Failure upon failure.

Students returned to class at Stoneman Douglas High School for the first time since a former student killed 17 in a mass shooting. (AP Photo/Terry Renna)

Listen To You Tell Me Texas Friday 3/2/18

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It is not possible, in the time and space that we have, to fully detail the cascade of government failures that led to the horrific mass murder of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

We know that Scot Peterson, the Broward County sheriff’s deputy assigned to the school, cowered outside the building even as 19-year old Nikolas Cruz was on a rampage of death inside. Peterson resigned from the department.

We know that three other sheriff’s deputies were also on the scene and that all three of them remained outside the school as well. Can you just imagine the heartbreak and the sleepless nights of the parents and families of those slain? There were four sworn peace officers on the scene that very plausibly could have interdicted in a way that saved lives. Yet they did nothing.

In the wake of the resulting outrage, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel is hiding behind a blizzard of words about “following established procedure” and other such bureaucratic claptrap. But that doesn’t change the fact that four duly sworn law enforcement officers –men who carry guns so that according to liberal anti-gun orthodoxy we mere citizens don’t need to – sat outside and did nothing as innocents inside were slaughtered.

But wait, it actually gets worse.

What’s now coming to light is that the Broward County school district was made into a liberal feel-good social engineering project of the Obama administration. In an effort to curtail the so-called, “school-to-prison pipeline,” – a sophism that springs from the spurious belief that school kids come to the attention of the police due to their ethnicity rather than for having actually committed crimes — the district stopped referring students to police for a long list of infractions, many of them serious and violent. As a result, the district’s campus crime statistics improved dramatically.

‘Success!’ hailed President Obama. Let the federal grant money flow!

Meanwhile, there was no actual reduction in campus crime. In fact, the kids did what kids do. They figured out that the heat was off.

Thus Nikolas Cruz began ramping up to the point of committing mass murder. He was involved in a felony assault on campus in January 2017 – more than a year before he shot up the school. But, under the oh-so-politically correct policy in place, he wasn’t arrested.

Among the many obvious problems with this is the fact that had he been arrested, he probably wouldn’t have been able to purchase the gun that he used to kill 17 people.

Will we ever learn? Every time liberal bureaucrats and politicians engage in the kind of social engineering that defies common sense, it ends in tears.

Yet those on the left never stop telling us that the expansion of government is the answer – the only answer – to the challenges that face our society.

As conservative columnist William F. Marshall says, our problem is not guns. It’s the false expectation that government will take care of us.