After the tragic school shooting in Parkland, there was a lot of tweets on the subject on twitter. Of the ones I saw, most were either talking about how to stop school shootings, or amplifying the voices of those who were direcetly affected by this school shooting. And then there were the Russian bots, pushing any gun control talking points.
And then there were the rare gems like the following
I call this a gem, because it is such a blatant lie, that it is amazing that he thought he could get away with it.
In many European countries, including my native Denmark, there is no such thing as an armed security guard. Either you are police or military, or you are unarmed. In other European countries, there are armed guards in high risk situations, e.g. transporting money, but rarely at any other time. Again, the general rule is, that if you are armed, you are police or military.
In no European country I know off, would anyone think of placing armed guards at a school, except in very extreme situations. For example, police guards Jewish schools when there is a very high Islamic terrorist threat level.
So, the idea that anyone would think it commonplace to place armed guards at a school, regardless of the size, clearly shows that the person has no understanding on the situation in Europe – it is, in other words, a fundamentally US question.
I am not the only who has made fun of this tweet, J.K Rowling has done so as well, and David Burke has taken it down (but not acknowledged that it was a lie).
He actually went one better than not acknowledging it was a lie. He first doubled down and claimed that European friend was his wife.
Most Fla public schools typically have one or more county deputies assigned to them as “School Resource Officers”, but apparently the SRO at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas HS was elsewhere when the shooter arrived.
The school also had multiple other security measures, but – as a recent student there – the gunman knew them well and figured out ways to sabotage and bypass them.