Obama Policy Linked to School Shootings

When Nikolas Cruz murdered 14 of his fellow students and 3 staff members at a Florida high school, there were a lot of questions and hand wringing over how this could have happened. How could he have passed a background check to purchase guns, especially since he had already committed a string of arrestable offenses on campus? It was widely assumed that the massacre had simply been a failure of law enforcement officials. But RealClearInvestigations cites a deliberate Obama policy of allowing thousands of troubled, often violent, students to commit crimes without legal consequence.

“He [Cruz] had a clean record, so alarm bells didn’t go off when they looked him up in the system,” said veteran FBI agent Michael Biasello. “Once the agent, or any officer, entered his name in the NCIC system, his history would have been viewed. He probably wouldn’t have been able to buy the murder weapon if the school had referred him to law enforcement."

Broward school Superintendent Robert W. Runcie had close ties to Obama and his Education Department. He worked closely with Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and Runcie's applications for federal grants factored in tens of millions of dollars in federal funding for Duncan's department.

Asserting that minority students were treated unfairly, “Runcie’s goal was to slash arrests and ensure that students, no matter how delinquent, graduated without criminal records,” says RealClearInvestigations.

RCI continues, “Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel backed Runcie’s plan to diminish the authority of police in responding to campus crime. A November 2013 video shows him signing the district’s 16-page “collaborative agreement on school discipline,” which lists more than a dozen misdemeanors that can no longer be reported to police, along with five steps police must “exhaust” before even considering placing a student under arrest.

“In just a few years, ethnically diverse Broward went from leading the state of Florida in student arrests to boasting one of its lowest school-related incarceration rates. Out-of-school suspensions and expulsions also plummeted.”

“Broward County adopted a lenient disciplinary policy similar to those adopted by many other districts under pressure from the Obama administration to reduce racial ‘disparities’ in suspensions and expulsions,” said Peter Kirsanow, a black conservative on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Washington. “In many of these districts, the drive to 'get our numbers right' has produced disastrous results, with startling increases in both the number and severity of disciplinary offenses, including assaults and beatings of teachers and students.”

For example, notes RCI, “In St. Paul, Minn., a high school science teacher was “beaten and choked out” by a 16-year-old student, who allegedly came up behind him, called him a “f--king white cracker,” and put him in a stranglehold, before bashing his head into a concrete wall and pavement. The student, Fon’Tae O’Bannon, got 90 days of electronic home monitoring and anger management counseling for the December 2015 attack. No jail time. No criminal record.

“The instructor, John Ekblad, who has experienced short-term memory loss and hearing problems, blames the Obama-era discipline policies for emboldening criminal behavior, adding that school violence 'is still rising out of control.'” That link has more examples.