https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/02/25/florida-shooting-yet-another-government-failure-keep-us-safe-glenn-reynolds-column/371372002/
The chief problem facing America today is the decline of its institutions, coupled with the denial of that decline by the people in charge of its institutions.
The latest example of this problem is the Parkland school shooting in Florida. From the FBI, to local law enforcement, to the schools, everyone failed. There was failure early, there was failure in the middle, and there was failure late. And no one has taken responsibility.
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But the bigger question is this: We have more government, at all levels, than we’ve ever had before. Yet failures like this keep happening. The FBI, after all, missed the Tsarnaevs (who committed the Boston Marathon bombing) despite being warned by the Russian government. It missed the 9/11 attacks even though it was investigating Zacarias Moussaoui — agents investigating Moussaoui hit so many roadblocks that they joked that Osama bin Laden must have had a mole in the Bureau HQ. And, of course, the San Bernardino shooters and Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen escaped the net as well.
People are being asked to trust the government to keep them safe, when the government is patently unable to do so. And then, when the government fails, it engages in blame-shifting deflection. Why should people listen? Increasingly, they won’t.
