Not just the Florida shooter. The FBI has failed several times to prevent mass shootings.
FBI Admits "Protocols Were Not Followed" Before Florida Massacre
Dylann Roof, who in 2015 shot nine people at a black church in Charleston, was allowed to purchase his weapon in part because of
errors by FBI agents during the background check process, the agency said.
Pulse shooter Omar Mateen, who pledged allegiance to ISIS before killing 49 people at the Orlando nightclub, similarly seemed to have fallen through the cracks. The FBI
investigated Mateen twice before the slaughter but ruled him not a threat both times.
The FBI knew that Fort Hood shooter Army Maj. Nidal Hasan had been in contact with al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, but
declined to investigate him. A congressional probe found that the FBI had failed to alert the Army about Hasan, and that the shooting
could and should have been prevented. Hasan killed 13 people and wounded dozens of others in the 2009 shooting.
The FBI similarly missed opportunities to stop Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the brothers behind the 2013 Boston Bombing, a
government review found. Russia warned the United States that Tsarnaev had associations with Islamic terrorists, leading an FBI-led task force to question the future terrorist. The agent who interviewed Tsarnaev closed the probe “having found no link or ‘nexus’ to terrorism.”
The task force was alerted a year later that Tsarnaev was leaving the country for Dagestan but declined to interview him or stop him from leaving the country. FBI agents later said the failure to interview Tsarnaev was a “huge” error,
according to Boston Magazine.
Another school shooter who was on the FBI’s radar killed two students at a New Mexico high school just two months ago. Although the killing doesn’t meet the government’s definition of a mass shooting, the shooter was known to the FBI. The agency investigated the shooter, 21-year-old William Atchison, in 2016 after he commented online about committing a mass shooting.