The FBI under fire

The FBI could have prevented the appalling massacre of 17 people at the Parkland school in Florida if only they had taken seriously all the warning signs and tip-offs that the self-confessed killer Nikolas Cruz was a potential school murderer in the making. The law enforcement agency has come clean. They have admitted they failed to carry out their normal protocols, as they said. The trouble is, there are so many warnings and tipoffs about dodgy neigbours or unpleasant family members or weird strangers that it is not surprising that "protocols" are not always followed properly. The temptation is to say: "Oh not another nutter who wants to carry out a massacre at a school. How many of those calls did we get last week?" This, I'm afraid, is the reality of a country that allows almost anyone to buy a gun, pistol, rifle, pump-action shotgn etc etc. But in the Cruz case, it was more that just hearsay or rumour. First, there was a tipoff from someone who knew him well that Cruz had actually boasted he wanted to shoot up a school on Instagram. Second, the police knew all about him from past bad behaviour. Third, if they had bothered to check his old school they would have discovered that students feared him because he was obssessed with guns. And fourth, he had an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in a cupboard at home. What more do you need to put two and two together and take this guy off the streets or mount a surveillance operation on him? But then, it's also about priorities. The FBI has to decide, do they pull out all the stops on this one guy or do they worry more about someone else in another state who has shown murderous tendencies? It's like all intelligence assessments whether about suspected terrorists or suspected would-be killers or suspected nutters. Which ones get the full FBI treatment and which ones are placed on file and forgotten about? It's never easy. But Cruz, by all accounts, stood out like a volcano about the explode. This time I'm afraid the FBI got their assessments all wrong. They failed to act or react. Seventeen people died. The responsibility lies totally with the shooter. But he could have been stopped.