Category: reason

The day after Jane Silakowski gave birth, a doctor came into her room and told her she’d failed a drug test. She insisted she had had no drugs and asked if the poppy seed bread she’d had before coming to the hospital could have caused the result. “That’s from Seinfeld, that can’t be,'” the doctor said. In fact, the bread had caused a false positive. But the hospital still contacted Erie County Child Protective Services, which launched an investigation. For the next eight weeks, CPS made house calls and visited Silakowski’s two older children at school. And Silakowski had to undergo drug testing and counseling at her own expense.

Two local media outlet are now reporting that the assault of Empire actor Jussie Smollet last month may have been a hoax: Smollet himself is suspected of organizing the attack, which was carried out by two brothers, at least one of whom had appeared as an extra on the show and knew Smollet socially.

“Multiple sources have told ABC7 Eyewitness News that police are investigating whether Smollet and the two men staged the attack allegedly because Smollett was being written off of ‘Empire,'” wrote ABC 7.

“Investigators believe Jussie Smollet and the non-cooperating witnesses in the alleged attack of Smollett last month ‘potentially staged the attack,’ sources tell CBS 2 Investigator Brad Edwards,” wrote CBS Chicago.

The two witnesses are brothers of Nigerian descent, and were picked up at Chicago O’Hare International Airport on Wednesday night. A relative of the two men confirmed that they knew Smollet, as did their attorney.

“They do know Jussie,” their attorney, Gloria Schmidt, told CBS Chicago. “They have worked with him on Empire. My preliminary investigations show that on set it’s very tight. They’re all very cordial with each other, so they’re baffled why they are people of interest.”

Police believe the two men were captured on surveillance video near the scene of the crime, according to to ABC and TMZ. Police raided their home Wednesday night, taking bleach, shoes, electronics, and other items.

A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department (CPD) described news reports as “unconfirmed, uninformed, and inaccurate.”

In a statement to Reason, the CPD said, “We don’t have any comment as the investigation is currently ongoing.”

Smollet was attacked at 2:00 a.m. on January 29 on the streets of Chicago while he was coming back from a sandwich shop. His two assailants allegedly put a rope around his neck, poured bleach on him, and shouted “MAGA country.”

According to the ABC and CBS reports, Smollet may have staged the attack because he was being written off Empire. Fox has denied that this was the case, however.

With the police and Fox both pushing back forcefully against the ABC and CBS reports, it’s impossible to say with absolute certainty what the truth of the matter is yet. But the fact that the two men evidently knew Smollet—a detail confirmed by their attorney—certainly makes inside job a more plausible explanation than random hate crime. At the very least, it seems vanishingly unlikely that the perpetrators were white Trump voters.

Today marks the day, 30 years ago, when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, whose novel, The Satanic Verses, mocked Mohammed. The Iranian leader offered millions of dollars to the true believer who would murder Rushdie. Forty-one years old at the time, Rushdie lived hidden and under guard for a decade before coming back above ground (it’s not fully clear if the fatwa is in force anymore, but Rushdie now lives publicly and without protection).

“It feels like ancient history to me,” he told an interviewer in 2018, while promoting his latest novel, The Golden House. He expresses satisfaction in finding that at long last, a generation on, The Satanic Verses can be read as a novel, rather than as a controversy, a symbol, a casus belli. “Now, after all this time, it’s finally been able to have the ordinary life of a book,” he said in March of 2018.

Writing in Spiked, Jonathan Rauch argues

At the time, many observers, myself included, believed the incident to be some kind of inflection point – a view which proved correct. But what sort of inflection point? Thirty years have brought additional clarity, and an ominous development. Today, mob demands for censorship and censure are so common they have acquired a new name: call-out culture. Contra Rushdie, the episode is not ancient history, not at all.

I’m not fully convinced by his argument that there is a straight line between the Rushdie affair and today’s diminished defenses of free speech (indeed, Rauch himself hedges toward the end of his article). But his quick litany of high-profile instances where the principle of free-speech has been tossed out the window in the name of protecting the feelings of the aggrieved is sobering and depressing. And certainly this much is true:

The impulse to rally against blasphemy and to drive out impurity is a human impulse, not a radical or Islamist or specifically religious impulse; and that lots of sophisticated people in places like America and the UK are yielding to it; and the ultimate consequences are barbaric and oppressive, because of the victims they destroy and the conversations they squelch.

