House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said Tuesday that lawmakers will be looking into why law enforcement failed to act quickly in the Feb. 14 Parkland, Florida, shooting.
“We will also have the FBI up here talking to the Oversight and Judiciary [committees] on where the failures happened and why, to make sure they can make corrections so it can never repeat itself again,” McCarthy said Tuesday at the weekly Republican press conference.
There were reportedly repeated warnings about the Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, 19, who was a former student at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and whose killing rampage left 17 at the school dead.
A woman said on the FBI’s tip line that she thought Cruz was “going to explode,” and go “into a school and just shooting the place up,” The New York Times reported.
The Naples Daily News reported that “Broward County deputies received at least 18 calls warning them about Nikolas Cruz from 2008 to 2017, including concerns that he “planned to shoot up the school” and other threats and acts of violence before he was accused of killing 17 people at a high school.”
Neighbors of Cruz were reportedly concerned he “planned to shoot up the school” after seeing photos of him on Instagram “brandishing” guns.
McCarthy also said that lawmakers will vote next week on a $50 million bill that would strengthen school security, provide federal funding to “threat assessment teams” that assist schools in sifting through reported threats, devise anonymous reporting systems to assemble reports from students and others, and “fund training and technical assistance for schools and law enforcement to help identify warning signs of potentially violent behavior,” according to The Washington Post.
The bill is sponsored by Reps. John Rutherford, R-Fla.; Derek Kilmer, D-Wash.; Ted Deutch, D-Fla.; and Hal Rogers, R-Ky. There are more than 30 co-sponsors and the bill has the support of Sandy Hook Promise, an organization created by parents of victims from the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
