TRAINED BY THE NRA
School shooter excelled in marksmanship program sponsored by gun group
NIKOLAS CRUZ, the deranged shooter who gunned down 17 students and staffers at his former Florida high school, honed his deadly marksmanship through a grant from the National Rifle Association.
In 2016, the gun lobby group’s fund-raising and charitable arm, the National Rifle Association Foundation, paid $10,827 to the gunman’s after school air-rifle team – part of a multimillion-dollar program to encourage youth shooting clubs.
Cruz, who offered to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty, was wearing a maroon shirt emblazoned with the logo of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, which hosted the gun club, when he was arrested Wednesday shortly after the massacre.
The 19-year-old, whose teammates at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School called him “Wolf,” excelled in the small varsity shooting club.
“He was a very good shot,” teammate Aaron Diener, 20, said. “He had an AR-15 he talked about and pistols he had shot . . . . He would tell us, ‘Oh, it was so much fun to shoot that’ It seemed almost therapeutic to him, the way he spoke about it.”
The NRA did not respond to request for comment.
It was that same AR-15, which the gun group calls “America’s most popular rifle,” that Cruz used to slaughter students and staff at a Parkland high school on Wednesday.
He picked up his murder weapon just days after getting expelled from school on Feb. 8, 2017 for disciplinary reasons.
Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie said Thursday the school received “no warning, no hints, no tips” about the impending violence, but classmates said that Cruz had an obsession with weapons and even joked about him shooting up the school.
Cruz had an extensive disciplinary record for profanity and fighting in school, and CNN reported on Friday that the local sheriff’s office was called to his family’s home 39 times since 2010.
There were other red flags. In
September 2016, Cruz cut his arms on the social media app Snapchat and said he wanted to buy a gun.
The post prompted the local sheriff’s department and the Department of Children and Family Services to investigate. Officials concluded the gunman was getting proper support from his school and a local mental health clinic. His mother, Lynda Cruz, told investigators that her son, who was diagnosed with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, was being treated for depression and the cutting was brought on by a breakup with a cheating girlfriend.
Three days after his expulsion he walked into Sunrise Tactical Supply in nearby Coral Springs and legally purchased the weapon that he would bring back to the school about a year later.
Lawyers for Michael and Lisa Morrison, the gun store owners, said that the sale complied with state and federal law and Cruz did not raise any red flags.
The Morrisons were “shocked and mortified anything like this could happen,” their lawyer Douglas Rudman said.
The couple would like to see stronger regulations on flagging mental illness during background checks, he said. “The Morrisons sold a lawful weapon to someone who was mentally ill,” Rudman said. “Someone who fell through the cracks.” The gun shop owners also believe the age for purchasing assault rifles should be raised to 21, he said.
Cruz also posted anti-Semitic and racist messages to an Instagram chat group that he belonged to, CNN reported.
He wrote about hating “Jews, ni--ers, immigrants,” the news channel reported and even told the other members of the chat, “I think I am going to kill people.”
He later claimed to be joking, CNN reported.
After leaving his high school last year, Cruz enrolled in the Cross Creek School at a campus specifically for students with emotional problems.
James Snead, who took Cruz in when the teen’s mother died last November, said that he had asked him to keep the weapon locked in a cabinet, but on the day of the shooting he refused to go to school.
“He said, ‘It’s Valentine’s Day and I don’t go to school on Valentine’s Day.”
Trump stopped by the devastated community on his way to MaraLago Friday.
Trump visited victims at Broward Health North Hospital and later spoke to cops at the county sheriff’s office.
Devastated parents and students encouraged the superintendent to teardown the high school where the massacre occurred, the Florida Sun Sentinel reported.
“Parents and students have resoundingly told me they can’t go back into that building regardless of what we do,” Runcie told the paper.