Msd Shooting Quotes

The morning after the shooting, Kenny watched the first press conference at MSD. Superintendent Runcie said: Students have been reaching out to me, reaching out to staff, probably board members and others saying that now, now is the time for this country to have a real conversation on sensible gun control laws in this country. So, our students are asking for that conversation. And I hope that we can get it done in this generation, but if we don’t, they will.1 Kenny yelled at the TV, “Can’t you just fucking wait until the bodies are buried?” Kenny didn’t have strong opinions on gun control, and no one in his family owned a gun. But the morning after a mass murder seemed way too soon to make any kind of political argument. He only grew angrier when Runcie called on the Florida Legislature to allocate more funding to mental health. Later in the press conference, Sheriff Israel admitted, “There are some bodies that are still in the school. It’s a process.” That’s when something inside of Kenny flipped. The bodies of children who had been murdered under Runcie’s leadership were still lying on the schoolhouse floor directly behind him, and he had already started politicking.

Cruz’s first day as a full-time MSD student was January 11, 2016. On February 5, 2016, a woman called the Broward sheriff’s office to report an Instagram post in which Cruz showed off a gun and wrote, “I am going to get this gun and shoot up the school.” The officer who responded to the call, Edward Eason, informed the woman that Cruz’s Instagram post “was protected by the First Amendment right of free speech.”1 When the woman asked Eason whether there would be any way to prevent Cruz from buying a gun when he turned eighteen, the officer told her that his right to purchase a firearm was protected by the Second Amendment and nothing could be done. Eason was wrong on both counts. Threatening to shoot up a school is a felony that, if successfully prosecuted, could have prohibited Cruz from buying a firearm. (And even if Cruz was not convicted, an arrest could have gone a long way toward law enforcement taking future reports about Cruz seriously.) But Eason declined even to write a police report about the call, a decision for which he later received a three-day suspension. He did, however, according to his logs, notify MSD’s school resource officer, Scot Peterson.