17 More Dead Kids

[Montmorency]

So, the shooter is a wannabe brownshirt.

White Supremacists Claim Nikolas Cruz Trained With Them; Students Say He Wore Trump Hat in School

Nikolas Cruz, the man accused of killing 17 people in a Florida high school, was a member of a “white separatist paramilitary proto-fascist organization,” the group told The Daily Beast.

Cruz, 19, is accused of opening fire inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Prior to the shooting, he trained with the Republic of Florida, the group’s captain Jordan Jereb said (as first reported by the Anti-Defamation League). The RoF seeks to create a “white ethnostate” in Florida, according to its website, a view that Cruz supposedly shared.

“I know he knew full well he was joining a white separatist paramilitary proto-fascist organization,” Jereb said.

Last year, an alleged school shooter in New Mexico also expressed alt-right ideology online, as The Daily Beast previously reported.

Cruz “seemed like just a normal, disenfranchised, young white man,” Jereb said.

While no motive has been described by police, Jereb speculated that Cruz may have allegedly committed the massacre out of hatred for Jews or women.

“There’s a very real sense of feminism being a cancer. That could’ve played into what he did, but we have female members of RoF,” Jereb said, adding that “we’re not a big fan of Jews. I think there were a lot of Jews at the school that might have been messing with him.”

Jereb said Cruz belonged to a RoF “cell” from Clearwater and drove up with members to Tallahassee to do paramilitary training. RoF was recently operating in Tallahassee and attempting to court new members, according to a local news report from last year. The group posts videos of training montages on the internet with members in fatigues brandishing weapons.

“I’m not trying to glorify it, but he was pretty efficient in what he did,” Jereb said. “He probably used that training to do what he did yesterday. Nobody I know told him to do that, he just freaked out.”

Cruz received at least one of his guns through the white supremacist group, according to Jereb.

“I think somebody bought him a Mosin–Nagant, but that’s bolt action. He had a semi-automatic in the school,” Jereb said.

Cruz bought the AR-15 rifle authorities say he used at the school in February 2017, the ATF said in an affidavit filed Thursday.

Listen, some argue there is moral justification in "punching Nazis" because they represent a "clear and present danger" to life and limb; punching them is an act of self-defense. I don't buy this line of thinking because it extends the logic of pre-emptive attack too far. One is not, for example, justified in tracking down and shooting someone because you saw them hanging around your house, maybe scoping it out for a home invasion. Neither declaration of intent nor logically-surmised intent go far enough to trigger a right to self-defense, at least as far as interpersonal violence goes.

These militias are a clear and present danger.

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