parkland was ranked 15th on Neighborhood Scout's list due to its low violent-crime rate. And yet it was one of these very children that took the lives of so many other innocents, in the most violent manner.

Missed Chances: This has two parts.

Part I: The first pertains to the perpetrator of the attack, Nicholas Cruz. Many websites have pieced together the assailant’s background in order to find a probable cause for his bloody rampage.

Cruz was an orphan with a disturbed mind. After his mother passed away a year ago, he had been living with family friends. However, a neighbour in Cruz’s old neighbourhood reportedly told New York Times that there were instances when Priscilla, Cruz’s mother called the police to talk to him. The family that Cruz was living with knew about Cruz’s guns which he kept in the house. Cruz had been treated for mental instability and also spent time at a mental treatment facility.

Cruz was expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2017. There were no confirmed reports but two accounts by a teacher and the parent of another student points the reason to threats, violent behaviour and even carrying hunting knives to school.

However, some students who knew Nicholas Cruz predicted his attack on the school. One student said kids at the school joked that Cruz would end up opening fire at the school one day. According to a report in TIME, students described him as someone who would act up when he was angry and describe the kinds of weapons he owned. Link for student witness:

The most shocking revelation of Cruz's likelihood of attacking a school has come from his own social media account which was even reported to the FBI. Cruz reportedly commented on YouTube last year that he would be a professional "school shooter." A user alerted authorities to the post but the FBI closed the investigation citing their inability to identify the video poster. 24 hours after the attack, the leader of a white supremacist group in Florida has come forward with the revelation that Cruz had joined his group and also received arms training at their facility.

Part II: The second part of the missed chance to prevent the horror of Parkdale is the U.S. government’s unwillingness to enact stringent laws that will control the access of guns to civilian Americans. Combine this with the fact that Donald Trump repealed a Barack Obama-era law that required background checks and made an effort to prevent the access of guns to people with mental illnesses. The Obama rule would have prevented an estimated 75,000 people with mental disorders from being able to purchase a firearm. It was crafted as part of Obama’s efforts to strengthen the federal background check system in the wake of the 2012 massacre of 20 young students and six staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Political Greed

Donald Trump in fact, during his presidential campaign, promised to keep guns in the hands of Americans. He has done so as the U.S.’s National Rifles Association poured in millions of dollars to support his presidential bid and as well paid millions of dollars to keep Democrats i.e. those who advocate for stronger gun-control, out of public office. Trump now holds the record for receiving the largest amount of funding compared to any other Presidential candidate in American history. When Trump rescinded the Obama-era law, he told the NRA that the organization now had “a true friend and champion in the White House.”

According to the Center for Responsive Politics in the U.S., Trump received USD 11.4 million in ad funding while he was fighting the presidential race against Hillary Clinton. The Republican Party in 2016 alone received USD 15 million dollars through various senators to keep the gun lobby’s interests safe. But this number is minuscule, as Mirror.co.uk reports the NRA expenditure on political activity (lobbying and independent expenditures) between 1998 and 2017 totals up to a massive sum of USD 200 million.

At the heart of this recurring tragedy that has no parallel elsewhere in the world is the U.S. Constitution, specifically its Second Amendment.

This amendment states, "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." This has been for two centuries interpreted to mean that every American has the right to bear arms for self-protection. In fact, according to the Cornell University’s brief on the Second Amendment under this "individual right theory," the United States Constitution restricts legislative bodies from prohibiting firearm possession, or at the very least, the Amendment renders laws prohibiting an individual to own a firearm as unconstitutional.

Scholars, activists and victims have argued with the Second Amendment, the framers of the American constitution wanted to protect the government’s right to create a “well-regulated militia”. They further argue the Second Amendment asserts that citizens do not have an individual right to possess guns and that local, state, and federal legislative bodies, therefore, possess the authority to regulate firearms without implicating a constitutional right. However, this argument has never caught traction because even the U.S. Supreme Court has judged in favour off an individual’s rights to bear arms and not restricting gun control.

As the world looks back on the tragedy of this massacre the blame is being laid squarely at the feet of Americans and their leaders. Because the numbers show that the U.S. has a disproportionate number of guns versus its population as compared to the rest of the world. The US tops the list of countries with the most guns, owning about half the world’s guns while making up only 5% of the world population. In relative terms, there is one gun almost per person in the U.S.

The refrain for this absurd amount of gun ownership is self-protection yet the U.S. has seen 33.000 gun-related deaths on average per year. These include homicides, suicides and mass shootings.

Americans seem to refuse to accept that more guns mean more violence which leads to more deaths. In fact, there are existing examples that prove a crackdown on private gun ownership brings down shooting incidents. In 1996, Australia enacted strict gun control laws that included buy-back and destruction of fire-arms. It has not had a mass shooting since then. A similar parallel can be drawn with the UK too.

Twenty-four hours on, there are videos of parents of dead children and students demanding that the President and U.S. government do more to prevent the tragedy of Florida’s bloody Valentine’s day. But from the initial statements, one can see the NRA has the Republican party firmly in its grip and the U.S. seems to be destined to repeat history as it citizens and politicians refuse to learn from it.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Feb 16, 2018 10:19 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).