The mainstream media appears to be attempting to orchestrate a national campaign to address gun control issues. In response the NRA and others are focusing on mental health issues and FBI performance. This is not atypical after any mass shooting. Nobody has clear policy recommendations which are grounded in consensus evidence and for which there is high probability of success. That is part of the tragedy. Everyone wants to make it better but there are no policies which make a compelling case.
After most mass shootings, the standard gun control proposals of banning, tightened background checks, etc. don't fit the circumstances of that shooting. The shooter stole the guns (Sandy Hook). The shooter had zero red-flags attached to them (Nevada). The shooter used semi-automatic weapons, not automatic weapons (virtually all shootings). In prior shootings, the proposals would not have addressed the facts of the case.
Partly this disconnect between problem and probable solutions is a function of everyone recommending single point solutions to a problem which is highly variant and the outcome of numerous complex interdependent systems. Instead of one single policy, we'll eventually probably end up with small slices of lots of different solutions. Maybe. In the meantime we have shouting and tears.
What has struck me though is the mainstream media theme which is entirely focused at federal policies and legislation and yet the emerging evidence over the past 72 hours seems to increasingly making the case that the tragedy would never have occurred had local policies been executed as intended. In other words, this seems increasingly a local tragedy rather than a federal one.
And that is not too surprising. With multiple complex interdependent dynamic systems that produce rare outcomes (mass shootings) every tragedy is unique. The best minds in the mental health field say that our state of knowledge precludes any reliable forecast of who might become a killer. The data on gun policy is exceptionally equivocal as well. We have states with astonishingly high gun ownership and no massacres. We have states with exceptionally strict gun control with excessive gun deaths. Civil libertarians are concerned about the suggested degrees of monitoring of individuals being proposed. How we weave between all this to find a single solution that fits all circumstances seems chimerical.
Perhaps the solution is not a federal one-size-fits-all policy but multiple local policies fit for purpose.
And here is where the emerging evidence is so striking. Even without a national policy there was so much that could have been done locally, and should have been done locally. It is still within a week of the tragedy and new information will surface and old information will get reinterpreted, but it appears that:
The FBI was alerted to explicitly dangerous and threatening social media messages by the shooter by a citizen in September. Even though the shooter used his own name as his handle, the FBI was not able to locate him.This shooting, as with all such shootings is a tragedy. What might have been a solution that could have prevented it?
The FBI was alerted in January by someone who knew the shooter well of the shooter's dangerous threats and behavior. This call was never apparently followed up on.
The shooter had dozens of interactions with local law enforcement in recent years in an escalating fashion over violent threats and behavior. 39 visits over seven years, averaging about one visit every couple of months.
The shooter had a history of mental health issues from middle school onwards which were recognized but never effectively addressed (despite many efforts).
A year and a half ago the Florida Department of Children and Families was alerted to Snapchat posts of Mr. Cruz cutting his arms and expressing interest in buying a gun but after investigation found that they had little confidence in his posing a threat to others.
The shooter had extensive documentation with the school district of violent, threatening, disruptive behavior including brawls.
The shooter was transferred six times in three years between different schools in the Broward District, including four special programs designed to address behavioral and mental health issues.
The Broward County Sheriff's office has confirmed that there was a deputy sheriff present at the school as the massacre occurred and did not enter the building to confront the shooter.
Clearly the MSM want this, just as with the Sandy Hook School shooting, to be a catalyst for federal gun control reform.
But if your objective is prevention of shootings rather than pursuing an ideological gun policy, the possible solutions that might have prevented this tragedy look far more state and local rather than federal. They are much more tactical than strategic.
They involve better management of personnel so that they reliably perform the job they already know they need to do. They involve better inter-agency communication and coordination. In the Parkland shooting, all the pieces appear to have been in place. Local managers failed to ensure that their processes functioned as intentioned. Local individuals failed to perform their jobs as they should have. These are easy, cheap, local solutions.
Yet the mainstream media wishes to focus on federal policies. They appear much more interested in ideology than they do in preventing such tragedies from re-occurring. Indeed, in a world of limited attention, they appear to be malevolently redirecting scarce national attention away from local lessons learned and leading practices which might cheaply and easily be transferred across states and instead are focusing on federal policies of dubious efficacy and low probability of passage.
At the federal level, clearly the FBI dropped the ball. They were the ones perhaps best positioned to have a three dimensional view of the situation and could have pulled together multiple institutional information and views that might have led to more significant action.
