Another school shooting in the United States

Another school shooting in the United States leaves 17 people dead.

Welcome to Plain English, the podcast that goes at the right speed for English language learners. I’m Jeff and today is Monday, February 26, 2018. On today’s program, we’ll talk about the terrible shooting at a Florida high school that left 17 people dead and 12 people injured—and the warning that the FBI got about the shooter in January. In the second half of the show, I’ll talk about how to use the English phrase, “pour out.”

If you haven’t been to the web site, please do check it out. PlainEnglish.com has transcripts of all the episodes as soon as they’re released, so you can read along as you listen to the program. Today is episode 24, so the transcript is available at PlainEnglish.com/24. And just a quick reminder to click “subscribe” if you’re in Apple Podcasts, or “follow” if you’re listening on Spotify. By doing that, you’ll make sure the new episodes show up on your phone every Monday and Thursday.

Let’s get started on today’s topic.

Another school shooting

It’s becoming an almost regular occurrence in the United States. Another school suffered a mass shooting on February 14th, Valentine’s Day—this time in the town of Parkland, Florida, a wealthy suburb near Ft. Lauderdale. An ex-student, Nikolas Cruz, 17 years old, ordered an Uber ride from his house to his former school, went into a building mostly used for freshman classes, loaded up his rifle, pulled the fire alarm, and started shooting people as they came pouring out of their classrooms and into the hallways.

By the time he was done, 17 people were dead, including 14 students and three staff members. Twelve were injured. As is so often the case in these shootings, some of the adult victims were killed as they were trying to protect students in their classrooms. After he finished, the shooter then blended in with the crowd and escaped, went to a Subway, then McDonald’s, and was captured by police as he was walking along a side road.

It was the deadliest school shooting since 2012, when a gunman killed 20 students and six adults in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

The United States has a problem with mass shootings. There have been school shootings over the years, but there was one in 1999 at a place called Columbine High School in Colorado that seemed to start a disturbing trend. Since then, there have been mass shootings at elementary schools, high schools, and universities.

There have been other high profile mass shootings at other locations, too. A gunman killed 14 people at an office holiday party in 2015; another killed 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando; and just last year, 58 people were killed at a music festival in Las Vegas after a gunman fired into a crowd from his hotel window. These types of high profile mass shootings are happening with greater and greater frequency in the last ten years.

The strange thing about this trend is that overall crime in the United States has been falling dramatically. Crime here rose from the 1960s through about the early 1990s. But since 1993, violent crime and property crime have both fallen between 50% and 75%. So, if you are living in the United States, life here is a lot safer than it has been at any time in the last fifty years, or so. But one big and unfortunate exception to this trend is these mass shootings, where one person kills a lot of others all at once.

Victims and family members in Florida are beginning to put pressure on politicians in Florida and Washington to respond to the shooting with stricter laws on gun ownership. This is a fairly divisive issue in American politics. A lot of people consider the right to own firearms, for either hunting or their own personal protection, to be an important part of their identity as Americans, and the right to own firearms is in our constitution. So many other people, though, see shootings like this and wonder why an 18-year-old should be able to get his hands on such a deadly weapon.

One really frustrating aspect about this latest shooting in Florida is that the FBI, the national government’s investigative agency, was actually warned about Nikolas Cruz in advance and didn’t investigate the tip. The news came out last week that someone had called the FBI in January with a warning about this teenager, saying he was behaving strangely, had posted alarming things on social media, had a desire to kill people, and had access to guns. The person who called specifically said that this Nikolas Cruz was capable of something like a school shooting—and the FBI didn’t even investigate the call.

Before we get to the word for this week, I wanted to remind you all about the emails that I send out with each episode. If you’re enjoying the program, you might like to get the e-mails I send out each Monday and Thursday. The emails have a summary of each show, but more than that, I include links to at least one English-language article that I use to prepare the program. So if you’re particularly interested in one topic and you want to read an article in English about the topic, just open the latest email from the show and you’ll see a link to the article right in the email. I also pick additional words or phrases to explain in more detail. So, if you want to get these emails, it’s really easy, just go to PlainEnglish.com/mail, enter your details, and you’ll get an email from me every Monday and Thursday with these additional resources.