First, we get it. A school shooting is reprehensible and the authorities have to do all within their power to prevent them… Including thorough investigation of high-risk individuals that are likely to commit the heinous crime.
But:
When a kid goes to a gun rage in the company of his father to learn how to fire a gun and then make tweets that do not raise any flags, the events described below shouldn’t happen!
Kyle Kashuv is a survivor of the Parkland High School Shooting. He is also against gun control. After his first trip to the gun rage to learn how to shoot, he had a few things to share in a short series of completely innocuous and illuminating tweets.
Nothing out of the ordinary, right? Well, not quite. America’s outrage culture hasn’t simmered one bit, and true to character, several other Marjory Stoneman Douglas High Schools students made a fuss about his constructive opinion. If Kashuv thought that was the end of it, he was in for a rude awakening. On the next school day, he learned that his principal had received complaints about other students being “upset” by his posts, even though ‘he hadn’t done anything wrong.’
It got even weirder later in the day when he was asked to go meet a Mr. Greenleaf—an armed school resource officer. The officer led him into his office, where another security officer joined them, and an intense bout of questioning started.
According to Kashuv, “First, they began berating my tweet, although neither of them had read it; then they began aggressively asking questions about who I went to the range with, whose gun we used, about my father, etc. They were incredibly condescending and rude.”
A third officer came in afterwards from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, only to proceed to ask the same questions he had previously answered again. “At that point, I asked whether I could record the interview. They said no. I asked if I had done anything wrong. Again, they answered no. I asked why I was there. One said, “Don’t get snappy with me, do you not remember what happened here a few months ago?”
Kashuv noted that while they continued the aggressive questioning, they couldn’t tell him what he had done wrong. Instead, they gave him a “pro-Second Amendment kid” tag which in his words, ‘shocked and honestly scared’ him. “I was treated like a criminal for no reason other than having gone to the gun range and posted on social media about it,” he concluded.
You be the judge whether this is remotely proper.
Leave a Comment