School Shooting Research Paper

On Valentine's day, seventeen people were pronounced dead due to a school shooting at Parkland High school; a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In addition to the Pulse Nightclub and Fort Lauderdale airport mass shooting this was the third massacre since 2016 with a total of seventy-one people shot and killed. The massacre is now known to be the deadliest school shooting since 2012, when Sandy Hook occured. With students now afraid to walk to halls of their school, which was set out to be a safe learning environment, are living in fear, not knowing what will happen next. This has been a reoccurring event in the United States, especially in Florida. It has now took several fatal shootings to consider adding stricter gun control laws or banning assault weapons at all. The big debate has occured after Parkland, a shooting nobody expected on a day that was supposed to be filled with love.

February 14, 2018, with the chaos when a local student at Marjory Stoneman

Douglas High School decided to open fire killing seventeen people. The deadly rampage was used with a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 rifle which was legally purchased before at Sunrise Tactical Supply in Florida. The gun was Cruz’s but the family that opened their home to Nikolas, knew about the weapon and had rules that was established to keep everyone safe. According to CNN, ‘"This family did what they thought was right, which was take in a troubled kid and try to help him, and that doesn't mean he can't bring his stuff into their house. They had it locked up and believed that that was going to be sufficient, that there wasn't going to be a problem. Nobody saw this kind of aggression or motive in this kid, that he would ever do anything like this," Lewis said.’
Nikolas Cruz was the student who caused the tragedy. Cruz was living with his foster family since his adoptive mother was suffering depression and died. However the nineteen year old had aspirations and a goal to become a ‘professional school shooter’ and made it very clear online. Nikolas’ social media contained photos with guns, slurs against different races and cultures, and violence related posts on his accounts. On Cruz’s Youtube account, he had personally made threats such as; "I wanna shoot people with my AR-15", "I am going to kill law enforcement one day they go after the good people.”and other harsh comments. FBI was aware of his threatening comments, receiving two reports
The day of the shooting, Cruz took an uber to school. The uber claimed to have not noticed anything suspicious about his customer. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a high school in the city of Parkland had a fire drill earlier that day. So when Nikolas Cruz pulled the fire alarm the staff and kids all thought it was another drill. Students began filling out of their classrooms to their designated route. The Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel states that the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, began on the first floor shooting in three rooms of the school. Nikolas went back into those rooms and fired again. He than made his way to the second floor of the building and only shooting one person in that room. Immediately after, the nineteen year old shooter dropped his Smith & Wesson M&P 15 rifle and the backpack he carried that held extra ammunition and fled the school on foot. Since all of the kids that attended the school was running away from the school, Cruz looked like a normal high school student, blending in with the crowd but was soon spot out and was arrested.
With the tragedy still fresh and the outcome of what will happen to the murder of seventeen and school shooter is still undetermined what his penalty will be, families are becoming wearier as days pass not knowing if their children are next or whether school is safe enough to send their kid to. Melisa McNeill, Nikolas Cruzz’s public defender, told a reporter on February fifteenth, that Nikolas Cruz is well aware of the concesenses and his actions but is just a “broken human being.” As students and staff members all over the state of Florida tries to ease the fear of this controversial issue by trying to develop a program where teachers who were a representative of the United States Reserves or National Guard, a current or former law enforcement officer, or was a part of the Junior Reserves Officers Training Corps program to be arm, allowing those who are eligible to carrying guns into school for protection purposes only.
This incident was the third mass shooting since 2016, which was only two years ago.

With the world getting more violent everyday, a change needs to happen. Since the fatal shooting, the big question everyone is asking; what are we going to do next to prevent this from happening again? Three weeks after the tragedy, the first gun-control bill in Florida was on the governor, Rick Scott’s desk in over two decades. With a sixty-seven to fifty vote, the new Florida gun bill was established in March of 2018, which accomplished raising the minimum buying age from eighteen years old to twenty-one for all guns creates a waiting period, bans the bump, and arms school employees. As well as fund school security and in Florida school districts they will now offer more mental health resources. Although this bill does include a variety of ways to prevent further issues, what it doesn’t contain is banning any assault weapon at all, or ban high capacity magazines or strengthen background checks on the

buyers.