I almost think that at this point we don't need to think to hard to see what went wrong. Technically an adult, and reportedly living of late in the home of a kind friend of his parents, he slipped through the cracks of a larger society that doesn't really care much about what happens to a kid once she or he hits 18 (if they care much about them even at a younger age).
Obviously, a lot of people dropped the ball with this kid. The school, which had warned teachers about him, washed its hands of him, the friend of his late mother, who took him in, allowed him to bring along his AR-15, although she at least required him to keep it locked up albeit with him having the key (why would any adult allow a visiting kid to do that?), and nobody, like a social worker, appears to have followed up when he stopped going to the mental health clinic where he was being treated.
Now let's add in the gun thing. Despite the fact that he had been diagnosed as having mental health issues and had been treated for a time at a local mental health clinic, reportedly for depression, Cruz was able on his own as an 18-year-old, to legally purchase a deadly AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and multiple large-capacity clips for ammunition.
Now I have to say, given what we are learning from neurology studies of the young brain, which show that the brain does not really reach maturity until the age of 24-26, and that one of the last things to reach mature development is the part of the brain that provides impulse control, you have to wonder why we are allowing people that age and younger, for example the legal age of maturity which is just 18, to buy such weapons of mass destruction.
An AR-15 is not a hunting weapon. In fact there's a reason it's called an "assault rifle." As a hunter, unless you're an atrocious shot and are hunting random flocks of small birds, you certainly don't need to be able to fire powerful ammunition at a rate of two bullets per second -- the rate at which experts say an ordinary person could be able to pull the trigger. Listening to the sound of bullets being fired on a clip that was broadcast of some cell phone recording Cruz's assault, it sounded to me like he had managed to fire even faster than that -- perhaps three shots per second. In any even he was able, in a short time, to kill at least 17 people and injure another 10 or more before presumably running out of loaded clips and sneaking out of the school (he was caught and arrested by police later blocks from the school).
Any person, politician or lobbying organization (think National Rifle Association) that argues otherwise, and claims it's every American's god-given Constitutional right to buy and own an assault rifle, including young people with age-appropriate impulse control programs, and even documented mental health issues, is either an idiot, an ideologically driven nut-job, or has some kind of other insidious agenda.
It should have been clear when 20 first-graders were murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. If that uniquely awful atrocity, committed by a mentally ill young man who obtained the gun from his also mentally ill mother who owned it legally, wasn't enough to get these weapons banned again (they were banned for 10 years nationally, from 1994 to 2004 until Congress allowed the law to expire), I doubt that this latest epic massacre will lead to any change in the law, either nationally or in the state of Florida.
Hell, why should we be surprised? Thanks to aggressive activity by the NRA, some states actually allow a totally blind person to buy and own a gun -- any gun, including an assault rifle.
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