Local school board members who are unwilling to fund needed security measures plus liberal school administrators who handicap the measures when they are available bear a major portion of the blame for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which claimed 17 lives on February 14, according to the president of the Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Union.
“That is the one entity that has not been brought up in this whole conversation,” said Deputy Jeff Bell during Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” on Friday night. “For years, the school board has known the schools have been soft targets, and for years they’ve claimed they wanted to have better police presences inside the schools and they wanted tougher security.”
But when it came time to fund those measures, Bell told host Laura Ingraham, “they don’t want to cough up the dollars to pay for that better security, to fortify their schools, to have better designs.”
Even when a situation arises, as was the case last week in Florida when an armed officer was present on the campus, Bell said, “The liberal thinking principles that are on the campuses — they don’t want the officers making arrests on the campus, and they don’t want the drugs to be found on the campuses, and they don’t want the warrants served in the schools …”
Bell disagreed with journalists, politicians and gun control activists who are demanding tighter controls on firearms as the best way to prevent future massacres.
The key to avoiding future massacres is dealing with the mental health issues involved, he said.
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“This is not a gun issue. I’ve said that from day one, and I will hold that belief until the day I die. It’s not the gun that is the problem. It’s the person behind the gun that is the problem,” Bell said. “The problem we face today is not going to be a simple fix … Until we can link the mental health records to the criminal background checks in the purchase of firearms, we’re not going to see if that person has an issue.”
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When Ingraham noted that Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel contends “we need less guns on the street, not more guns,” Bell conceded that “he is my boss and he is my sheriff, and he does sign my paychecks.”
Even so, Bell insisted “that doesn’t mean I have to have the same opinions as the sheriff. We need to intervene with the people with the gun, not the gun itself.”
Senior editor Mark Tapscott can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.
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