Florida State Seminoles

[eCat]

speaking of Parkland, heard this morning that a Broward county Deputy was onsite during the shooting and took a "defensive" position as opposed to confronting the gunman while he was shooting children. He has resigned.

I'm not bold enough to fault a man for not taking action in the face of possible death, but I gotta believe that 99 out of 100 LEOs faced with kids screaming and pleading for their lives would have charged in. I think 99 out of 100 civilians , if armed, would have done the same.

This particular deputy is going to have some hard days ahead of him, if true.

[aTm]

Well, regardless, I'm pretty sure we are on an inevitable collision course where a law enforcement officer of some kind shoots a teenager by mistake on a campus.

[hedge]

Or as feverishly as I support legal heroin...

[eCat]

Well, regardless, I'm pretty sure we are on an inevitable collision course where a law enforcement officer of some kind shoots a teenager by mistake on a campus.

or a teacher shoots a kid

[eCat]

on purpose

[eCat]

JFC....I think the parents and kids outraged is misplaced.


Feb. 5, 2016: A Broward Sheriff’s Office deputy is told by an anonymous caller that Nikolas Cruz, then 17, had threatened on Instagram to shoot up his school and posted a photo of himself with guns. The information is forwarded to BSO Deputy Scot Peterson, a school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

▪ Sept. 23, 2016: A “peer counselor” reports to Peterson that Cruz had possibly ingested gasoline in a suicide attempt, was cutting himself and wanted to buy a gun. A mental health counselor advises against involuntarily committing Cruz. The high school says it will conduct a threat assessment.

▪ Sept. 28, 2016: An investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families rules Cruz is stable, despite “fresh cuts” on his arms. His mother, Lynda Cruz, says in the past he wrote a racial slur against African Americans on his book bag and had recently talked of buying firearms.

▪ Sept. 24, 2017: A YouTube user named “nikolas cruz” posts a comment stating he wants to become a “professional school shooter.” The comment is reported to the FBI in Mississippi, which fails to make the connection to Cruz in South Florida.

▪ Nov. 1, 2017: Katherine Blaine, Lynda Cruz’s cousin, calls BSO to report that Nikolas Cruz had weapons and asks that police recover them. A “close family friend” agrees to take the firearms, according to BSO.

▪ Nov. 29, 2017: The Palm Beach County family that took in Cruz after the death of his mother calls the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office to report a fight between him and their son, 22. A member of the family says that Cruz had threatened to “get his gun and come back” and that he has “put the gun to others’ heads in the past.” The family does not want him arrested once he calms down.

▪ Nov. 30, 2017: A caller from Massachusetts calls BSO to report that Cruz is collecting guns and knives and could be a “school shooter in the making.” A BSO deputy advises the caller to contact the Palm Beach sheriff.

▪ Jan. 5, 2018: A caller to the FBI’s tip line reports that Cruz has “a desire to kill people” and could potentially conduct a school shooting. The information is never passed on to the FBI’s office in Miami.

[aTm]

speaking of Parkland, heard this morning that a Broward county Deputy was onsite during the shooting and took a "defensive" position as opposed to confronting the gunman while he was shooting children. He has resigned.

I'm not bold enough to fault a man for not taking action in the face of possible death, but I gotta believe that 99 out of 100 LEOs faced with kids screaming and pleading for their lives would have charged in. I think 99 out of 100 civilians , if armed, would have done the same.

This particular deputy is going to have some hard days ahead of him, if true.

99 out of a 100 would have gone in?

Well, apparently 4 out of 4 Broward County Sheriff's Deputies would not go in.

You know, the department led by this guy...

[tweet]966524504091459584[/tweet]

[hedge]

Evidently Broward County deputies are already practicing strict gun control...

[Professor Tiger]

Welcome to modern America. Everybody is shooting everybody. Except cowardly worthless cops, who won’t even bother to shoot someone who is murdering school kids.

[eCat]

I like all those articles and tweets about the gun control people having momentum


--------------------------------------------

Thousands of gun enthusiasts -- more so than ever -- flocked to the Florida State Fairgrounds for the Florida Gun Show event.

