Kyle Kashuv is a Parkland student who, just like Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg, was at Douglas High School the day Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 of his classmates. Unlike Gonzalez and Hogg and many other Douglas survivors, Kashuv has been a lone, persistent student voice in favor of gun rights and the Second Amendment.
Despite his support for the right to keep and bear arms, Kashuv didn’t own a firearm and had never fired one. That changed over the weekend when he went to a range with his father. He tweeted stills and video of the range session.
It was great learning about our inalienable right of #2A and how to properly use a gun. This was my first time ever touching a gun and it made me appreciate the #Constitution even more. My instructor was very informative; I learnt a lot. #2A is important and we need 2 preserve 2A pic.twitter.com/4rcOZbpl88
— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) April 21, 2018
As night follows day, he was attacked on line for daring to fire an AR in a safe and controlled manner. Kashuv no doubt expected the reaction and shrugged it off.
But today, as the Daily Wire reports, when he returned to class, he was informed by Douglas High’s principal that his range trip tweets had traumatized some of his fellow students. And the reaction didn’t end there.
Kashuv was later pulled out of class and interrogated by two school resource officers, Broward County deputies.
Near the end of third period, my teacher got a call from the office saying I need to go down and see a Mr. Greenleaf. I didn’t know Mr. Greenleaf, but it turned out that he was an armed school resource officer. I went down and found him, and he escorted me to his office. Then a second security officer walked in and sat behind me. Both began questioning me intensely. First, they began berating my tweet, although neither of them had read it; then they began aggressively asking questions about who I went to the range with, whose gun we used, about my father, etc. They were incredibly condescending and rude.
Then a third officer from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office walked in, and began asking me the same questions again. At that point, I asked whether I could record the interview. They said no. I asked if I had done anything wrong. Again, they answered no. I asked why I was there. One said, “Don’t get snappy with me, do you not remember what happened here a few months ago?”
They continued to question me aggressively, though they could cite nothing I had done wrong. They kept calling me “the pro-Second Amendment kid.” I was shocked and honestly, scared. It definitely felt like they were attempting to intimidate me.
I was treated like a criminal for no reason other than having gone to the gun range and posted on social media about it.
Kashuv has criticized the Broward County Sheriff and his band of incompetent men on Face the Nation for their lack of action regarding Cruz leading up to his attack and the school resource officer’s cowardly behavior during the shooting. Observers of the Broward deputies’ interrogation of Kashuv today might conclude that sweating him was simply retaliation for his nationally broadcast statements, but we couldn’t possibly comment.
If any of Sheriff Scott Israel’s disinterested deputies had spent half as much time investigating Nikolas Cruz’s extra-curricular activities — a student with a long and demonstrated history of violence and criminal behavior on the Douglas High campus — who knows how many lives might have been saved?