Despite Broward Sheriff Scott Israel’s all-out attack on the NRA the night before Peterson’s inaction became public, this debacle illustrates why so many Americans want to own guns, and aren’t comfortable relying solely on “trained professional law enforcement officers” like Scot Peterson. As Jim Geraghty writes in National Review, “the Parkland shooting is proving to be a colossal cascading failure of both local and federal law enforcement. We know the world has plenty of good cops and good FBI agents. But as American citizens, we never know when we’re going to roll snake-eyes and find that the threat in our midst was missed by cops and that they will not come quickly to our rescue. This is why we need the option to protect ourselves — a right which is in the Constitution. What is the point of changing our laws if the police cannot rise to the challenge of enforcing them?”

In Sheriff Israel’s case — as with Harvey Weinstein’s promise to “give the NRA my full attention” after he was exposed as a sexual predator — blaming the NRA is an attempt at deflection, and a way of rallying Democrats to his side. It didn’t work for Weinstein and it’s not likely to work for Israel, either.