Gun policy, i suggested here a corresponding cause for our national tragedy. And today in light of new information, let me say it flat out. The Florida School shooting was an epic intelligence failure. It should have been stopped. It never should have happened. In this technological world of apple and google, facebook and amazon, better management of data by Law Enforcement needs to keep us safe from mass killings. And better integration of that which was in a variety of databases should have kept us safe from this guy. I hate to say his name, but i need to in order to make my points. Nikolas cruz was not living off the grid like the Unabomber Ted kaczynski. He was totally plugged in. To his community, to Law Enforcement. And to social media. There was a Staggering Amount of seemingly searchable information 3r5 predicting his future path. Consider just some of the electronic bread crumbs. The Broward CountySheriffs Office received 23 calls about this one guy over ten years. Starting when cruz was just nine. That data was all recorded. Since 20 on 10, Law Enforcement had to respond to his house 39 times. Or in a classmates words, almost every other week. And again, records were kept. The most serious warnings started in february of 2016 when an anonymous caller alerted police that the killerragram to shoot up the school and cruz posted pictures of himself with a gun. Another electronic marker. Seven months later, a pier counselor reported that the killer possibly ingested gasoline, wanted to buy a gun and attempted to commit suicide by cutting himself. Days later an investigator for floridas department of children and families ruled him a low risk. Still dcf had a thick file on this guy. That is more data which could have been integrated. And later that month, the family that initially took the killer in after his mothers death called police to report a fight. 911, how can i help you . There was a fight in my house. Between a kid and my son. Okay. He left the house but im afraid he is coming back and he has a lot of weapons. What kind of weapons, maam . I need to ask. What kind of weapon did he get, that he is going to get is . A remington. Beiokay. And who did this . Nikolas cruz. This is not the first time hes put a gun to somebodys head. There is more. The family also revealing this disturbing detail. He knows he is not lowered to bring it here. He was going to behaviorury the. Next day a tipster called the Sheriffs Office telling them he will kill himself and could be a School Shooter in the making. Cruz posted comments like i want to die fighting and i want to shoot people with my ar15, yet more electronic footprints. And then there was his behavior at school. According to the miami herald, teachers said he kicked door, he cursed at teachers, that he fought with and threatened classmates and brought a backpack with bullets to school. More markers. Student Samantha Fuentes who was injured in the shooting said students used to joke about cruz being the next School Shooter. Also reports that an investigator with floridas department of children and families had previously warned the state of cruzs intentions to buy a gun after his 18th birthday. And asar15. The transaction was perfectly legal, but youd think that a background check should be able to detect all these prior warnings. Last september, a mississippi bail bonds man flagged for the fbi a Youtube Comment from a nikolas cruz saying im going to be a professional School Shooter. The Washington Post reported that a nexus search revealed only 22 so named swridindividua. That is another searchable database. And still they didnt stop him. Finally the fbi admits that they failed to act on a january 5 phone call in which according to the transcript yet another unidentified caller said she feared cruz was about to explode and was capable of, quote, getting into a school and just shooting the place up. I just want to get it off my chest in case something does happen and i do believe somethings going to happen. After receiving that call, an fbi employee discussed the it inwith hin wi tip with her supervisor and conclude the there was no imminent threat. The case was closed within an hour. The information was never passed on to the miami field office. And this is not even a full accounting that im giving you. It is inexcusable that all this. I get there are Civil Liberties. But protection of americans demands better data management. When any of us makes a rudimentary amazon or google search, we trigger all sorts of algorithms that make it hard to evaried commercial suitors. Why shouldnt Law Enforcement have the same tools at their disposal . We were a key stroke away from catching this guy. Instead 17 are dead. It is time to work smarter, not harder. I want to know what you think. Go to smerconish. Com, answer this question. The Florida School shooting was more a failure of Data Integration or gun policy . Ill give you results later in the show. Now, with all those missed signals, sources are the telling cnn it wasnt only Broward County sheriff Deputy Scot Peterson who had not entered the building as the shooting was unfooleding. Three other deputies were also outside the school shielded by