Re: Another Mass Shooting
Oh I know. My instinct is to dismiss them as just flailing to take the subject off guns.
But I am still wondering whether the police really did have any failure to take action they were legally allowed to take and what level of knowledge they had. Either way, we know that plenty of people can stockpile weapons without being so creepy and aggressive that people call the police on them, and there's no law against it. The very act of stockpiling weapons ought to be seen as a warning sign, but the government isn't allowed to even keep track of things like that.
As it is, because of idiotic record-keeping rules, they might have been unable to connect the dots between "dozens of calls about this guy seeming dangerous" and "this guy is buying powerful weapons", because you're not allowed to connect gun ownership to other records.
And as I suggest, it certainly seems like if he had just been a "suspicious" looking black man walking on the street, he might've gotten more attention in many parts of the country.
But the fact that I haven't seen much of anything in the way of an explanation of what laws the Florida police should've used, and emphasis purely on "they got a lot of calls", it's probably safe to assume that they couldn't have legally done much. Because otherwise the GOP and NRA would be really pushing on how "this law already allowed them to take his guns".
But exploring what the law actually says they could do is certainly an avenue for considering ways the law could be made better, aside from banning assault rifles (which I also think is a good idea). Since we're not realistically going to be going to UK-level gun control, we should still be interested in what police should be allowed to do when someone like Cruz has legal guns, even if in the future those guns don't include AR-15s because we banned them.
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