“TRAINED BY THE NRA.”

That’s the bombastic and misleading headline that ran in The New York Daily News’ Saturday print edition about Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old man who confessed to murdering 17 high school students and faculty in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14.

The rampage, in which Cruz used an AR-15, sparked a typical debate over gun rights, with Democrats and liberals calling for increased gun control. Part of the strategy has been to link Cruz to the National Rifle Association, the largest gun lobby in the U.S.

The Daily News cited an Associated Press report in its misleading article, but without providing additional context that undercuts the idea that Cruz was “trained” by the NRA.

The Florida shooting suspect was on an NRA-funded school rifle team https://t.co/6pZqrtZMRD

An early look at Saturday's front… pic.twitter.com/kqi7fd6G9J

— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) February 17, 2018

Instead, Cruz was a member of the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program at Stoneman Douglas High School, where Wednesday’s shooting took place. JROTC programs operate in more than 1,700 high schools across the U.S. and are sponsored by the U.S. Army rather than the NRA.

The Daily News report, and others published by left-leaning news outlets, also avoids mentioning the FBI’s admission on Friday that the bureau failed to act on a tip last month from someone who said that Cruz had expressed a “desire to kill people.”

Vox, a left-leaning website, published an article with the headline: “Nikolas Cruz was reportedly on an NRA-funded rifle team in high school.”

And Think Progress, a website affiliated with the leftist Center for American Progress, published a piece headlined, “The NRA donated $10,000 to help train the Parkland shooting suspect to use a rifle.”

As part of Stoneman Douglas’ JROTC program, Cruz competed in air rifle marksmanship competitions with other schools.

“He was a very good shot,” Aaron Diener, a teammate of Cruz’s in the marksmanship program, told The Associated Press.

According to the AP, the NRA Foundation gave $2.2 million in cash and non-cash grants to schools in 2016. Most of the grants — $1.8 million worth — were in-kind donations of “equipment for high school air rifle teams to gun safety programs for younger children.”

Stoneman Douglas received a $10,827 non-cash grant as part of the program, according to the AP.

There is no evidence that the NRA provided marksmanship training to Cruz or any other JROTC members.

The Daily News and other breathless reports about Cruz’s alleged NRA links left out other critical context about the JROTC funding.

Some of the grants provided to Stoneman Douglas’ program were used to purchase bulletproof Kevlar curtains that were used to protect students during Cruz’s rampage.

As the AP reported, “Colton Haab, a second lieutenant and platoon leader in the school’s JROTC, told The Associated Press that he helped usher about 90 students into the room where cadets train with pellet rifles. Haab moved the Kevlar sheets used as a backdrop for target practice away from the wall and told everyone to hide behind them. As it was, the shooter never approached the ROTC rooms.”

“So I think the NRA actually bonused us in a way,” Haab said.

A version of this article appeared on The Daily Caller News Foundation website.

After the news that eleven Dallas officers were shot and five killed, many have pointed fingers at the rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement and at politicians for refusing to draw the proper conclusions. The concern that the police, while protecting the rights of BLM rally-goers, were picked off by a gunman, who clearly stated he wanted to kill white cops, has regular Americans partially paralyzed about what can be done about the crisis.

It’s clear the radicals who seek social change do not care at all about justice, since all of the killed officers were individuals who had nothing to do with any incidents portrayed by BLM as racially motivated killings. But because of the mental sickness that focuses on uniform and skin color, every white cop is in an extremely dangerous position.

So it would be helpful if people started taking rhetoric about murdering people with guns pretty seriously. Law-abiding gun owners don’t go out and buy a gun to murder people, nor do they share plans to do so on social media in order to create “social change.”

Case in point: James Pearce. The FBI is now investigating Professor Pearce’s Facebook post from the middle of June that called for killing everyone at the NRA headquarters. Pearce is an adjunct professor of Southern State Community College in Ohio, and was referred to the FBI and Loretta Lynch told the college head to take no action until the federal government concluded their investigation.

Reports say that a former student alerted local law enforcement of this post and the matter made it to the FBI and Homeland Security.

So let’s look at Pearce’s comments and see if what he is now saying, that it was all just a funny sarcastic joke, and that people need to loosen up and stop being so divided, is true. First of all, the day of the posting, June 13th, the news cycle was saturated with the news of the Orlando terrorist massacre, and the day before, Obama issued a statement about the massacre and included this dog whistle in his remarks.

“The shooter was apparently armed with a handgun and a powerful assault rifle,” Obama said. “This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.”

So a comment like this from a professor right after Obama makes the attack about gun control doesn’t sound like a joke. Pearce also seems to be hiding behind “art” as he insists that he was just making “poetry.” He often writes poetry on his Facebook account, and earlier this week drafted a poem complaining that as an American, he should be able to say what he wishes and that he is actually a brave man.

So let’s talk about what would happen to our brave professor if he approached the NRA headquarters with a bunch of armed “anti-gun types” in Fairfax, Virginia.

He’d get shot, and maybe learn a lesson.

The NRA headquarters is staffed by very well trained gun experts, and Virginia is a concealed carry state. Anti-gun types armed with guns they are extremely afraid of using would be pretty easy sitting ducks for those defending themselves. If the Orlando night club held some people with the expert training the folks at the NRA headquarters have, any gunman who showed up to the nightclub and opened fire, would expect to die that night.

And that’s what the anti-gun people don’t get. If law abiding people are allowed to carry guns, non-law abiding people like Mr. Pearce here, would not be able to carry out their terrorist plans in order to create social change.

Even though the professor laughs it off now asserting that only those with low IQ’s could possibly have thought it serious, his post is no small thing because of the times we live in and the dangerous leadership this nation has. Intentionally taking the focus off of lawbreakers and instead hyping hatred has not and will not stop bad people from killing. In fact, it’s creating a mentality that having a gun is a license to kill, rather than a weapon for self-defense against the crazies like the Dallas shooter. Yet the professor’s commentary holds distinctly murderous rhetoric, and what is most despicable, is that his purpose is to make guns illegal through using them illegally, no matter what the human cost.

It may very well happen that Mr. Pearce suffers no consequences for his incitement, but law-abiding gun owners in the area where he lives ought to encourage the college to remove him from their community classrooms. Someone so flippant about killing people for political gain ought to be watched very carefully. (For more from the author of “College Professor Calls for Mass Murder at NRA Headquarters” please click HERE)

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