Parkland School Shooting Survivor: Don’t Blame Guns, Blame the ‘Cowards of Broward County’

During the March 25 airing of Face the Nation, Parkland school shooting survivor Kyle Kashuv suggested people looking for something to blame ought to be pointing at the “cowards of Broward County” rather than guns.

Kashuv was referencing the Broward County Sheriff’s Office from which a deputy arrived on scene 90 seconds into the attack and waited outside the building while the gunman spent nearly five more minutes shooting innocents.

That deputy, Scot Peterson, can allegedly be seen on surveillance video arriving at building 12 only to remain outside while the sound of gunfire continued on the inside. Sheriff Scott Israel called out Peterson for not going into the building and Peterson resigned rather than face suspension.

But further reports were not kind to Israel either, and the behavior of deputies on scene were called into question as well.

None of this was lost on Kashuv, who bemoaned the fact that not one protester in the student march for gun control carried signs calling out Sheriff Israel.

He transitioned to the topic of Sheriff Israel while explaining why a ban on “assault weapons” and/or “high capacity magazines” would not end school shootings. He said:

That won’t solve the issue. What we’ve seen is that there are certain things such as having — enforcing the regulation that’s currently in law. I mean we’ve seen on so many different levels that the cowards of Broward (ph) failed, the FBI failed, Sheriff Scott Israel failed. So many different multi-layered levels failed in Parkland. And it’s absolutely reprehensible that I didn’t see one single poster yesterday at the march that said f the NRA that — no, sorry, that said f Sheriff Scott Israel.

He went on to point to armed individuals as part of the solution to school shootings. In making his case, he mentioned the good guy with a gun who shot at the Maryland school attacker on March 20, ushering in the end of the incident. He praised a newly passed law — signed on March 9 by Gov. Rick Scott (R) — which will allow certain Floridians to get training to carry guns on campus for school safety.

Kashuv said, “Something called the Marshal Program, which was registered and implemented in Florida and which would allow properly trained officers and veterans, and unemployment veterans, to acquire the training to protect our school because we’ve seen in Maryland that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Host Margaret interrupted as Kashuv spoke, saying, “You want — you would have liked more armed guards at the school?”

Kashuv replied:

Absolutely. I mean we saw it in Maryland. He stopped the shooter. He did his job. And had the cowards of Broward done their job, I think that the count in Parkland would have been much lower. We saw that in Maryland that a good guy with a gun stopped a bad guy with a gun. The only way to stop an active shooter on campus is to have another person to eliminate him.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.