Saturday, February 17, 2018

What Happened to the FBI?


Yet again, the FBI failed. It failed to follow up on an explicit warning about Nikolas Cruz. It failed to protect the children of Parkland, Florida.

While  our intellectual elites are pounding the pavement demanding that we repeal the Second Amendment, one point should be clear: a competent FBI would have been far more likely to stop Nikolas Cruz than would new gun control laws. While people complain about how Cruz was able to buy an AR-15, not an unimportant question, the more salient point is: why was he walking the streets at all. Why was he not cooling out in a psychiatric facility… and I do not mean spending a weekend there. I mean, spending a few months there. Besides, do you really believe that if he could not buy a semi-automatic assault weapon legally, he would not have been able to find one anyway. Or, that if he couldn't he would not have been able to find another weapon.

One understands that civil libertarians have gutted psychiatric institutions and made it nearly impossible to hold people against their will. And one must add that insurance companies often refuse to pay for long term commitments. Which leaves us with the FBI.

Roger Simon calls it biased and incompetent. He reminds us that ace FBI agents also failed to detain or even to care about other mass murderers over the past few years:

But the latter seems to be an apt characterization of our Federal Bureau of Investigation in the wake of the killings in Parkland, Florida, where, by their own admission, the organization overlooked warnings about the killer that could have saved seventeen students and teachers from mass murder. This is no mere bureaucratic slip-up and the demand by Governor Scott for the resignation of FBI Director Wray is understandable considering the number of dead children in his state.

The incompetence, moreover, is not just restricted to Parkland. It pervades an institution that—frequently blinded by the most rote political correctness—interviewed and then released terrorists who ultimately perpetrated horrific attacks from the Boston Marathon to the Orlando nightclub massacre. (There are several more.)

I am far from well-enough informed to say whether political correctness killed people at the Boston Marathon or the Orlando nightclub, but I would not be surprised to hear that the transformational Obama presidency produced a biased and incompetent organization.

And yet, the FBI was perfectly capable of doing a job when that job involved slandering Republicans. consider the Steele dossier:

For the last few weeks we have been digesting the nauseating probability that the FBI used a dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and ginned up by an assembly of creepy political hatchet men and women (Blumenthal, Shearer, Steele, two Ohrs, etc.) with input from various "friends of the Kremlin" in order to spy on an American citizen and, undoubtedly, Donald Trump, before and after he became president.

Where was the FBI? Why did it take them so long to unmask a fairly paltry one million dollar Internet campaign using the most old-style Soviet front groups, although throwing them up online this time? Could it be because this all got started under Obama and he was the one who famously excoriated Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates for daring to point out that Russia was still a serious threat? Obama (busy cozying up to and ultimately enriching Iran) accused Mitt of being back in the eighties. The Cold War had been over for twenty years. No wonder the FBI wasn't paying much attention to Putin & Co.

Who knows the reason for this dereliction? Evidently, the FBI was fighting the good fight against racism, sexism and Islamophobia. When it came to psychotic serial killers and terrorist mass murderers, it was blinded by its bias. Whatever is wrong with the FBI, we now know that Christopher Wray is not the right man to clean it up.

10 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Sam L. said...


Any chance of getting the first comment translated?

Anonymous said...

Gee, its in Arabic! Google translate shows it crap! Please delete.

Gee, also, that the American Communists Lawyers' Union (ACLU) had such influence in reducing the impact of psychiatric care on such individuals, all in the name of "rights" for the psychotic or mental defectives! (The large class of Homeless anyone?)

Now, such class has the "right" to shoot up drugs in public, spread their filth by shi**ing and pi**ing in public, aggressively begging and ruining public libraries with their unbathed foul stench!

THANK YOU, ACLU!

Jay Dee said...

Our self styled intellectual elites are more and more demonstrating themselves to be an Idiocracy.

James said...

People forget it is comprised of human beings and therefore subject to all of the assets and failings that humans are. It should watched at all times.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

I am a firm believer in the Second Amendment. And I believe psychotics should not be able to purchase firearms. It seems Cruz was able to legally purchase a firearm.

The issue you’ve laid out well here is that involuntary (and lengthy) commitment has been made almost impossible by civil libertarians. There are lots of examples of this, including the real problems associated with epidemic homelessness in big cities. That means voluntary commitment is the only way, but those who do choose that option give up certain civil rights for the rest of their life, which includes exercising their Second Amendment rights.

