Posted on 03/28/2018 10:34:45 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
PARKLAND, Fla. — My first interaction with Nikolas Cruz happened when I was in seventh grade. I was eating lunch with my friends, most likely discussing One Direction or Ed Sheeran, when I felt a sudden pain in my lower back. The force of the blow knocked the wind out of my 90-pound body; tears stung my eyes. I turned around and saw him, smirking. I had never seen this boy before, but I would never forget his face. His eyes were lit up with a sick, twisted joy as he watched me cry.
The apple that he had thrown at my back rolled slowly along the tiled floor. A cafeteria aide rushed over to ask me if I was O.K. I don’t remember if Mr. Cruz was confronted over his actions, but in my 12-year-old naïveté, I trusted that the adults around me would take care of the situation.
Five years later, hiding in a dark closet inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I would discover just how wrong I was.
I am not writing this piece to malign Nikolas Cruz any more than he already has been. I have faith that history will condemn him for his crimes. I am writing this because of the disturbing number of comments I’ve read that go something like this: Maybe if Mr. Cruz’s classmates and peers had been a little nicer to him, the shooting at Stoneman Douglas would never have occurred.
This deeply dangerous sentiment, expressed under the #WalkUpNotOut hashtag, implies that acts of school violence can be prevented if students befriend disturbed and potentially dangerous classmates. The idea that we are to blame, even implicitly, for the murders of our friends and teachers is a slap in the face to all Stoneman Douglas victims and survivors.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Your school administration and local Sheriff refused to do anything about Mr. Cruz.
That’s how he killed your friends.
They had to hurry up and counter the story from yesterday that claimed he was bullied for many years. See people tried to be his friend.
In Hillary’s leftist thug village, no individual is ever responsible for his bad actions.
The collective is always responsible, and individual freedom is always the root cause of any bad outcome.
No amount of kindness or compassion alone would have changed the person that Nikolas Cruz is and was, or the horrendous actions he perpetrated. That is a weak excuse for the failures of our school system, our government and our gun laws.
It wasn't the gun laws that failed. Had the FBI, Broward Sheriff's department and school administrators done their job, Cruz would have had a criminal and/or mental health record that would have blocked him from legally purchasing a gun. Instead, the local authorities implemented a plan to help ensure Cruz never faced legal jeopardy - and patted themselves on the back for how well their program was working - until it failed, and they have been in CYA mode ever since, and the left conveniently ignores their culpability in all of this.
Sorry, but your rigid, bureaucratic, over-regulated, school administration failed you, as did the stupid local police.
And that's your excuse to take our guns away?
He might have been bullied in the past, but the upshot is that he might have benefited from focused intervention. Unlearning old bad habits and learning new good ones is something that can take great insight by the coaches. There’s no one size fits all, everybody does the same thing program.
Yep, that is exactly what this is about. NYT at it again.
Maybe if you had beaten him up instead of crying...
Well, that’s kind of like a tourniquet solution to a problem that got bad enough.
Now you’re alarmed. “My guns!” are at risk.
Well, maybe this is God’s way of saying you should have been alarmed at other things long ago.
The way he had been acting seems to have called for the men in the white coats. This is not some shallow bully, one knock on the nose and he quits. This is one who somehow learned it in an ingrained manner.
Agreed. Somehow, overnight, the people running this show had to find a Parkland student who could quickly write a story about Cruz being a bad seed from way back and justify how he was ostracized. This piece is cutom-made in order to please the string-pullers.
No, he was bullied for years up to the day he snapped. But that wasn't my point at all.
Hogg’s cousin admitted the FB”I” plants had
tormented and bullied the perp until he was boiling,
and then they hid in the closed with video equipment
just waiting, practiced, even on the set of ABC.
CHARGE THEM FOR BULLYING TO MURDER and COMPLICITY
to MURDER CHILDREN.
And you had no ears for what I said?
It often happens that the affairs of men are impacted by the affairs of hell.
It’s sickening how badly they screwed up.
I worked in the Juvenile Courts. “He might have unlearned bad habits” - We had a family who had adopted a feral kid at 3. The dad said it would take the whole rest of his life with the adoptive family to straighten that kid out, and he didn’t think it would be terribly successful. He was now 7 and they were seeing things so clearly.
Feral mom, of course, was producing more so she could have more government money.
No amount of kindness or compassion alone would have changed the person that Nikolas Cruz is and was, or the horrendous actions he perpetrated. That is a weak excuse for the failures of our school system, our government and “our gun laws”. ................................ Our gun laws are fine, does she know them, were they enforced? Mental instability has no laws? Just let them mix in society and when they wish to do harm, they will have a vast selection of ways to do it. Cruz just picked one that was handy. If the gun was not handy, he would have used other means. One cop with an MP5 instead of a Glock would have been all the protection that was needed. It would have represented an immediate danger to the perp., thus diminishing the success of his plan.
It really takes a highly distributed form of meanness to do this.
And still, somehow Hogg managed to be where Cruz wasn’t. What made this Hogg so sure that he wouldn’t be the first in Cruz’s crosshairs?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.