FSU Shooting: What We Know Right Now

I hate writing about active shooter situations like I did on Thursday. They bring up painful memories for me. However, until we stop them from happening, I’m probably going to keep doing them for a while.

And we’ll probably keep talking about them for a little while afterward, if for no other reason than to make sure we’ve covered all of the ground.

What we know right now is a lot more than what we knew on Thursday, but that wouldn’t be overly difficult.

The suspect accused of gunning down two people and injuring five others at Florida State University on Thursday is the son of a local sheriff’s deputy, authorities say, and spent time training with law enforcement and serving on a sheriff’s advisory council in the years before his alleged attack.

When he was taken into custody, [Alleged shooter’s name redacted], 20, was carrying a handgun that used to be the service weapon of sheriff’s deputy Jessica Ikner, according to officials and records.

A review of court records show [he] had a tumultuous childhood, with another woman — identified in the documents as his biological mother — accused of removing him from the US in violation of a custody agreement when he was 10 years old.

Sheriff Walter McNeil told reporters that the suspect was “steeped in the Leon County Sheriff’s Office family and engaged in a number of training programs that we have, so it’s not a surprise to us that he had access to weapons.”

Jessica Ikner has served at the sheriff’s department for more than 18 years, McNeil said, adding that “her service to this community has been exceptional.” She did not respond to a request for comment.

[The alleged shooter] was a member of the sheriff’s Youth Advisory Council, which is designed to “provide an open line of communication between the youth of Leon County and local law enforcement,” according to a news release from 2021. McNeil described him as a “longstanding member” of the council.

Honestly, the idea of him being “steeped in the Leon County Sheriff’s Office family” is pretty common for the child of a police officer. I was in my early years as well, having half grown up in the Albany (Georgia) Police Department. There’s nothing like a field trip to the police station your first week at a new school, and having most of the officers greet you by name, let me tell ya.

But I can also tell you that there’s nothing about that which would prevent such a thing from happening, necessarily. There’s typically nothing about that would cause it, either.

Now, let’s review a couple of things, and I’m going to start with this bit from an interview with an FSU student who immediately jumped to blaming folks.

On the scene at the FSU shooting this Florida State University student calls out Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis:

“I’m gonna call on Governor Ron DeSantis [and] Donald Trump. This stuff keeps going on. We’re praying every day. Praying is good. Spirituality is good. But prayers… pic.twitter.com/YoX7Gs1O4G

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) April 17, 2025

Post continues:

…don’t do much. It’s good for the soul, but is this still happening? I think it is. So we need to make some gun reforms.” 

Listen to the people!

This is a recurring sentiment among many people, as is typical after such a shooting, and was a similar sentiment to Giffords:

What Florida doesn’t have: Universal background checks, assault weapon restrictions, large-capacity magazine bans.

What Florida does have: The latest school shooting in America.

— GIFFORDS (@GIFFORDS_org) April 17, 2025

However, while Florida may not have a ton of gun control laws, it does have age restrictions on firearm sales. Federal law prohibits adults under 21 from buying handguns, but state law also prohibits them from buying long guns.

And yet, the alleged shooter got his hands on them just the same.

How?

Well, he did what a lot of people who can’t legally buy guns do. He stole it. It was a firearm his mother owned, her one-time duty weapon that she kept after the department upgraded.

He couldn’t legally buy one at all, so he took one, and a universal background check wouldn’t have stopped anything

He didn’t use a so-called assault weapon and couldn’t have bought one anyway. As for magazine limits, from what we know about the shooting, it doesn’t sound like he fired more than 10 rounds, so that’s also irrelevant, and even if he did, it wouldn’t have mattered because he could have reloaded easily enough since there was no armed resistance facing him.

Plus, this was a gun-free zone in a state where there is no campus carry at colleges.

Unfortunately, this is just the start of the debate, I’m sure.

However, it looks pretty clear that the issue wasn’t insufficient gun control. It’s too much.