Over the past several days, in contrast with the other networks, Fox News Channel has been giving attention to one of the Parkland parents who is pro-gun and blames President Barack Obama and other Democrats for school policies making it easier for Nikolas Cruz to murder his daughter, Meadow, and 16 other students at Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.
Andrew Pollack has appeared on a number of Fox News shows to promote his new book, Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America's Students, which gives the results of his own investigative efforts into the school's history of covering up Cruz's severe behavioral problems that should have already landed him with a criminal record, making it harder for him to purchase his murder weapon.
He also credited the Donald Trump administration with ending an Obama-era guideline that pressured schools to go soft on problem students, as Pollack makes the point that, in order for background checks to have any effect, a criminal or mental health record has to actually be placed into the system instead of being covered up by school administrators.
In an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight last week, Pollack recalled:
Students were allowed four misdemeanors per school year without being introduced to the judicial system, and then, at the end of the year, if you can believe this, that was in ninth grade, you had a kid next to your kid in the classroom, commits four misdemeanors, and then, next year, in tenth grade, he resets at zero again and is allowed another four misdemeanors per school year.
He soon added:
And the worst thing about it is they don't make the parents aware of it. I found out recently that they actually had to frisk this kid before he went to school every morning. He wasn't allowed to school with a backpack. That's how dangerous he was, and they put him in the school with my daughter.
On Friday's Your World show, Pollack and host Neil Cavuto discussed some of the disturbing behaviors Cruz engaged in during middle school, with Cavuto reading from notes that were collected by one of Cruz's teachers that Pollack managed to get ahold of.
The school safety activist also took aim at California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom for signing a law that would block the suspension of problem children from school, thus threatening to create similar problems in his state.
On Saturday's Watters' World, Pollack implicated President Obama as he recalled an effort to deter schools from charging underage students with crimes: "And those policies of leniency started with the Obama administration where they just didn't hold kids accountable to end the school-to-prison pipeline. And what it does to the school system is creates a culture of leniency."
On Monday morning, as Brian Kilmeade interviewed Pollack on Fox and Friends, the school safety activist praised President Trump for ending the Obama policy: "The President did more about school shootings than any other administration, you know. He formed the Federal School Commission to look into school safety where he ended the leniency policy started by the Obama administration."
After praising his guest for all the effort he put into the book, Kilmeade pointed out that the Dayton mass shooter similarly had a history when he was underage that should have been included in a background check.
Pollack declared that his book is one he painstakingly put together to encourage and help parents to pay attention to their own school's local policies on dealing with problem students and demanding that they deal with any safety risks wisely.
