Playing politics with our children's lives

I'm obliged to Aaron at The Shekel for bringing to our attention the remarkable facts uncovered by a Broward County student investigating the Parkland school shooting.  He highlights Twitchy's coverage of the issue, which leads to other links.  In order, the articles are:

1. Aaron:  "Just When You Thought Broward County's Failures Concerning The Parkland Shooting Can't Get Any Worse, They Do".
2. Twitchy:  " 'My blood is boiling': Broward student journalist lays out his case against superintendent, school board".
3. The Hill:  "Exclusive: Broward County’s $100 million failure on school safety".

I strongly recommend taking the time to follow each of those links, and read the articles in question.  They're enough to make your blood boil.  In so many words, the murder of seventeen schoolchildren was entirely avoidable, if the authorities had acted as they should;  and, since the event, those same authorities have lied, obfuscated and dodged the question in an attempt to deny or avoid responsibility for their actions.  It's a sickening tale of official betrayal of trust.

Aaron sums up:

While the blame for these murders lies squarely with the killer, the errors of both omission and commission on the part of the Broward County School Board and The Broward County Sheriffs Office along with a fumble by the FBI and a push from the Obama administration set the stage for this event to happen.

. . .

The sheer amount of fail before, during, and after the shooting is rather staggering. Verily, it takes a village to mess this up this consistently over and over again. So of course, instead of blaming themselves for this causal chain of events a mile long and years in the making, they decided to blame the NRA.

This is as if the powers that be decided to ignore arsonists as it made their crime stats look bad, knew there was one around the area, and knew exactly who the local arsonist was who was setting a series of small fires. Knowing that, they then took a bunch of flammable material, piled it up in a building, soaked it in gasoline, and after being told the arsonist was going to come set it on fire did nothing. After the arsonist gets on social media and says he's coming to light the building on fire they still do nothing. Then, when the arsonist went ahead and in fact lit a match, tosses it onto the gas-soaked pile and burned the building down, they held a press conference to blame the National Match Association for advocating for law-abiding people to be allowed to own matches and preventing common sense match control and match bans.

There's more at the link.  Highly recommended reading.

If I lived in Broward County, after reading those reports, I'd mobilize my friends.  We'd be demonstrating outside the offices of the county School Board and Sheriff's Office every single day, demanding the dismissal - without retirement or any other benefits - of any and all officials involved in this catastrophe, who played any part whatsoever in the events that inexorably led to the deaths of seventeen schoolchildren and the injuring of seventeen more.  I'd also be demanding that a full investigation be conducted, with at least civil, if not criminal charges resulting against as many of the guilty as possible.

I greatly fear that if the people of Broward County don't demand action like that, then sooner or later the same thing will happen there again.  It's as simple as that.  That's also a warning to the rest of us to examine our own local affairs, right now, to make sure the same mistakes are not being made closer to home.  If we don't . . . if we merely accept that the authorities in our area are doing all they can, without checking to make sure they are . . . then, when our children are murdered in the same way, we won't have a leg to stand on.  We'll be complicit in their murder, because we just didn't care.

Peter