Organizers say they had a record number of people attend the event on Saturday, Feb. 24, almost 7,000, and expected more Sunday.

The manager for the Florida Gun Show, George Fernandez, says they’ve never seen such a big crowd.

-------------------------------------------

"19-year-old Nikolas Cruz passed a background check before purchasing a semiautomatic AR 15-style rifle."

The police were made aware of him at least 18 times. All it took was one arrest and conviction and that wouldn't have happened.

[bluetick]

nice cap

[Saint]

The NYT article on that Fla. gun show had several quotes from people saying that they agreed that more stringent means were necessary in the purchase of firearms. Most people do follow the rules and seem to like the idea that guns should be heavily regulated but not banned. I would start with enforcing the current laws, making certain weapons harder to get and shoring up loopholes before they even think about banning anything altogether. I would think most people would want a common-sense approach but then you have the head of the NRA sounding like a bull-goose looney and that gets the anti-gun people riled up and talking about bans.

[eCat]

seems like to me every time there is a mass shooting, with maybe the exception of that guy in Vegas, people were aware the shooter was unstable.

I'm not condoning rounding these people up and forfeiting their civil rights but there has to be a way to put someone on the you can't buy a gun until we clear you list and we're confiscating all your guns until we're confident your weren't serious when you said you'd shoot up a school

That seems common sense to me. Now I'm sure the NRA would have a problem with the latter but once you publicly declare (and there is proof) that you're going to shoot up a school, place or work, family , whatever, then its time to take your guns away for an evaluation period.

The second part is we need to make it a felony with harsh penalties for anyone the provides access to a gun to a minor without supervision and they lose sight of the gun. Would that have prevented Sandy Hook? I don't know but the mom have no qualms about giving her batshit crazy son a gun. Had she been told ahead of time her ass would get locked up in the clink for giving a gun to a kid and him running off with it, she and those kids might be alive today.

those two things alone would stop the majority of school shootings.

And I do like the idea of the "air marshall" approach to schools. Not all the teachers have to be armed...just one of them and the kids never know who. Just knowing a school has an armed teacher, who we assume is stable and won't shoot a kid in anger or by accident - will pretty much stop all this nonsense. Do I want to live in a world where we have to arm teachers to keep kids safe? no, certainly not. Do I want to live in that world without access to a gun? hell no. Especially when Broward County deputies crouch down behind their car and listen to kids getting shot for 4 minutes.

These are common sense approaches that don't require further gun control.

[eCat]

did anyone read the Adam Schiff rebuttal memo on the FBI /FISA/ Dossier?

whoever wrote it pretty much admits the FISA warrant was based on the dossier. I have to believe whoever wrote it thought it would never see the light of day and would be held up by a republican controlled committee.

[Saint]

Just knowing a school has an armed teacher, who we assume is stable and won't shoot a kid in anger or by accident - will pretty much stop all this nonsense.
.

Most schools have armed policemen/deputies as SROs. The one in Florida decided he wasn't going to bother doing his job. I think arming teachers is the dumbest idea ever but having another armed, trained officer on site wouldn't be a bad idea.

But the vast majority of these shooters never make it out alive. Cruz was an exception so I don't agree that the knowledge that teachers have guns is going to stop many of these shooters, most of whom seem to be on suicide missions.

[Cletus]

did anyone read the Adam Schiff rebuttal memo on the FBI /FISA/ Dossier?

whoever wrote it pretty much admits the FISA warrant was based on the dossier. I have to believe whoever wrote it thought it would never see the light of day and would be held up by a republican controlled committee.

It shows that the reasons for the warrant were supported by the dossier not solely due to it, showed that the dossier was disclosed as politically motivated, and cited several ways that the claims in the dossier were confirmed by independent FBI research (those things are classified and thus redacted but they were there). Perhaps Rep. Nunes should have read the FISA warrant before writing his memo. He may have saved himself some time and humiliation.