Read Rauch’s full article here.

Read Reason works by and about Rauch here.

Activists who worked with both parties to pass a signature criminal justice reform bill late last year sounded the alarm on Thursday as a major spending bill worked its way quickly through Congress—without, apparently, including promised funding for the newly passed law.

As Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella reported in December when it passed, the FIRST STEP Act aimed to reduce federal prison populations by shrinking some mandatory minimum sentences, giving judges greater discretion over the lengths of prison sentences. Importantly, the bill also called for expanding job training opportunities and programs that seek to ease prisoners’ reentry into society, and for funding a risk assessment system that would be used to give some inmates access to early release.

The FIRST STEP Act authorized $75 million in spending annually from fiscal year 2019 (the current fiscal year) through fiscal year 2023, with most of that funding directed to the federal Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Department of Justice. It was widely assumed that funding would be included in the omnibus bill now before Congress—the most high-profile element of which is funding for President Donald Trump’s border wall—but there is no explicit funding for the FIRST STEP Act included in the bill.

The omission is particularly glaring since President Donald Trump had highlighted the passage of the bill just 10 days ago at the State of the Union address. Among the White House’s guests for the occasion was Alice Johnson, whose story, Trump said, “underscores the disparities and unfairness that can exist in criminal sentencing—and the need to remedy this injustice.”

“Notably, for President Trump’s agenda, the bill entirely fails to provide appropriations for one of his greatest legislative victories thus far in his term—the First Step Act,” said Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a free market group that supported the passage of the FIRST STEP Act. “It is unacceptable that Congress should not find it important to fund this massive legislative victory, while it simultaneously has no problem funding above and beyond for wasteful programs.”

In a statement posted online Thursday afternoon, Brandon called for lawmakers to vote against the omnibus bill, citing concerns about profligate spending, a rushed timeline for a final vote, and the lack of funds for the FIRST STEP Act. The 1,000-plus page bill was unveiled in the early hours of Thursday morning, and had already cleared the Senate (with an 83-16 vote) on Thursday evening.

(For more on the spending components of the bill, see Christian Britschgi’s report here. For more on Trump’s decision to take $1.3 billion for a border and then declare a national emergency to spend even more money on a wall, see Joe Setyon’s report here.)

It’s possible the FIRST STEP Act could still receive its promised funding by reallocating other Bureau of Prisons funding, but criminal justice reform advocates told Reason they were skeptical that could happen. Newly confirmed Attorney General William Barr would likely have some control over those decisions, and he has a track record of being skeptical of sentencing reforms—while advocating for putting more people behind bars. It seems unlikely that he’d find $75 million in his own budget if Congress doesn’t put it there.

“I think that’s potentially a big issue,” Brett Tolman, a former federal prosecutor who now works on criminal justice issues, told Reason. “If [DOJ] has the ability to control that money, it’s going to take political pressure to get them to spend it” on the FIRST STEP Act, he said.

South Carolina lawmakers introduced a bill Wednesday to effectively abolish civil asset forfeiture, following a multi-part local news investigation that revealed widespread abuses of the practice, which allows police to seize property even when a person is not charged or convicted of a crime.

If the bill, H. 3968, passes, South Carolina would join three other states—New Mexico, Nebraska, and North Carolina—that have ended civil asset forfeiture by requiring criminal convictions before property can be forfeited. In total, 29 states have passed some form of asset forfeiture reform over the past decade.

At a bipartisan press conference Wednesday, South Carolina state legislators unveiled the bill, which already has 71 cosponsors and the support of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the National Black Caucus of State Legislators.

“I know some of you are saying, ‘Oh my god, has hell frozen over? Cobb-Hunter is supporting something that ALEC is supporting,'” said state lawmaker Gilda Cobb-Hunter at the press conference. “Wonders never cease. It’s a great day in South Carolina.”

The bill would also redirect asset forfeiture funds to the state’s general fund. Law enforcement groups say civil asset forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug trafficking and organized crime, but civil liberties groups say allowing police departments to directly pad their budgets with forfeiture proceeds creates a perverse profit incentive that leads them to target everyday people and petty amounts of cash.

Additionally, the bill would forbid state and local enforcement from participating in the federal government’s Equitable Sharing Program, which allows the Justice Department to “adopt” local forfeiture cases and split the proceeds. Critics say the program acts as a loophole that allows police to continue using civil asset forfeiture even in states that have passed reforms.

In January, The Greenville News began publishing the results of a two-year joint investigation with several other news outlets into every single civil asset forfeiture case in the state over a three-year period. The meticulous investigation revealed South Carolina police had raked in $17 million in forfeiture proceeds between 2014 and 2016.

As Reason wrote:

Nearly a fifth of the 4,000 people who had their property seized by South Carolina police between 2014 and 2016 were never arrested nor even charged with a related crime. Under typical civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize cash, cars, houses, and other property suspected of being connected to criminal activity even if the owner is never convicted of a crime […]

For example, there’s the case of Ella Bromell, an elderly woman in Conway, South Carolina. Police and city officials tried to seize her house through civil asset forfeiture because of small drug deals taking place on her property, even though she was not connected in any way to the sales and had repeatedly tried to get rid of the dealers.

The Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm that has challenged forfeiture laws in several states, applauded the introduction of the bill.

“Civil forfeiture is one of the greatest threats to private property and civil liberties in the nation today,” Institute for Justice senior legislative counsel Lee McGrath said in a statement. “If enacted, South Carolina’s forfeiture laws would be second only to New Mexico in safeguarding the constitutional rights of its residents. It’s encouraging to see so many lawmakers, Democrat and Republican alike, come together to defend due process.”

Jessica Rosenworcel, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, does not like TV and radio ads for e-cigarettes, and she seems to think they can be banned by reinterpreting the 1970 law that prohibited broadcast ads for conventional cigarettes. She is wrong.

“Today you won’t see cigarette ads on television,” Rosenworcel wrote on Twitter yesterday. “But nothing stops the ads for e-cigarettes, even if they are targeted at kids. The @FCC can help put a stop to this, and I think it should.”

Rosenworcel explains how in a USA Today op-ed piece. “We do not need to sit idly by while the electronic equivalent of the Marlboro Man surfaces in new advertising that introduces the next generation to habit-forming tobacco products,” she writes. “Congress charged the FCC with upholding the ‘public interest’ in its oversight of the broadcast industry….As one court recognized long ago, ‘the public interest indisputably includes the public health.'”

Rosenworcel seems to be claiming that the FCC’s mandate to regulate the airwaves in “the public interest” gives it the authority to impose whatever speech restrictions it thinks will promote “the public health,” which is a pretty alarming conjunction of two vague, expansive phrases. As fellow FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr observed on Twitter today, “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.'” A little more concretely, Rosenworcel suggests that “we can work with the FDA to ensure that the Department of Justice—which interprets the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act—does so in a modern way that recognizes the public health crisis from the growth in use of these addictive products.”

Leaving aside the “public health” wisdom of suppressing information about products that offer a potentially lifesaving alternative to smoking, Rosenworcel’s plan is dubious on both statutory and constitutional grounds. The statute to which she refers says “it shall be unlawful to advertise cigarettes on any medium of electronic communication subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission.” It defines cigarette as “any roll of tobacco wrapped in paper or in any substance not containing tobacco.” Since e-cigarettes contain no tobacco, interpreting the law “in a modern way” evidently means ignoring its plain meaning.

Even if the Justice Department managed that interpretive feat, there is the little matter of the First Amendment, which says “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” When Congress enacted the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, the Supreme Court was still taking the position that “commercial speech” is not protected by the First Amendment. Hence it is not surprising that a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., upheld the ban on cigarette advertising in 1971, when six radio companies challenged it. The Supreme Court affirmed that decision without comment in 1972.

Since then, however, the Court has reconsidered the original version of the “commercial speech” doctrine, recognizing that advertising is constitutionally protected. Under the test it laid out in the 1980 case Central Hudson Gas & Electric v. Public Service Commission, restrictions on truthful, nonmisleading advertisements of legal products will be upheld only if they directly advance a substantial government interest and are no more extensive than necessary.

In the 2001 case Lorillard Tobacco v. Reilly, the Court used that test to overturn a Massachusetts ban on tobacco billboards within 1,000 feet of a school or playground. Although the Court deemed preventing underage tobacco consumption a substantial government interest and even accepted the dubious argument that advertising restrictions directly advance that goal, it said the 1,000-foot rule swept too broadly, barring outdoor tobacco advertising from “a substantial portion of Massachusetts’ largest cities” and in some places amounting to “nearly a complete ban on the communication of truthful information about smokeless tobacco and cigars to adult consumers.”

If Massachusetts legislators’ desire to shield children from tobacco ads could not justify a state ban on billboards, it is hard to see how Rosenworcel’s desire to shield children from e-cigarette ads could justify a nationwide ban on TV and radio ads. “Censoring lawful speech based on its content?” Commissioner Carr responded on Twitter yesterday. “I’m with the First Amendment. I’m a no.”

At a press conference today, Rosenworcel reacted to Carr’s pushback by insisting that “all I’ve done is called for the idea that the FCC, the FTC, and the FDA should come together, look at what laws are on their books, and identify if there are things we can do to assist with…what the FDA Commissioner called a public health crisis.” Yes, and her main idea for assisting the FDA involves censoring speech.

Rosenworcel’s obliviousness to the constitutional issue is especially striking because she has been quick (and correct) to say the FCC must resist President Trump’s suggestion that the commission’s regulatory powers should be used to punish or suppress speech he does not like. “History won’t be kind to silence,” she said on CNN in 2017, “and I think it’s important for all the commissioners to make clear that they support the First Amendment.”

Video game violence does not lead to real life violence, finds a terrific new study in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The title lays it out plainly: “Violent video game engagement is not associated with adolescents’ aggressive behaviour.” Oxford University psychologist Andrew Przybylski and Cardiff University psychologist Netta Weinstein set out to test the findings of researchers who claim violent video games induce aggressive tendencies in players. Their “aim was to rigorously test the hypothesis that time spent playing violent video games is positively associated with adolescents’ everyday behavioural aggression.”

Their top-line finding is that their study “did not support the position that violent gaming relates to aggressive behaviour.”

This contradicts the consensus hammered out by an American Psychological Association task force on violent video games in 2017. That task force “found that violent video game exposure was associated with: an increased composite aggression score; increased aggressive behavior; increased aggressive cognitions; increased aggressive affect, increased desensitization, and decreased empathy; and increased physiological arousal.” The task force also “concluded that violent video game use is a risk factor for adverse outcomes, but found insufficient studies to examine any potential link between violent video game use and delinquency or criminal behavior.”

Przybylski and Weinstein set out to devise a particularly rigorous study by pre-registering their empirical approach so that they could avoid the persistent problems in psychological research of “p-hacking”; that is, running multiple tests on a dataset until the researcher finds a result that achieves statistical significance, and then “HARKing,” an acronym that stands for “hypothesizing after the results are known.” In Przybylski and Weinstein’s review of prior literature, the two researchers strongly argue that earlier research is beset with such problems.

In this study, the pair recruited 1,004 British video game players ages 14 and 15, of which 540 participants identified as male, 461 as female, and 3 as another gender orientation. For each player, they also recruited their carers (mostly parents). They determined which games the kids played and coded the level of violence in each game using E.U. and U.S. industry ratings. They measured youth aggression and prosocial behaviour with carer responses on the Strengths and Difficulties questionnaire that has been extensively used to assess interpersonal aggression across a wide range of cultures. Then they ran their various regressions.

“We found adolescents were not more or less likely to engage in aggressive or prosocial behaviours as a function of the amount of time they devoted to playing violent games,” they report.

Przybylski and Weinstein add, “This pattern of findings further suggests that links reported in the literature might be influenced by publication bias, selective reporting, or an artefact of unobserved or hidden moderators.” In other words, the 2017 task force’s conclusion that video game violence makes players aggressive is highly suspect.

A marijuana activist who met with a staffer for Rep. Andy Harris (R–Md.) in the congressman’s office last year and streamed the meeting to Facebook Live has been charged with making an “illegal wiretap,” according to the Maryland State Prosecutor’s office.

In October 2018, 20-year-old Jake Burdett was attending a medical marijuana protest organized by the advocacy group Maryland Marijuana Justice outside Harris’ office in Salisbury, prosecutors said in a news release. Burdett and several other protesters were invited to meet with one of Harris’ staffers in that staffer’s office. The staffer informed the activists they could not record in the office, but Burdett allegedly streamed the meeting to Facebook Live anyway.

Unfortunately for Burdett, Maryland is an all-parties consent state, meaning it’s illegal for one party to record a meeting unless the other parties say it’s OK. “We need to ensure people are respecting boundaries set by Maryland’s wiretapping law,” State Prosecutor Emmet Davitt said in a statement. Burdett was thus charged last week with “the illegal recording of the Congressional Staffer and the illegal distribution of that recording,” according to the news release.

While Burdett knew he did not have consent, he did not know that recording anyway would be illegal, claims another pro-cannabis reform group, DC Marijuana Justice, in a press release. Burdett, who plans to plead guilty, also says he apologized to the staffer and deleted the recording after realizing it was illegal.

“This sort of thing happens all the time in Maryland, but it is very rare for someone to actually press charges about it, and it saddens me that Rep. Harris has decided to needlessly drop the hammer to make an example out of me over a mistake I quickly corrected and apologized for,” Burdett said in an email to the Salisbury Daily Times. “I also find it odd that we, as citizens and constituents, are not allowed to record conversations with paid staffers by public officials in a taxpayer-funded space.”

When asked by Reason if Harris pushed for Burdett to be charged, a Harris spokesperson declined to comment.

President Donald Trump plans to sign a bipartisan budget deal and then declare a national emergency to obtain money for his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday.

McConnell’s Senate floor announcement came the day before funding for parts of the federal government was set to lapse. Congressional leaders from both parties reached a deal to avoid a shutdown earlier in the week, but it was unclear if Trump would sign it. The president has demanded $5.7 billion for his border wall, but the deal in question includes just $1.375 billion for the wall.

Trump “has indicated he’s prepared to sign the bill,” McConnell said. “He will also be issuing a national emergency declaration at the same time. And I’ve indicated to him that I’m going to support the national emergency declaration.”

Trump’s use of a national emergency declaration to secure border wall funding should trouble anyone who understands and appreciates separation of powers. According to a 2007 report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the 1976 National Emergencies Act entitles the president to “statutory delegations from Congress” that let him “seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens.”

We don’t know what limits there are on a president’s ability to declare a national emergency. There is definitely potential for civil liberties abuses, particularly in regard to eminent domain, which is the process by which the government forces a property owner to sell. David Bier, an immigration policy analyst for the Cato Institute, told Reason last month his “biggest concern” is that Trump will use the declaration of a national emergency to “seize private property for the wall without following the normal, albeit, minimal procedures.”

Bier has previously noted for Reason that the federal government owns less than a third of the land on the southern border. The rest belongs to other entities, including states, Native American tribes, and private individuals. Most of the border land in Texas, in fact, is private property. In order for the wall to get built, the federal government will need to confiscate quite a bit of privately owned land.

What’s less clear is whether Trump can seize land without congressional authorization. Title 42 of the U.S. Code says that when a federal program or project (like the border wall) requires an individual to relocate, that individual must be given “a reasonable opportunity to relocate to a comparable replacement dwelling.” But there are three exceptions, including “a national emergency declared by the President.”

Trump, for his part, has already suggested using the “military version of eminent domain” to build the wall. And federal law does allow for military department secretaries to seize land “in the interest of national defense.” But in the face of one or more inevitable legal challenges, Trump would still have to convince the courts that building a wall is necessary for national defense.

It remains to be seen if Trump can legally seize land for the wall. The same goes for whether declaring a national emergency will help him secure border wall funding. Trump has a few options regarding the latter, as noted by Margaret Taylor, a governance fellow at the Brookings Institute and a senior editor at Lawfare.

Title 10 of the U.S. Code, for instance, says that when the president declares a national emergency “that requires use of the armed forces,” the secretary of defense can authorize “military construction projects, not otherwise authorized by law that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces.” The necessary money would come from un-obligated funds that have already been allocated for military construction.

Title 33 of the U.S. Code applies to similar situations: namely, a national emergency declaration “that requires use of the armed forces.” It says that in such cases, the secretary of the Army can “terminate or defer the construction, operation, maintenance, or repair of any Department of the Army civil works project that he deems not essential to the national defense,” then “apply the resources of the Department of the Army’s civil works program, including funds, personnel, and equipment, to construct or assist in the construction, operation, maintenance, and repair of authorized civil works, military construction, and civil defense projects that are essential to the national defense.”

Trump has already deployed troops to the southern border, which could come in quite handy.

But does the situation at the border really require military intervention, and thus warrant a national emergency declaration allowing Trump to bypass Congress and build the wall? Short answer: no.

“There is absolutely and without question no crisis at our southern border,” Kristie De Peña, director of immigration and senior counsel at the Niskanen Center, told Reason last month. Politicians should “stop framing this as if it’s some sort of national security crisis,” she added.

Peña also points to the fact that net migration flows to the U.S. are going down. As Reason‘s Shikha Dalmia explained in January, net migration flows between the U.S. and Mexico have actually reversed in recent years, meaning more Mexicans are attempting to leave the U.S. than are attempting to enter.

“The facts could not possibly justify a state of emergency declaration,” said Bier, who noted that Border Patrol agents are actually apprehending less people now than they were in the early 2000s. “I cannot imagine what case the president could make that the challenges this administration faces are unique or unprecedented.”

But just because Trump shouldn’t declare a national emergency doesn’t mean he’s legally in the wrong. “It will probably hold up in court,” Peña said of Trump’s declaration. “There’s a strong case to be made that presidents need to have the authority to declare a national emergency. And that’s been upheld in court a number of times.”

Bier expressed similar sentiments, predicting that just as the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s travel ban on a handful of largely Muslim-majority countries, it will uphold his use of a national emergency declaration to secure border wall funds.

Bier put it bluntly: “My belief is that the president can get away with doing almost anything he wants in the name of national security.”

For most people—including the teenagers who lived through it, and then became national advocates for the anti-gun cause—the February 14, 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida was primarily about one thing: how easy access to firearms leaves schools fundamentally unsafe.

“Our school could be next,” a 13-year-old told me when I interviewed her at the 2018 March for Our Lives rally in Washington D.C., held a month and a half after the events in Parkland, Florida. “What if it is?”

This message was echoed by the well-spoken, telegenic, and unbelievably driven survivors of the Parkland shooting: David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez, and their friends.

Today marks one year since Nikolas Cruz, a disturbed teenager and former Stoneman Douglas High School student, walked into the school and murdered 17 of his ex-classmates. In the months since the attack, Parkland activists have made some headway on behalf of gun control: The Florida legislature passed a “red flag” law that empowers courts to take guns away from purportedly dangerous people, and raised to 21 the minimum age to purchase a gun. At the federal level, President Trump signed a bill that banned “bump stocks”—an after-market gun modification that allowed Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock to fire more rapidly.

But though the activists and most of the media have focused on guns and what to do about them, there’s another story to be told about Parkland—one that Broward County’s local paper, The Sun-Sentinel, has done a praiseworthy job of telling.

It’s the story of catastrophic failure at every level of law enforcement, beginning with a corrupt and incompetent sheriff’s office warned on multiple occasions about the specific threat posed by Cruz. The Broward County sheriff’s office received at least 18 tips between 2008 and 2017 concerning Cruz. A November 2017 caller described him as a “school shooter in the making.” Despite knowing that Cruz was in possession of a cache of weapons, the sheriff’s office passed the buck, expecting a different police authority to handle it.

On the day of the shooting, a Broward County school resource officer beclowned himself. School Resource Officer Scot Peterson, an employee of the sheriff’s office, refused to enter the school and confront Cruz, as did three Broward County Sheriff’s deputies who had arrived on scene. These were stunning indictments of Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, a man who responded to accusations of corruption by comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King. “Lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep,” he said, paraphrasing a Game of Thrones villain.

As questions about his leadership mounted, Israel remained defiantly proud of his behavior—boastful, even. When asked if his office should have handled things differently, he shrugged. “If its and buts were candy and nuts, O.J. Simpson would still be in the record books,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) fired Israel, a Democrat, shortly after taking office. But the failures do not end with the sheriff. The FBI itself was told about Cruz’s instability just days before the attack but “processes… were not followed,” according to an FBI spokesperson, and the tip was ignored.

Gun control and government incompetence are not unrelated subjects. Generally speaking, the logic of gun control rests on the idea that public safety can be trusted to the police. People don’t need guns because the government is protecting them.

That’s why law enforcement’s spectacular failure before, during, and after the Parkland shooting should be a more pressing topic of discussion. When we talk about various strategies for disarming the public—most of which are law-abiding citizens who do not use guns inappropriately but might want them for self-defense—we should not forget that these stragies place implicit trust in government agencies to protect us from all threats. Every day, as was the case with Parkland, many of these agencies prove themselves to be wildly incompetent for reasons ranging from arrogant leadership and individual cowardice, to toxic workplace culture and shoddy internal systems.

The mantra of post-Parkland activism is that every kid has the right to feel safe. The myriad failures of police bureaucracies at the local, state, and national level raise serious questions about whether the government can provide such guarantees.