their cars and had not rushed in by the time that other on officers arrived. Joining me now is a criminal justice professor and executive director of the advanced Law EnforcementRapid ResponseTraining Center at texas state university. Dr. Blair, you know these men are essentially being challenged and accused of ycowardiccowardi. Is there any benign explanation . I always try to give officers on the scene the benefit of the doubt. We are not there. We dont see what they see. And we really want to give them that benefit of the doubt and we still dont have all the information in. Occasionally there could be a situation when an officer may choose not to enter right away if the next oifrn is only a few seconds behind and two of them can enter as opposed to one. But in general, i swrnts sent h anything that tells me why they wouldnt have entered. Might it be that Scot Peterson knew he was outgunned, that he had an ar15, that he could hear the type of weapon write and he had a simple handgun . He would be at as today advantage facing it with a hand gun, but not as much as the people who are inside the building that are completely unarmed. He is there with a gun. He has body armor and training. So i keep reading this week as i try and become more knowledgeable about appropriate police response, in fact ill put the New York Times up as an example of what im about to say, the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 fundamentally changed Police Protocol amid fears that a gunman equipped with semi automatic weapons would be capable of killing dozens in a matter of seconds. Officers now are stocked with appli supplies and trained to seek gunmen urgently even if they have no backup or only limited information. Does that represent the current protocol for Law Enforcement . Yes, it does. When we teach Police Officers to respond to these events, we teach them the first thing they should do on scene is stop the killing. So if you see kids coming out screaming, you matter gunfire, you want to proceed directly toward that attacker and try to stop them from shooting anybody else. So the fact there was a deputy on premise with a firearm who didnt go in, does that mitigate against the argument that we should be Arming School personnel . I dont know that necessarily directly relates to the School Personnel argument. Id be interested to see if officer what kind training he had had, when the last time was that he had training. And try to find out from his point of view why he chose not to go in. I want to switch gears. I want to talk not about Law Enforcement, i want to talk about the citizenry. God forbid any of us should find ourselves in an active shooting situation. The wordser ke ei keep hearing run, are hide, fight. What is your mantra . We say avoid, deny, defend. We want action words in there that people are doing things. Meaning what . So meaning that we want you to first start by avoiding the attacker if that is possible. Get away from the person who is trying to kill you. If for some reason you skptd, you are in a classroom, you hear gun fire in the hallway, you are worried you might be shot, best next option is deny access to your location, close, locked door, barricade it. That sort of thing. And as last resort if you end up in close proximity to that person, next best thing is to defend yourself. That person is trying to murder you, you should not let them do that easily. Let me ask some practical questions. Use the he will swrat tore or dont . You dont want to be trapped in a box that doesnt give you options of where you can go an what you can do. Full the fire alarm, dont pull the fire alarm . I would say dont pull the fire alarm particularly in a case where apply the school had a fire drill earlier in the day. You dont want everybody to spill out into the hallways where the shooter might be. So you dont want to pull it. Play dead, dont play dead . Im not a fan of playing dead. There could be situations where playing dead might work momentarily, but what we see again and again in these situations is the shooter comes in, they shoot the people who are up and once the people who are up are down, they shoot the people who are down to make sure they are dead. So we commonly see people who are playing dead get shot while they are playering dead. Use the cellphone, dont use the cellphone . You can use the cellphone, but i wouldnt use it until youre out of the danger area. So the most important thing is that you start taking actions to protect yourself immediately. Once youve gotten yourself out of immediate harms way, then you can get on the phone and notify police and authorities. And you dont want to stay on the phone doing social media. You want to keep your head in what is happening here and paying attention to what is happening here as opposed to being distracted by something else. And from a defense standpoint, ive period you say it before, through any means necessary. Dr. Blair, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. What do you think . Go to smerconish. Com, answer poll question. Results later this hour. The Florida School shooting was more i think it is both. Im asking you which was it more . A failure of Data