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  • 2018-03-28 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Emma González 'Admit' to Bullying the Parkland School Shooter? (en)
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  • In March 2018, conspiracy theorists made another attempt to use disinformation in order to discredit gun safety activist Emma González by accusing her of bullying her former high school classmate accused of killing fourteen students and three staff members at a month earlier. In this case, conservative blogs such as LouderWithCrowder.com and right-leaning magazines like The American Spectator circulated a brief clip taken from her remarks at a rally on 17 February 2018 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, calling it proof that González admitted to mistreating the suspect, Nikolas Cruz: But placed in context, González's remarks reveal that students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had alerted officials over concerns about Cruz's potentially dangerous behavior and had not ostracized merely out of spite: The Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed shortly after the 14 February 2018 shooting that they had received reports concerning the suspect but failed to act upon them. Prior to being expelled from the school the month of the attack, Cruz had also reportedly threatened online to commit a school shooting and was suspended for attacking a student who was dating his former girlfriend. He also reportedly posted racist and homophobic thoughts in a private chat group and also wrote, I think I am going to kill people, later claiming that he did so in jest. Another Marjory Stoneman Douglas High student, Isabelle Robinson, called the idea that she and her classmates could have prevented the shooting by being nicer to their attacker a slap to the face to both the survivors and the victims in a 27 March 2018 op-ed in the New York Times. Robinson wrote that she first encountered Cruz when he hit her in the back with an apple and displayed no remorse. A year later, she recalled, she was assigned to tutor him as part of the school's peer counseling report: Suggesting that Cruz's issues could have been remedied by being loved more by his fellow students, Robinson wrote, represented both a fundamental misunderstanding of mental health and a dangerous idea. It is not the obligation of children to befriend classmates who have demonstrated aggressive, unpredictable or violent tendencies, she said. It is the responsibility of the school administration and guidance department to seek out those students and get them the help that they need, even if it is extremely specialized attention that cannot be provided at the same institution. (en)
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