At the state level, it is hard to understand how Florida Department of Children and Families missed the warning signs. After the FBI, they seem the next institution best positioned to integrate multiple sources of information. Perhaps they are understaffed. Perhaps they cannot afford the quality of employees they need. Perhaps they have high employee churn. Perhaps there is an institutional bias towards individual freedom such that interventions only occur in the most obvious cases. I don't know and no one in the MSM seems interested in pursuing those questions.
All the other failures occurred at the local level. Local law enforcement, the local mental health programs, the school district, the leadership of the individual schools, individual teachers. Each individually had what would seem more than sufficient individual evidence of a grave danger.
It is especially galling to see the County sheriff abetting CNN in a nationally televised scripted "townhall" to focus on gun control when he was the institutional leader best positioned to have prevented this tragedy. He had a deputy on site as the shooting began whose immediate intervention could have substantially contained the tragedy. That single failure would, through better personnel selection and training, most easily have made averted this massacre.
It appears with the information that has emerged so far, as if this was nearly entirely a state and local issue. It also appears that the problem is not that State and County were negligent in not having programs. There was a state agency tasked with child welfare that did act. There was a sheriffs office with deployed resources. There was more than one agency available to address mental health. The school system was actively trying to address the shooter's conditions.
This isn't an issue of negligence in that sense. It appears to be an issue of state and local tactical ineffectiveness. All the safety nets appear to have been in place but somehow they didn't work.
If we want to prevent such tragedies, making the existing systems effective would appear to be the first step.
Instead, the mainstream media, through ignorance or ideological fervor seem to be reveling in Rahm Emanuel's counsel, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." Instead of seeking to understand the circumstances of the massacre, identify the points of failure and advocating to implement policies which would fix those failures, they are orchestrating a national campaign for an ideological position of doubtful legislative prospects and even less certain efficacy. No wonder we can't progress towards solution with such irresponsible media.
UPDATE: sounds like there is even more to the local failure aspect of this story. From Twitter there is this reporting.
1. Watch this video. People don't understand how Broward County School Sheriff Officers operate. I'll explain. https://t.co/SF4LDv1amf
— TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) February 23, 2018
UPDATE 2: When you think it can't get worse. . . Four further developments. Comprehensive Dereliction, Astonishing Incompetence, Surprising Omission, and Clear Conflict of Interest.
We knew the Sheriff's Department had a deputy on site at the school before the shooting began, a deputy who elected not to engage the shooter and who has now resigned. It now appears that three additional deputies arrived during the shooting and also took shelter outside the school and did not enter. It was only after the municipal police arrived and entered the school that the deputies followed. By which time the shooter had fled. Four Sheriffs Deputies Hid During Florida School Shooting by Ruth Brown.
The transcript of the call from a friend of the shooter's family to the FBI is now public. The caller's information was detailed, explicit and extensive. The caller first tried to contact the Broward County Sheriff's Department but could only leave a message. Receiving no call back she contacted the FBI with her detailed warning. The FBI failed to pass that warning on to the school or to local law enforcement.
Then there is this, further exacerbating the media's dereliction of professional conduct. The New York Times covers the released transcript, but it takes the New York Daily News to highlight what one would have thought to be an exceptional red flag.
Another of the woman's stunning revelations: Cruz was obsessed with ISIS.Why did the NYT omit the claim about ISIS? I would have thought if there were a flag redder than a school shooting, it would be admiration for ISIS.
"He's so into ISIS and, um, I'm afraid this is so something's gonna happen," she said, describing how Cruz would post pictures of himself dressed up as an Islamic terrorist.
I understand that the NYT has shown a pattern of being excessively alarmed by the potential for popular backlashes after Islamic terrorist attacks (backlashes which never eventuate) and they probably are erring on the side of excessive caution; there is nothing otherwise in the news so far that links the shooting to ISIS affiliation. Indeed, all the news, so far, supports a tragedy of mental illness compounded by repeated and extensive failures by local agencies to address the situation.
But by trying to "manage" the news narrative, it seems to me that the NYT is deepening the distrust in the media.
Finally, there are multiple reports calling into question the CNN "townhall" in which it now appears that the event was entirely or substantially scripted to focus on gun control policy with reports by individuals of CNN programmers suggesting questions, providing scripted questions to be asked, disinviting individuals who had different questions than those sanctioned, etc. Fringe media are also pointing out that the CNN moderator was previously employed by a gun control advocacy group. Reports which appear to be accurate.
This is just a mess. If only we had local agency competence this tragedy might have been avoided. If we only had a mainstream media that would report all the facts and not just those which support their preferred narratives we might not have such distrust of the media.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment