The Daily Signal - 'Exposing Everything That Went Wrong': A Parkland Researcher Speaks Out

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

Today is the second anniversary of the Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed. Max Eden, an education researcher, who co-authored "Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created The Parkland Shooter and Endanger America's Students.” joins today's podcast. We also cover these stories: The Democrat-led House passed a bill 232-183 Thursday that would eliminate the 1982 deadline to ratify the the Equal Rights Amendment.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticizes President Trump over his protests about the original 7-9 year jail recommendation for Roger Stone, a Trump ally. According to a Gallup poll taken in January, 61% of Americans say they are better off than they were three years ago  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, February 14th. I'm Kate Trinco. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Today marks the second anniversary of the Parkland shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that took the lives of 17 people. Max Eden, an education researcher who co-authored a book called Why Meadow Died, The People and Policies that created the Parkland shooter and Endanger America's students. joins me on today's podcast. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, and please encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. The Democrat-led House passed a bill 232 to 183 Thursday that would eliminate the 1982

deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, which would prohibit withholding equality of rights on account of sex. Five Republicans joined the Democrats in voting to remove the 1982 deadline and advance the legislation. Tom Jipping, however, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who formerly worked as Chief Counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote in a recent commentary for the Heritage Foundation that, as the Congressional Research Service has concluded, the 1972 ERA formally died when its ratification deadline passed on June 30, 1982. The original deadline had mandated that 38 states passed the ERA by 1982, but the 38th state, Virginia, only passed it this year in January. Jimbing also pointed out that Congress has no role in determining when a proposed amendment has been ratified, and the states cannot ratify an amendment after its deadline has passed.

The Republican-led Senate is not expected to vote to extend the 1982 deadline. In her weekly press conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized President Trump over his protests about the original seven to nine year jail recommendation for Roger Stone, a Trump ally who had been found guilty of witness tampering and lying to Congress via C-SPAN. We also saw the president this week demonstrate once again that he does have, has no respect for the rule of law, his assault on the rule of law by engaging in political interference in the sentencing of his associate, Roger Stone, indicates. an obstruction of investigation into Trump-Russia ties and witness tempering.

That's what Trump, that's what Stone was indicted for. This is an abuse of power that the president is again trying to manipulate federal law enforcement to serve his political interest. Pelosi also criticized the Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr. The Justice Department had modified the sentencing recommendation. AG Barr has deeply damaged the rule of law. by withdrawing the DOJ sentencing recommendation, the act of interference, and Trump's retribution against lead attorney in the Stone case.

Imagine that four of the prosecutors separated themselves from the case when the president did that. Just days after firing Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin for speaking truth to power, this all must be investigated. The American people must have confidence in our nation's system of impartial. justice. And with the draw of the four career prosecutors, the case, what an act of courage on their part. It must be commended, but the actions of the Justice Department. Justice Department should have this R of something so apolitical, so above the political fray, that people have confidence in the rule of law in our country. The Attorney General has stooped to such levels. He's lied to Congress, for which you will be in contempt.

He has engaged in these activities. What a sad disappointment to our country. President Donald Trump had harsh words for his former chief of staff, John Kelly, after Kelly defended Alexander Vindman, formerly the Director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council. He was moved to the Department of Defense after Trump was acquitted of two impeachment charges. Vindman had flagged Trump's July 25th phone call with Ukrainian President. Voldemore Zelensky and was a top witness in Trump's impeachment hearings where he talked about his decision to report the July 25th call to his superiors at the NSC. Kelly had said a Vindman. He did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave.

Kelly told a crowd at your university on Wednesday night, according to the Atlantic. He went and told his boss what he just heard. In response, Trump tweeted, when I terminated John Kelly, which I couldn't do fast enough, He knew full well he was way over his head. Being chief of staff just wasn't for him. He came in with a bang, went out with a whimper, but like so many exes, he misses the action and just can't keep his mouth shut, which he actually has a military and legal obligation to do. His incredible wife, Karen, who I have a lot of respect for, once pulled me aside and said strongly that, John respects you greatly. When we are no longer here, he will only speak well of you. Wrong.

States government is hitting Chinese telecommunications company Huawei with new charges. The new charges are that Huawei and its American subsidiaries are stealing intellectual property, according to the Wall Street Journal. Huawei, which can build 5G networks at a lower cost than competitors, has attracted controversy for the potential access to data it is providing the Chinese government with. According to a Gallup poll taken in January, 61% of Americans say they are better off than they were three years ago. However, there is a big divide between Democrats and Republicans. A mere 29% of Democrats say they're better off, while almost all Republicans, 89% think they are. Meanwhile, 6 out of 10 independents think they're better off.

There have now been 15 instances of coronavirus cases in the United States, reports USA Today. The newspaper said the person diagnosed with coronavirus was in Texas. and had recently traveled to Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the disease. The person is being cared for and is quarantined. Meanwhile, China announced new numbers on Thursday. CNBC reports that China now says the number of people infected by coronavirus is just under 60,000, and 1367 people have died so far. Next up, we'll have Rachel's interview with Max Eden about Parkland and how that tragedy could have potentially been prevented.

Are you looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues? Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. In the agenda, you will learn what issues Heritage Scholars on Capitol Hill are working on, what position conservatives are taking, and links to our in-depth research. The agenda also provides information on important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online, as well as media interviews from our experts. Sign up for the agenda on heritage.org today. We are joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Max Eden.

He's an education researcher. Max, thank you so much for being with us today. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. February 14th is the second anniversary of the Parkland shooting in Parkland, Florida, that took the lives of 17 people. Max, you co-authored a book about the shooting. The book is called Why Meadow Died, the people and policies that created the Parkland shooter and endangered America students.

Max, why did you write this book? Immediately after the shooting, kind of two groups, of students came forward. And one group got a lot more attention than the other. The group of students got attention, said, we blame the Second Amendment, we blame the NRA, we blamed the gun for what happened. The other group of students said, we knew it was him before it was over. The student threatened to kill us. He threatened to rape us. He threatened to kill our families. He brought knives to school. He brought bulls to school. We saw something. We said something. They did nothing. They didn't protect us from him. And kind of from my perch as a researcher in D.C. when I saw this, I thought,

oh, okay, well, this isn't a school district that became nationally famous for fighting the so-called school-to-prison pipeline by lowering arrests, lowering suspensions, lowering expulsions. I wonder if these policies, this kind of leniency pressure, played a role in his journey through the school system. So I wrote an article kind of posing this question about 10 days after the shooting. And unfortunately, this question kind of very quickly became an answer in politics, as happens, right? I mean, one side was for gun control and the other side was very quick to take the question. It was an answer. It wasn't the gun's fault.

It was these policies. It was Obama's policies. And it became a political football very quickly and nobody answered the question. It was labeled as fake news by the superintendent and most of the media skated on by. But a couple months after the tragedy, I wanted to see whether. or not, the answer was yes to the questions that I had posed. And I found a way to get down there to talk to some students, talk to some teachers. And while I was down there, Andrew Pollock, whose daughter Meadow was murdered on the third floor, heard that there was somebody from D.C.

who was looking for answers. And he got my number somehow. He texted me, said, you know, come over to my house. I explained to him what I was doing and kind of gave him some questions to ask. And he texted me a couple days later and said, thanks so much for your help, Max. You're going to be a tremendous asset helping me find justice for my daughter's murder. And, you know, I came down thinking, oh, I'll just, you know, come in for a few days, talk to a couple of people, maybe write an article. When I got that text, I knew I had to come down again. And after my second trip, I had talked to enough people that I got through him to realize, oh, wow, this is much bigger than an article and also bigger than, you know,

the discipline issue that I thought it had to do with. That was part of it, but it was part of a broader story that needed to be a book for parents to understand it. So, Max, in the book, you detail how the shooter Nicholas Cruz slipped through the cracks when there was just really an exorbitant amount of red flags and warning signs. For example, I know you said in the book that the police were called to Cruz's homes, I think about 45 times. What were some of the other warning signs that just went unnoticed? Well, they were noticed and ignored. I mean, in middle school, the student, when you read his teacher's records, he kind of was fixated with guns daily. He would always talk about guns, always talk about shooting.

Whenever the topic came up, he would kind of light up or he would bring up the topic himself. His behavior in middle school was so egregiously bad that he was suspended every other day for about 10 months in middle school. And middle school disciplined and policy wasn't the problem. The problem was there was a student whose behavior was so extreme that he required a security escort to walk in the hallways, to go to the bathroom, to do anything outside of the classroom. in some cases teachers wouldn't let him into their classroom without a security escort. When the security escort wasn't enough, the school got the mom to come and accompany the security escort accompanying him. And they kept him at the school for 10 months before they finally got the paperwork in order to send him to a specialized school where he very desperately needed to be. At that specialized school, his behavior was so disturbing that they wrote a letter to his private psychiatrist after his first semester, basically saying,

This student told us that he dreams of killing and being covered in blood. He is extreme mood liability. We try to take away all sharp objects in the home, but there's a hatchet missing and there are still holes appearing in the walls. And we're very, very worried about this student. But after a couple months of good behavior at that school, they thought, oh, well, he's ready to attend a normal school again. And he seems to be very interested in the military, very interested in guns. All the teachers say that he's interested in the military in guns. So let's try him at a traditional high school for two courses for one semester.

see how that goes, and we'll do, you know, maybe one academic course and JROTC, where he got to practice marksmanship. You know, I think we can have a gun control debate. We should have a gun control debate. But when you have a school district that's taking a kid who has literally said, I dream of killing and being covered in blood, who talks about guns all the time, and they put him into a normal school, and they give him a gun and teach him out of shoot, maybe it's, you know, something more in the school that we should be looking at. So in your book, you obtained a lot of information that wasn't public, at least at the time.

How did you go about compiling all that information, gaining access to it? And given that you were so successful in that, like, what kind of impetus does that have on us to see what you uncover and enact on it? It was not an easy process. There are federal education records privacy laws that protect kids from adults who want to snoop it and find out about them and for good reason. But unfortunately, those laws still apply after the student has committed a mass murder in school. So at first I had to just ask a whole bunch of questions to teachers and students and try to put inferences together. Like, oh, well, you said this and he said that. And how do these pieces fit together?

And how can I just take all of the stories that I'm finding and weave it into a story that makes sense, that fits, that coheres? after a certain point, though, I realized after one trip when I was talking with people who Andy geared me that this is a book, I realized the deeper I got into it. We never used the word victim to refer to the shooter, but we realized just how profoundly the system failed him. And, you know, as Andy has said, like, he blames the shooter for half of it. He blames the system for the other half. I said to him at a certain point, you know, we're basically going to be acting as your daughter's murderer's defense attorney in the court of public opinion because our argument is, It's their fault, too. And that's the exact same argument that his lawyer is going to be making.

And we can't get his official records, which would break the case wide open. So it might be worth talking to them about it and seeing if they provided to us. And he called me a few days later and said, yeah, so I just talked to the defense attorney and they're going to give us the records. I told them that at the trial, I would take the stand at bash the school district, bash the terrorist office, bash the mental health provider. So we'll get the records. and that's how we got a lot of the stuff that had never previously been reported, right?

Because Andy, his sense of justice, his mission has been to expose everything that went wrong, everyone who failed, hold as many people as possible accountable, and try to have everybody learn every lesson that there is to be learned. So, you know, what will happen to the trial, we'll see what he chooses to do and how it all plays out. but he took that step because he is so committed to having the full truth be exposed. And that's what we try to take and weave into the story and put forward a product that parents and schools across the country can read and can say as it's an anecdotal thing to say, but I can't tell you how many people have DMed him, have DMed me,

have emailed us being like, oh, wow, I knew what was happening at my kid's school, but I didn't know what it all fit together and how big of a problem it was. or, oh, I read this book and then I started asking some questions, and it turns out the exact same thing is happening here. So the mission of the book was, as Andy said, to expose. And the hope is that by exposing everything that went wrong with the shooter, every way that the school district failed him, that we can open parents' eyes a little bit to ways that school districts are failing their kids in ways that will, you know, God willing, never nearly

approached the level of what happened there. But, you know, times when there are other red flags being swept under the rug, other violence that goes unaddressed, bullying that is just ignored by administrators who have this pressure to bite the so-called school to prison pipeline, lowering suspensions, lowering expulsions, lowering arrests. And the easiest way to do that is to just not do anything to sweep under the rug to say, hey, look, our numbers are looking better. That means our school is getting safer. And it's up to parents at the end of the day to speak up against that because teachers are frequently too intimidated to say, hey, our principal's leading our school in a very bad direction and our superintendent's policies are totally out of whack. Teachers aren't going to say that. If schools are going to start putting kind of the safety of classrooms and the interests of students first, again, before these kind of fake numbers that has to come from parents. So in talking about the Parkland shooting, I can't help but think back to the 2017-Las Vegas shooting, which killed 15.

people and wounded some, I think, 413 others. More than two years later, the motives of the shooter remain a mystery for the Vegas shooting. But in the case of Parkland, we kind of have the exact opposite where there's a wealth of information on the alleged shooter and his background, but all this information doesn't really fit the gun control narrative. So it hasn't been covered, at least to the extent that people want to see it covered. What's been your experience with the media covering your own work. The Vegas shooting laid into a much better case for it's the AR-15 at the so-called assault weapon because you couldn't have pulled that off with a handgun. You couldn't have pulled that off with a shotgun. It was the gun that enabled the Vegas shooting and it was a gun that was

legally acquired by a guy who otherwise looked clean. Like that's a very alarming thing that fits that narrative very well. In this case, as Andy has said, he could have killed 17 people with a musket that day. It did not matter what gun he had. He had 11 minutes alone in a school building with 800 kids. It did not matter that it was an AR-15. And he bought that gun legally, despite having exhibited every red flag that in a functioning system, would have prevented him from buying the gun. He committed felony-level crimes that could have either got him directly prohibited or when the FBI in Broward Sheriff's Office received tips, could have showed up, could have made them think, oh, wow, this kid who threatened to kill somebody at school, committed to hate crime assault,

trespassed on campus, or getting a call that he might shoot up the school. Let's look into that. But they looked him up and they saw nothing. And I think to answer your question directly about media reception, it's been something that has been very upsetting to me more so to Andy. He at one point said in an interview, you know, the only parents who will know about what really happened in Parkland and we'll know what they need to know to keep their kids safe for the parents who watch Fox News. It was no reception whatsoever in so-called mainstream media,

no reception whatsoever in education media. You got all the attention in the world that we could have asked for within conservative media. It's just very, very sad that it had to play out that way. Anything that isn't pro-gun control is in the way that the media and political environment shakes out has to be anti-gun control. And not that my opinion and gun control matters,

but I actually came out of it probably more pro-gun control than I went in because I saw just how hard it can be to stop crazy people from getting guns. And there are probably, there are pro-gun control changes

that I would happily endorse. But it's just a tragedy that because our book didn't say, you have to blame the gun, and this is the primary issue, it was cast as being like a right-wing pro-gun apology book

when it was just what actually happened to the school and what parents needed to know to keep their own kids safe. Yeah, wow, that's really unfortunate. In your book, and you sort of alluded to this at the beginning of our discussion, you talked about how the school created a culture of leniency. And part of this was through the school instituting a program called the Promise Program. What was that program? So the Promise Program was one part of a broader suite of kind of leniency reforms. And this part focused on lowering arrests, right? and accomplish that goal by basically giving students four free misdemeanors a year before they were required to talk to law enforcement.

And it reset every single year. And this program to let kids commit up to four crimes before they have to talk to a school resource officer, and at that point, arrest is probably still discouraged. That succeeded in getting arrests down by 70 percent, and it was perceived to be a great success by the Broward County School District. And it became kind of a model for the nation. It was credited with inspiring this 2014 dear colleague letter by the Obama administration's Department of Education, which was less focused on decriminalization and more focused on kind of lowering suspensions and detentions and expulsions.

But these same kind of policy pressures on principals and assistant principals, you know, lower the numbers. We're watching the numbers. We expect these numbers to get lower. That has spread to schools across the country, probably at least half of schools, about 54% of schools. in America of administrators who say that they're implementing restorative justice, which is kind of what these new leniency policies go by. And we have situations where, you know, a teacher will send a student to the office and the

student will come back five minutes later smiling with a lollipop and the teacher will be the one who will get flack from the administrator for sending a kid there because that means that you're not doing your job as a teacher. Now, the promise program was the highest profile aspect of it because it was just the most egregiously, oh, wow, you're going to lower arrests by not arresting kids. But it was one part for the whole of these policies that prioritize almost transparently fake statistical progress in the name of allegedly fighting institutional racism, which is, of course, an allegation predicated on the idea that teachers are racist or ablest or can't be trusted

and need to be micromanaged second caste, which is fundamentally wrong and leads to all sorts of problems in and out of the classroom far short of what happened in Parkland. So you mentioned that this Promise program resulted in nearly a 70% drop in school-based arrests. And you also note in the book it allowed this 90% non-recidivism rate. How did this enable the shooter in the end? There was some controversy argument about this point. The Promise program itself only applied to the shooter once directly when he committed an act of vandalism in middle school. that he was supposed to have been sent to the Promise program,

but they didn't keep track of him effectively because the program itself was kind of just kind of fraudulent all the way down. It was chaotic. It was very poorly run, a very toxic environment at the school. So he seems to have been referred to the Promise program once in middle school. Didn't go. They couldn't figure out why he didn't go. They couldn't figure out whether or not he really didn't go.

They didn't send him to the court system as they were supposed to, given that he didn't go. The State Commission, looking into this, kind of came to the conclusion that, well, that one incident itself, wouldn't have made a decisive difference in the course of events. So that's not really the issue. And I don't dissent from the opinion that that one act of vandalism wouldn't have made a difference. But when he got to high school, he was committing crimes that did not qualify for the

Promise program that were felonies, not misdemeanors, things that did not technically fall under the umbrella of the Promise program. And not only was he not referred to the Promise Program, nothing happened to him when he threatened to kill other students. When he, you know, called a student the N-word and attacked him. It was pretty clearly a hate crime assault. When he was no longer a student, when he trespassed on campus, having been labeled already by the security staff of like, oh, if there's any kid who's going to shoot up the school, it's going to be, it's going to be that kid. So the premise program directly only touched him once in a way that wasn't decisive, but it created this broader culture of leniency that allowed him to, commit crimes such that, and we only figured out this last part after the book was released, so it's not in it. They eventually not only prohibited him from wearing a backpack to school after a series of kind of, after an assault and after, I believe, they found bullet casings in his backpack. They also frisked him every day to make sure that he wasn't bringing a deadly weapon to school.

And so you have a situation where you're saying you're not allowed to bring a backpack, we're going to frisk you every day because, as we admit later in our testimony to the police, we're worried that he might bring a weapon and kill people, but arrest, not even on the table. Wow. That is just kind of, it's definitely very alarming. So looking at all of this, were parents aware of all these changes that were made when, for example, the Promise program was implemented? Did they know the extent of everything that this program meant? No. What Andy has said repeatedly is that he will never forgive himself for not knowing what was actually going on at his daughter's school. Having no idea that there was somebody there who was so dangerous that they had to frisk him every single day for knowing that kids could get away with that many crimes in a single year, Scott Free.

He had absolutely no idea. And his mission with everything that he's done since, kind of our mission with the book, as he says, is that he wants to be. the last father who can honestly say, I had no idea what was going out at my daughter's school. I honestly did not know. The purpose of the project was, as you asked earlier, it said, not allow any other parent to make the excuse. I mean, even when something happens like this again and it resembles Parkland, and sometimes it won't. Sometimes there's the shooting in California. Sometimes they are out of the blue and there are no warning signs. But sometimes there are. And if schools will continue to sweep the warning signs on another rug unless

parents take it to them. The hope is that by opening their eyes to the example of what happened in Parkland, we can make it such that parents know, this is, I know what's happening in my kids school. I understand the risks. I understand the dynamics and I have some idea what to do about it if I find that what I'm reading about here fits what's going on in my kid's school too. So in the book you mentioned that campus security guard, Andrew Medina, spotted Cruz the day of the shooting. And he later told the police, I saw him with a bag with like a rifle bag, be lining to building 12. And that this officer said he looked like that the shooter looked like he was on a mission and walking with purpose. And then this officer recognized Cruz and said he, you know, he thought, man, that's the crazy boy.

Why wasn't school security called? what was the breakdown at this point? Just looking back with all of the research you've done, the security guard is asking this question of himself and looking back and telling listeners, like why wasn't security called? At that point, his job was to call a code red. You see a suspicious intruder,

you fear that something might happen, you call a code red that's broadcast over the intercom and everybody shelters in place. And if a code red had been called, then I think everybody on the third, floor could have lived because everybody who died in the third floor died because the fire alarm went off. When the fire alarm went off, one or two of the teachers knew the sound of gunshots when they heard them before. The other teachers didn't put it together. They put their kids out

into the hallway. Everybody who died in the third floor died in the hallway. So if a code red had been called before the fire alarm went off, Meadow would be alive, five other students would be, or four other students, one other teacher would be alive. But he did not call a coderet himself. And And as he said shortly after, he sees him go in, he starts to hear these loud percussion noises like pow, pow, pow. Like it's not a firecracker noise, he says. But he doesn't call a code red because these are his words, not mine. If I call it and everybody comes in and, you know, it's not really, I don't want to be the guy who made that call. So this is the reductio ad absurdum slash like ad infinitum of the whole story where you have a security guard.

His one job is to call a code red when you see something like this happen and when it almost couldn't possibly be more clear what it was. He still doesn't because he doesn't want to get in trouble in case kids aren't actually getting murdered. And that's kind of part and parcel of what happened with the shooter his whole way through. There was an obviously responsible decision that could have been made by an adult around him after he displayed disturbing behavior and the obviously morally wrong decision was made by the adult and authority many times over because that's what they were incentivized to do because it was a path of least resistance for them because that's what their bosses wanted. On the one hand, the Parkland School shooting has been called a total system failure, but in other hand, you can't really call what happened a failure because everybody who made a wrong decision made it for a reason.

They made it pursuant to a policy. And these policies are not confined to Broward County, not confined to South Florida. They are found in many, many schools across the country and lead to thousands of tragedies every day that come nowhere near approaching the scope and the horror of what happened in Parkland, but will also never be reported and never acted on and won't be changed unless parents take a really hard look at what happened there. We've talked a lot about how the school failed parents and students that day. And in all of your research for this book, how did law enforcement fail students? So there was the before and the during, right? Before, as you said, the consistent behavior that he displayed wasn't just displayed in school. The police were called to his house 45 times before the shooting.

They received tips. The FBI received tips. Brog Sheriff's Office received tips. This is a guy who might shoot at the school. Never arrested. Every tip is dropped. A lot of the attention of what happened that day has gone to Scott Peterson, who is the school resource officer on duty, who gets the memo of it happened, approaches the building, but then takes a step back, takes cover behind the building nearby, and stays there for what ends up being over 50 minutes. And not only doesn't approach the building, but actually gets on the radio and basically tells the other police officers to make a perimeter, to not approach the 1,200 building, where.

he seems to have a very good reason to know exactly what's happening. And attention focused mostly on him, but before the shooting was over, there were eight Broward Sheriff's officers on scene, hearing gunshots, and none of them approach the building. You can see body cam footage of one of them who kind of gets out of the car. You can hear the shots in the background, goes back to the car, takes his gun off, puts on his bulletproof vest, puts the gun back on, and then takes position behind the car. You can listen to statements from other police officers.

They take positions behind trees. And eventually the Coral Springs police officers, officers who were given good training, not under the umbrella of the Barrow Sheriff's Office, they start coming in, according to one of them, as they're approaching a Brow Sheriff's officer who's standing behind a tree says, don't go in there, he's got a gun. at which point in time the Coral Springs police officer who has a son inside the building basically says F you and runs in and the other Coral Springs officers run in as well. But unfortunately, you know, the good cops running into the building isn't the end of the story.

