facts. we need to figure out what happened. where the holes and we need to make sure it doesn t happen again. but if law enforcement, you know, identified him four years ago as a threat, we need to figure out why he wasn t how he got we moved from that. pete: congressman, i want to make sure we make this point clear. you are saying there is an arrest report, engagement with the police four years ago where they had identified he had made a prediction he was going to do something like this in this very year? yes. so four years ago. him and a friend and i want to look into the details hey where is that guy at? what is he doing? there is a lot of copy cats out there. i want to make sure that the threat is completely over. so four years ago he came out and said, you know, he was saying that he was going to shoot up a school in his senior year in 2022. brian: did he write this down? did he post it? i don t know the exact details but the police arrested him and they actually submitt
reporter: the border patrol agents were in the building. they did line up. they were part of the 19 i talked about, the entry team, ultimately the entry team that went in. i can tell you they were told just like as any other officer was told, and others even command staff that came on board is that the incident commander at that time was believed that, in fact, it was a barricaded subject that we had time. there was no kids at risk. we talked about how having a chat a group chat and coming to people. why wasn t he on any radar? i wished he was. because then there s no question. and i ll say this right now. and every time we have one of these and there s copy cats, okay, and we need the public just like we did back in 2018 that was a public. they came forward. we got two people that are about to shoot up a school or planned to shoot a school.
fear in the community alive. people here say they re not going to go for it. they re going to stick together and keep fighting and keep trying to move past this and mourn together, wolf. yeah, the threat of copy cats is a serious problem. thank you very much. to our viewers, if you are a long time viewer of cnn, you probably know buffalo is my hometown. growing up there taught me a lot about the toughness and tenderness and simple strength of people i grew up with and am in touch with to this very day. people like the mayor. mayor, thanks for joining us. you have a lot going on. you heard reporting about the arrests. have there been additional copy cat threats in recent hours? we spoke about this yesterday. i know the community is worried about that. what can you share with us? there have been two arrests.
states will do the best they can, and i m going to be posing more gun laws on tuesday to preschedule a press conference before this convenient occurred, but we need other states to step up, and we need the federal government on our side. let s talk about holding these internet companies responsible. obviously, there s this law on the books to allow the internet to sort of escape liability on so many things that frankly, we as television broadcasters, cannot escape the same liability. do you think they should be held responsible for the spread of, for the easy spread of this propaganda? i hold them responsible for not monitoring and alerting law enforcement. that s the issue here. people are sharing these ideas, videos of other attacks and they re all copy cats. they want to be the next great white hope to inspire the next attack. we can t let that continue. that s not happening in the
williams. ted, a few things struck me. i want your thoughts. first, the mayor was speaking, he talked about the social media posts, the threats, they re investigating them. erie county d.a. john flynn just alluded to them of the copycats in those sort of cases. how do we guard how does society guard against the potential for copy cats in the near term? charles, we have to be vigilant when it comes to copycats. over the weekend here in laguna woods, california, we had a shotting at a church. we don t know if there s a nexus, we don t knee if this individual at the laguna woods, california church was a copycat. but there s a lot of mentally ill people out there. a lot of people out there unfortunately that will try to take advantage of a situation