Educators should consider employing armed combat veterans to protect students against the kind of senseless violence that claimed the lives of 17 people at a Florida high school, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik tells Newsmax TV.
"I don't necessarily know about teachers, that's stretching it I think, but arming people on school campuses, college campuses, high school campuses, various schools, I'm all for it," Kerik told host Miranda Khan on Thursday's "America Talks Live."
"[Such as] having off-duty or retired cops. Look, we have a whole slew of veterans coming back from combat that are looking for jobs . . . and that would be a perfect position for them."
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Kerik's comments came as disturbing new details emerged about Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old man who shot dead students and staffers with a .223 caliber, AR-15 style rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Wednesday afternoon.
Video blogger Ben Bennight told CNN he had alerted the FBI in September about a YouTube message left by a user with the name Nikolas Cruz stating: "I'm going to be a professional school shooter."
And Cruz, once kicked out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas because of disciplinary problems, was seen as having serious mental problems and was joked about by some students as the most likely candidate to shoot up a school.
In addition, Cruz's Instagram page featured unnerving photos of dead animals and weapons, and he so terrified staffers he had been banned from carrying a backpack into school. Despite that, Cruz reportedly had been in legal possession of the firearm he used to kill.
"They're going to be going through this guy's life, everything he's done, thought about, purchased, all his social media, his friends, associates," Kerik told Khan.
"If these guns were legally purchased and he passed a background [check], I think that's going to be something that's extremely interesting to the authorities and to the FBI . . .
"I'm not sure how he passed that background and why the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] didn't go back and get his guns when all this other stuff came to light."
Kerik said, while FBI, terrorist task forces, and local authorities are inundated with potential threats, "in this one case for sure, there was plenty to look at."
"You have to look at what he sent to the YouTuber: he wants to become a professional school shooter. The FBI responded, they spoke to the blogger. All you had to do is reach out to the school, and the school would have told them that he was a problem, there was a threat that they were concerned," Kerik said.
"Then, if you looked at his social media, it was saturated with weapons and all this threatening rhetoric, that should have raised some flags, some alarms, somewhere, for somebody to go in and look at his weapons to see if he had them, if he was attempting to purchase them."
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