In newsrooms across the country, there is, by now, a formula that editors follow for mass shootings. They order up a “lede-all,” a story that wraps together all of the important news; a “scene” piece, which is usually a narrative account of what it was like on the ground; a story about the victims; and, finally, as details emerge, a portrait of the shooter. These shooter profiles often follow a familiar path as well, about warning signs, disturbing behavior, and concerns about mental health. In Parkland, Florida, where a gunman killed seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday afternoon, the details that have come out about the alleged shooter, Nikolas Cruz, a nineteen-year-old former student at the school, have so far failed to deviate from this pattern.
People who knew Cruz have described him as troubled and obsessed with guns. “Honestly, a lot of people were saying it was going to be him,” Eddie Bonilla, a former classmate, told the CBS affiliate in Miami. “A lot of kids threw jokes around like that, saying that he’s the one to shoot up the school, but it turns out everyone predicted it. It’s crazy.” Helen Pasciolla, who lived across the street from the Cruz family, until they moved out, about a year ago, told the Times that Nikolas’s mother, who died late last year, had struggled to handle both him and his brother, Zachary, and that she had called the police about them. “I think she wanted to scare them a little bit,” Pasciolla said. School administrators were alarmed enough about Cruz that they expelled him. “There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus,” Jim Gard, a math teacher at Stoneman Douglas, said to the Miami Herald. Beam Furr, the Broward County mayor, related to media outlets that Cruz had been receiving mental-health treatment but stopped going. “We missed the signs,” Furr said. “We should have seen some of the signs.” On Wednesday morning, President Trump seized on the same notion: “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!”
This, too, is a familiar trope—that somehow, if the authorities had only been aware of worrisome signs about a future mass shooter’s mental health, the tragedy could have been averted. But this theory is contradicted not just by the facts in Parkland and in previous mass shootings but by America’s gun laws. The reality is that, in most states, law-enforcement officials often can do nothing to prevent even an obviously troubled person from buying guns, let alone take steps to confiscate guns that the person might already own.
On Thursday morning, the A.T.F. agent in charge of South Florida said at a news conference that Cruz had legally purchased the AR-15 assault-style rifle used in the shooting. Federal gun laws only bar people from buying guns under very specific criteria, such as felony convictions, domestic-violence misdemeanors, dishonorable discharge from the military, and other disqualifiers. When it comes to mental health, only people who have been involuntarily committed––a relatively high bar––are banned from buying guns under federal law. A few states imposed tighter restrictions on gun purchases because of mental health—including New York, California, and Maryland—after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in December, 2012. Florida, typically considered a strongly pro-gun state, also tightened its laws to bar people who have voluntarily committed themselves to a mental-health facility from buying guns.
New Yorker writers respond to the Parkland school shooting.
But what could the police have done if, as Trump suggested, they had been fully alerted to the warning signs about Cruz? Could they have taken away Cruz’s semi-automatic rifle? This would seem in keeping with basic public safety. But there is a thicket of challenges confronting the authorities when it comes to keeping guns away from people suffering from mental illness. In 2013, after the Sandy Hook shooting, when I was an investigative reporter at the Times, I spent time going through records in several jurisdictions across the country that detailed gun-related interactions between the police and people with mental-health issues. Among the places I examined was Arapahoe County, in Colorado, where twelve people were killed in a shooting in a movie theatre in Aurora, in 2012. It was extremely unusual, I found, for the sheriff’s department to confiscate weapons in these types of situations, and, when it did, almost all were soon returned to their owners. I asked Grayson Robinson, then the Arapahoe County sheriff, what his deputies would do if they encountered someone on the street with a gun acting irrationally or suicidal. He told me that they might take away the gun temporarily, for safekeeping, but that they would have no right to confiscate other weapons that the person owned, or even to hold onto the gun if the owner wanted it back. “We understand property rights,” he told me. “We would return those weapons to him upon his request.”
In Florida, under a state law known as the Baker Act, the police can send people considered a danger to themselves or others for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation and hold them for up to seventy-two hours. But, in 2009, Bill McCollum, a Republican and then the state’s attorney general, issued an advisory opinion saying that, “in the absence of an arrest and criminal charge,” law-enforcement officials did not have the authority to hold onto weapons confiscated from people in such situations.
On Thursday morning, Trump delivered a televised speech on the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. He vowed to focus on mental health; he did not mention gun control. Yet these issues are intertwined. Lately, gun-control advocates have been pushing for states to adopt the use of gun-violence restraining orders—also known as extreme risk protection orders. These are legal instruments that function like domestic-violence protection orders, allowing family members or legal authorities to petition a court to temporarily prohibit someone from possessing a firearm. In recent years, California, Washington, and Oregon have enacted such measures, joining Connecticut, which has had a tool like this since the late nineteen-nineties. More than a dozen states have introduced similar legislation this year, Josh Horwitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told me. “In a situation like this, where the person seems to be a substantial risk to himself or others, you’re worried about something happening, could be a suicide, could be a shooting like this,” he said. “Let’s take a time-out. Take the guns out of his hands.”
Makes sense. But that hasn’t usually been enough, in the past, for politicians to agree, particularly when it comes to guns. It’s much easier to bemoan the missed signs.