[bluetick]

The Nunes memo made it appear that the political funding of the dossier wasn't divulged, which it clearly was. In addition:

the Democratic memo asserts in a heavily redacted section, the FBI verified parts of the Steele dossier with “multiple independent sources.” It also revealed that Steele’s research didn’t make it to the FBI team investigating Russia until mid-September 2016, more than seven weeks after the initial probe into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia was launched.

The Democratic memo refuted other claims in Nunes’ memo — some of which had already been rebutted by outside reporting or even by evidence put forward by the Republican memo itself. It references former Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, who had pleaded guilty in Mueller’s probe to lying to FBI agents about Russian contacts. It was previously reported that Papadopoulos’ drunken bragging to Australian diplomats about his contacts with Russia kicked off the initial FBI probe. Democrats, in their memo, take issue with how the Republicans described the mention of Papadopoulos in the Page FISA warrant.

[eCat]

did anyone read the Adam Schiff rebuttal memo on the FBI /FISA/ Dossier?

whoever wrote it pretty much admits the FISA warrant was based on the dossier. I have to believe whoever wrote it thought it would never see the light of day and would be held up by a republican controlled committee.

It shows that the reasons for the warrant were supported by the dossier not solely due to it, showed that the dossier was disclosed as politically motivated, and cited several ways that the claims in the dossier were confirmed by independent FBI research (those things are classified and thus redacted but they were there). Perhaps Rep. Nunes should have read the FISA warrant before writing his memo. He may have saved himself some time and humiliation.

From the National Review......


the dossier was the sine qua non of the warrant application. The memo concedes that the FISA-warrant application relied on allegations by Steele’s anonymous Russian hearsay sources that:

Page met separately while in Russia with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin and executive chairman of Roseneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, and Igor Divyekin, a senior Kremlin official. Sechin allegedly discussed the prospect of future U.S.-Russia energy cooperation and “an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions against Russia.” Divyekin allegedly disclosed to Page that the Kremlin possessed compromising information on Clinton (“kompromat”) and noted the possibility of its being released to Candidate #1’s [i.e., Donald Trump’s] campaign. . . . This closely tracks what other Russian contacts were informing another Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

This was obviously the most critical allegation against Page. The Democrats attempt to make much of Page’s trip to Moscow in July 2016, but the uncorroborated Sechin and Divyekin meetings, which Page credibly denies, are the aspect of the Moscow trip that suggested a nefarious Trump–Russia conspiracy. That’s what the investigation was about. Far from clandestine, the rest of Page’s trip was well publicized and apparently anodyne. And saliently — for reasons we’ll get to in due course — Page was clearly prepared to talk to the FBI about the trip if the Bureau wanted to know what he was up to.

Democrats implausibly insist that what “launched” the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation was not Steele’s allegations but intelligence from Australia about George Papadopoulos’s contact with what Democrats elusively describe as “individuals linked to Russia.” As we learned when Papadopoulos pled guilty, though, it is anything but clear that these “individuals linked to Russia” had much in the way of links to Putin’s regime: London-based academic Joseph Mifsud, who is from Malta and apparently does not speak Russian; an unidentified woman who falsely pretended to be Putin’s niece; and Ivan Timofeev, a program director at a Russian-government-funded think tank.

Even if we assume for argument’s sake that these characters had solid regime connections — rather than that they were boasting to impress the credulous young Papadopoulos — they were patently not in the same league as Sechin, a Putin crony, and Divyekin, a highly placed regime official. And that, manifestly, is how the FBI and the DOJ saw the matter: They sought a FISA warrant on Page, not Papadopoulos. And, as the above-excerpted passage shows, they highlighted the Steele dossier’s sensational allegations about Page and then feebly tried to corroborate those allegations with some Papadopoulos information, not the other way around.

Another major takeaway from the Schiff memo is that the FBI and the DOJ withheld from the FISA court the fact that Steele’s work was a project of the Clinton campaign. Naturally, the reader must ferret this admission out of a couple of dense paragraphs, in which Democrats risibly claim that the “DOJ was transparent with the Court about Steele’s sourcing.”