That means communities have one remaining option: law enforcement. Yet at the Parkdale press conference the other day, Sheriff Israel made it quite clear that state, county and municipal authorities are limited in what they can do under federal law. Which means the only remaining option is the FBI. If the FBI doesn’t do its job, then we have no recourse. We’re targets.

Professed psychotics like Cruz will kill, be taken into custody, and will likely be pronounced insane. Then it’s too late.

There are so many things that we cannot say in our age of “zero tolerance” and political correctness, but someone like Nicolas Cruz can publish “I want to be a professional school shooter” and Broward County Sheriff Israel says it is is “not enough” to have someone involuntarily committed, even with all the contact and incidents local law enforcement had with Cruz.

Not often talked about in these mass shootings is the most obvious fact: the targets these shooters choose. Schools are gun-free zones. No armed security, and CPL holders are not allowed to carry on school property. CPL holders are also forbidden to carry in bars (Orlando), churches (Texas) and public gatherings like concerts/sports (Las Vegas). That means shooters know it’s open season. Shooters choose these targets because there is no fear of armed confrontation, and they will have ample time to kill as many people as possible because it takes time for police to arrive. Remember the Texas church shooting was halted by a good guy with a rifle across the street from the church, who neutralized the shooter.

These are real considerations not often talked about. Instead, all we hear about is AR-15, semiautomatic, lots of magazines. Put a psychotic behind the wheel of a car or truck and it becomes a weapon capable of killing lots of people, as Islamists show us. Calling an AR-15 a “weapon of mass destruction” minimizes the true meaning of the term. Gun control advocates are almost invariably ignorant of guns, and unwilling to consider both sides of the gun debate. They’re scared, and therefore you must give up your a Second Amendment rights.

There are many people who want to end Second Amendment rights by any means necessary, yet offer no meaningful solutions to the problem of gun violence. They turn these school shootings into political events. Yet they are never questioned by the press in order to acknowledge that there is nothing that can be done if dangerous people are able to make explicit threats with impunity. What can we do if such people are not involuntarily committed for psychiatrical evaluation? That means there is no chance of a conclusive diagnosis that will get that dangerous person on the national gun registry.

Law-abiding gun owners are not the problem. Until we get some serious traction on involuntary mental health evaluation for suspected psychotics, empty talk about guns as the cause of these kinds of events will continue.

Liberals like to characterize their opponents’ political ideas and solutions as “simplistic,” but I can think of few things that are as silly and simplistic as their notions of gun control. If you can’t get a mentally-disturbed person diagnosed, they’re not going to show up on the national firearms database. And then they’re a serious risk, as we know grandiose psychotics want to kill lots of people. “Gun-free zones” like schools, churches, bars and concerts become more attractive targets. That’s scary.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Sam L. @February 17, 2018 at 8:46 AM:

Some Iranian wants you to buy an Apple Watch wristband.

First time I ever used Google Translate. Cut, paste and read (in English). Pretty cool.

Anonymous said...

We're told Nikolas Cruz is a "broken human being".

He made these demonic social media posts. He took an Uber to go shoot up a school. He killed 17 people. Then he went to Subway and McDonalds.

He's more than broken, he's evil.

This is a case capital punishment was designed for. Everyone knew he was a danger, but no one could get him properly evaluated. If he couldn't be properly evaluated as a psycho before he killed, he shouldn't be able to use it as a defense.

The FBI isn't doing its job anymore. Christopher Wray should be fired, and then made Cruz's public defender.

Since when do crazy people become the standard for whether the rest of us get to keep our 2nd Amendment rights?

Strikes me that Cruz and people like him are able to stay out of the psych ward to protect their civil liberties, so that the rest of us have to give up ours? Who are we saying is crazy? Sounds like a lot of crazy ACLU lawyers to me.

Our communities are barred from from examining Cruz's sanity before he kills, but then his insanity keeps him from being executed? That's not justice, that's a shell game.

You can't eat your cake and have it, too.

Sam L. said...

Thanks, IAC. I don't want an Apple watch, nor an Apple watchband, Nor an Apple phone.

None are big enough to get a Post-It Note well stuck on,

Redacted said...

"What happened to the FBI?"

Like much of the federal bureaucracy, it's been colonized by Progressives.