Integration or gun policy . What are your thoughts . Tweet me, go to my facebook page. Ill read some throughout the course of the program. Im fired up today as you can tell. Really angry about this issue. Not sure, what if the fbi or local Law Enforcement had gone in and seized his guns . What would have been the due process considerations, the political ramifications . What about the Civil Liberties of the family that took them . Is . What about a complaint to making terroristic threats that would warrant a full scale investigation that would tie together all the data that i referenced in my opening comment taker . That is what im advocating. This is not a guy who should have had access to weaponry. Hat. This is not a guy who should have had access to weaponry. It is unclusable. A inexcusable. I dont think Law Enforcement has the tools. We give them all the weaponry from iraq and afghanistan. We give them the mraps. We need to give them searchable data. Up ahead, fear and loathing on both sides. Could the gun debate tear this country apart . Join the uncarrier right now, and get four unlimited lines for only thirtyfive bucks each. Woah. Plus, netflix for the whole family. On us. Prrrrrrr. So, they get their shows. Lets go, girl youre gonna love this bit and you get yours. Watch however you want. On your phone, tablet, or tv. For a limited time, get 4 lines for just thirtyfive bucks per line, with no extra charges. Its showtime all on americas best unlimited network, tmobile. And when youod sugar is a replace one meal. Choices. Or snack a day with glucerna. Made with carbsteady. To help minimize blood sugar spikes. 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There are patients out there that dont have a lot of time. Finally, it was like the sun rose again and i was going to start fighting back now. When those patients come to me and say, you saved my life. My life was saved by a two week old targeted therapy drug. Thats what really drives me to to save lives. I am totally blind. And non24 can throw my days and nights out of sync, keeping me from the things i love to do. Talk to your doctor, and call 8442142424. There are angry words being thrown around in the wake of the shooting at stoneman douglas. Dana lash said this in a speech at cpac. Many in legacy media love mass shootings. You guys love it. Now, im not saying that you 4r love the tragedy. But i am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold. On friday liberal Michael Moore tweeted this, the nra is a terrorist organization. The media should speak to the n rachlt in the sa ra in the same way as they do isaiah. We isis. Weve had 1. 2 million gun deaths since john lennon was shot dead. Fr could it sever the ties that unite us as a nation . His most recent piece called the gun control debate could break america. David, i find each that we just showed rep plhelp prehenceable. Absolutely. Weve seen it on both sides since parkland. Weve seen people telling americans who support gun rights that they have blood on their hands when they are desperate to stop school shootings, too. They have different ideas for how to do it, but they are called murderers and then we see the rhetoric that says that the Mainstream Media loves mass killings when we know that is not the case. And weve seen people mocking the kids who are the survivors of the parkland massacre, accusing them of being plants and trolls and paid actors. So what you are seeing is this unbelievably vicious rhetoric and it is injected into a political environment that is already toxic. It is not like we had a healthy political discourse in this country before this occurred. But now it is being escalatedlad death issue. And it is putting strains on the system. And how far do you fear those stwrans might take us . Well, you know, it really depends on what happens next. This is a news cycle that is persisting for a lot of very Important Reasons day after day. Were heading into an off year election cycle, into an election cycle where you will have more rhetoric around this issue and around other issues. And again, we cannot divorce this from the overall context. And we cant divorce it from other trends such as the fact that we tend to live more in like minded enclaves than we have in recent memory. So that we tend to live and work and live our lives with people who agree with us. Which means that we have less capacity to understand others. And again, all of this is pulling at the fabric of this country, pulling and tugging and pulling, and you cant keep doing that forever. I give senator rubio credit for going into the lions den for appearing at that cnn town hall meeting. Shear a snippet of what transpir transpired. Your comments this week and those of our president have been pathetically weak. Ill repeat what i said. And what i said, and then ill tell you what were going to do how does that fit into your analysis, how is that indicative of what you see going on out there . And lets keep in mind that was one of the more civil moments. We had one of the kids from parkland comparing him, marco rubio, to the shooter himself. I mean, we had people shouting at dana lash that she was a murderer. So what that tells me is that th