How’s this for transparency? The FISA warrant application says that Steele, referred to as “Source #1,” was “approached by” Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, referred to as “an identified U.S. person,” who

indicated to Source #1 that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified U.S. Person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s [i.e., Trump’s] ties to Russia. (The identified U.S. Person and Source #1 have a longstanding business relationship.) The identified U.S. Person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. Person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. Person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.

The first thing to notice here is the epistemological contortions by which the DOJ rationalized concealing that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for Steele’s reporting. They ooze consciousness of guilt. If you have to go through these kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid disclosing something, it’s because you know that being “transparent” demands disclosing it.

The DOJ’s application asserted: “The identified U.S. Person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia.” There is only one reason to include such a statement: The DOJ well understood that the implied biases in the process of compiling the dossier’s allegations, including Steele’s implied biases, were material to the FISA court’s evaluation. A prosecutor does not get to tell a judge reasons that a source’s reports should be thought free of bias while leaving out why they should not be thought free of bias. If you know it’s necessary to disclose that “identified U.S. person” Simpson was being paid by “a U.S.-based law firm” (Perkins-Coie), then it is at least equally necessary to disclose that, in turn, the law firm was being paid by its clients: the Clinton campaign and the DNC. To tell half the story is patently misleading.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/ ... elps-them/

[eCat]

The Nunes memo made it appear that the political funding of the dossier wasn't divulged, which it clearly was. In addition:

the Democratic memo asserts in a heavily redacted section, the FBI verified parts of the Steele dossier with “multiple independent sources.” It also revealed that Steele’s research didn’t make it to the FBI team investigating Russia until mid-September 2016, more than seven weeks after the initial probe into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia was launched.

The Democratic memo refuted other claims in Nunes’ memo — some of which had already been rebutted by outside reporting or even by evidence put forward by the Republican memo itself. It references former Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, who had pleaded guilty in Mueller’s probe to lying to FBI agents about Russian contacts. It was previously reported that Papadopoulos’ drunken bragging to Australian diplomats about his contacts with Russia kicked off the initial FBI probe. Democrats, in their memo, take issue with how the Republicans described the mention of Papadopoulos in the Page FISA warrant.

There are four problems with this:

1) It would not justify using uncorroborated allegations in the first warrant.

2) The supposedly corroborative information is blacked out; while that may be an appropriate protection of sensitive intelligence, we are still left having to take Schiff’s word for it.

3) Taking Schiff’s word for it would be unwise given his memo’s warped conception of “corroboration.” Recall the Schiff memo passage excerpted in the first section above. In the last part, the Democrats argue that the dossier claim that Page met with Kremlin official Divyekin was somehow corroborated because it “closely tracked” what Papadopoulos was hearing from his dubious “Russian contacts.” But the supposed “Russian contacts” were telling Papadopoulos that the Kremlin had thousands of Clinton-related emails. That did nothing to confirm Steele’s claim that Page had met with Divyekin, a top regime official; nor did it corroborate that the “kompromat” Divyekin referred to was the same thing as the emails that Papadopoulos’s “Russian contacts” were talking about. (Of course, it may well be that Page never actually met with Divyekin and that Papadopoulos’s sources were wrong about emails; if so, committee Democrats are in the strange position of contending that the non-existent can corroborate the non-existent.)

4) Most significantly, Democrats seem not to grasp that the flaw here lies not merely in the failure to corroborate the information from Steele’s sources. There appears not even to be corroboration that these sources existed — i.e., that they are real people whose claims are accurately reported. Indeed, it is worse than that. Even if we stipulate for argument’s sake that Steele’s anonymous Russian informants are authentic, they are generally hearsay witnesses, one or more steps removed from the events they relate. The real question, then, is whether the informants’ sources are real, identifiable, reliable informants. Based on what has been disclosed, we must assume that the FBI did not know. That is why the DOJ inappropriately tried to rely on Steele’s credibility.

[eCat]

Representative Massie brings up a point about raising the age to 21 for gun purchases

. According to the DC vs Heller Supreme Court decision, completely depriving an adult of the right to keep and bear arms is unconstitutional. How do proponents of raising the age to purchase long guns (and therefore all guns) to 21 resolve this?