JUST IN: The NRA Funded Rifle Training For The Parkland Florida Shooter (DETAILS)

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This past week, the nation was rocked by a school shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, where an expelled student returned to their former school and opened fire, killing 17 people and wounding many more.

The debate has unsurprisingly been reignited in the aftermath of this shooting over what to do about the proliferation of firearms in the United States. In a troubling aspect to the situation, even though the shooter had a documented troubled past, he was still able to legally buy the firepower necessary to carry out this week’s atrocity.

As the nation continues to peer into the path that allowed the shooter to carry on with his rampage, a sobering fact has emerged via the Associated Press. The shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was reportedly a part of an air rifle marksmanship program supported by the NRA Foundation at his former school, meaning that part of the experience with firearms that allowed him to be able to carry out the attack was provided for by an entity associated with the infamous group.

He was a part of the marksmanship team in 2016, a year when the NRA’s charitable organization provided it with $10,827 in non-cash assistance. “Non-cash assistance” includes such items as equipment for the team — equipment that, ironically, was used by some students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School while Cruz was on his rampage Wednesday.

One student — Colton Haab — brought more than 60 others to take shelter behind the Kevlar sheets used by the school’s shooting program, which is associated with its JROTC program.

In 2016, the most recent year for which NRA Foundation tax filings are publicly available, the entity gave a total of nearly $2.2 million to schools in 30 states. $400,000 of that was in the form of actual cash, while nearly $1.8 million was in the form of donations like the aforementioned equipment for high school marksmanship teams.

Entities like the schools to receive grants from the NRA Foundation aren’t the only destination for money associated with the group.

The gun advocacy group has donated millions of dollars to an array of Republican political leaders in recent years. As of last October, following the horrifying mass shooting at a Las Vegas country music festival, The New York Times published a list of the recipients of the largest amounts of NRA funding over the course of their careers, with the numbers including donations to the candidate and spending on their behalf.

Among the top recipients is Florida’s GOP U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, who’s benefited from over $3 million from the group.

Neither Sen. Rubio nor any other Republican leader, including the president, have taken any major step to enact common sense gun control in the aftermath of the Florida shooting.

The president has stuck to the line that the issue is all about mental health, posting a message to Twitter to that effect recently that essentially blamed Parkland community members for not reporting Cruz’s past erratic behavior to authorities.

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He stuck to that line in eventual on camera remarks delivered about the shooting before actually visiting Parkland on Friday.

Featured Image via Charles Trainor Jr. – Pool/Getty Images