They get very delayed in their job of going through the building to try to clear it because the school district did not give the sheriff's office access to their access to their video equipment, right? You don't want the cops to see what's going on in schools because you're trying to lower arrests, probably. So as they're going through the building, there are school administrators who are in the camera room saying to another school administrator what they're seeing on the camera without having made it clear or it's somehow getting lost in translation that the school administrators had rewound the tape several times and were. describing delayed footage to the police.

So the police were being told, you know, the shooter's on the second floor, when they were on the second floor, when they could see that there was no shooter. And ultimately this confusion made it such that it took medical personnel 43 minutes to reach Meadow on the third floor. And she was shot nine times probably wouldn't have helped, but other students who it might have, another student who might have died of it had been a couple minutes longer, who could have been spared a lot. if it had been a half hour sooner. It's not just that parents should take a close look at what happened for all the warning signs of what went out of the school. I think the police offices, police departments need to understand the second by second blow by blow of what happened that day because it's hard to imagine a broader failure that could have

occurred on their part. Looking at all of what we've discussed today and even what Andy said about him wanting to be the last dad who really can say, you know, I didn't know what was going on in my daughter's school. And knowing everything you know now, what are some lessons for schools as well as parents going forward? And how can we avoid future things like this happening? There's a hardware on a software side to it, right? I mean, and a lot of the attention went on the hardware side of it in the immediate aftermath, right? I mean, if you don't want weapons getting into buildings, then a metal detector and an armed guard and a single point of entry will do more than almost anything.

And if worse comes to worst and something like that happens, you want the police to be able to see what's happening instantly. So these are things that parents can and, you know, in my opinion, should advocate for in their own communities and things that can be kind of controversial. aren't going to fit everywhere. But then there's the software side of it too, right? There's the question of are the dynamics that we describe in the book that engendered and enabled the Parkland Shooter are those dynamics playing out in your kids' school too? And it's ultimately on parents to find out because teachers aren't going to stand up and point a finger at their bosses. They're not going to go talk to the press immediately and say how bad everything around them is. Parents need to talk to their students, talk to their teachers, and just ask a couple of basic questions.

Like, do you feel supported when it comes to discipline? Do you feel like your administrators, like the principals, sweeping problems under the rug? Is there a student in my son or daughter's classroom who everybody knows shouldn't be there? And if the answer to any of those questions are yes, then it's on the parents to take another step, to try to talk to the school board members, talk to the superintendent, and affect policy change. I mean, these policies come down partly from pressure from the Obama administration department of education, partly from kind of outside social justice activist groups sometimes and partly from state bureaucrats.

And it's framed as like a social justice thing, right? Like lower suspensions because we're trying to reduce bias and everything will get better. And if you're a school board member or a superintendent, it's very easy to want to believe these things, to believe these things. but if there are parents who are coming to you consistently and saying, hey, this might have sounded nice, but my kid says that he was assaulted and that your principal did nothing, or my daughter says that she was harassed and told the assistant principal and they didn't do anything, if the people who run schools at a local level hear that from parents,

they're in a position to actually address it. I think part of the tragedy of Parkland is that, as I said, is the most avoidable mass murder in American history. Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong, all for a reason, all at the local level. And it immediately became subsumed into a big national political fight that distracted from what really went wrong. And if such an avoidable tragedy hitting such a, you know, frankly high socioeconomic class community can't make parents take a hard look at what's going on to their kids' schools, then it's it's caused for a lot of concern. Well, Max, we appreciate you being with us here on the Daily Signal podcast today,

talking about everything you've learned, about your book. Thank you for taking time to be with us. Thanks for having me. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify. And please leave us a review or rating on Apple Podcasts to give us any feedback.

We hope you're having a great Valentine's Day. And Rob and Virginia will see you Tuesday. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, the Leah Rampersad, and Mark Geine. For more information, visitdailySignal.com.