Volusia County Sheriff’s deputies arrested a teenager after posting a threat online. The video of the arrest was posted today. The teen reportedly posted that he wanted to take his father’s “M15” rifle to school and kill at least several people. The student made posted remarks on Discord, which is used by gamers. In an apparent attempt to not drop the ball again after Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the FBI alerted the local sheriff’s department who then showed up at the kid’s residence. The mother can be heard protesting, saying that it was due to a game he plays. Still, the deputies said that it doesn’t matter; it’s a crime (via WSVN):
A Florida high school student was accused of posting a message online saying he would "vow to bring my fathers m15 to school and kill 7 people at a minimum." Deputies released video of the arrest where they explain how serious the threat was.
— WSVN 7 News (@wsvn) August 20, 2019
STORY: https://t.co/W1GoEFnERO pic.twitter.com/avUZvdEiDS
LEO acted on existing FL law that criminalized written or digital credible threats to make this arrest. So-called “red flag” laws had no part. It’s not an absence of law but a lack of follow-through and, as previously seen, enforcement that contributes to tragedy. https://t.co/Iw3KXYtCjP
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 21, 2019
The boy, whose name is not being used by The Associated Press, told investigators he was joking when he posted the message on Discord using the fake name Dalton Barnhart. In it, he vowed to bring his father’s “M15” to Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach and “kill seven people at a minimum.”
The FBI alerted Volusia County authorities on Thursday, and deputies arrested the teen the next morning.
“Joke or not, these types of comments are felonies under the law,” the sheriff’s office wrote in its Facebook post.
In the video, the deputy tells the mother the boy had made a written threat to carry out a mass shooting.
“But he’s just a little kid playing a video game,” she protests. “These kids say stuff like that all the time. It’s a joke to them. It’s a game. And it’s so wrong. I hate that game.”
The deputy says law enforcement officers now spend a lot of time checking out similar threats.
“How do we know he’s not going to be like the kid from Parkland, or he’s not going to be like the kid that shot up Sandy Hook? We don’t know that,” he says.
“There is a Florida state statute that you cannot make a written threat to cause a mass shooting,” he adds, explaining that her son would be charged with either a second- or third-degree felony.
So, before the gun control crowd erroneously uses this example to support their red flag law narrative, this, as you can see, wasn’t due to such a law, but an existing state law that was enforced. Marjory Stoneman Douglas was avoidable. The FBI was warned. Local law enforcement knew Nikolas Cruz, the shooter, was trouble. And state officials, like everyone else, dropped the ball keeping tabs on this kid. It’s not that we don’t have enough laws on the books—we do; it’s that we appear to have a lapse in enforcing those laws already on the books.
In Texas, the Sutherland Springs shooting was due to the fact that the Air Force did not submit the proper paperwork to the FBI concerning the domestic violence conviction of Devin Patrick Kelley, who served a year in jail for beating his wife and fracturing his child's skull. That conviction would have prevented Kelley from purchasing firearms. Areas in our legal system need to be re-worked and re-tooled. That's not in dispute, but the anti-gun Left doesn't want that. They want to confiscate guns and shred our constitutional rights. They want to start doing that by passing new, ineffective laws that won't improve public safety.
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