Even when it aired in the 1960s, “The Andy Griffith Show” was an anachronism. Today, it’s hardly watchable. Griffith is still likeable as Andy Taylor, sheriff of the mythical North Carolina town of Mayberry. But Barney Fife, his deputy (and cousin), is merely irritating.

A preening blowhard, Fife is so comically incompetent that today we’d see him as a cautionary tale against nepotism, maybe even white privilege. One recurring sight gag was Barney nearly shooting himself in the foot with his own gun. That’s less funny today, as our nation addresses the crisis of police shootings of civilians. Another reason Barney Fife is so annoying is that we have so many of his kind in modern U.S. law enforcement. The latest example comes to you from Broward County, Florida.

Thirteen months before the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School, the Broward Sheriff’s Office had a grisly dress rehearsal. It did not go well. At 12:53 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2017, an Army veteran landed at Fort Lauderdale’s airport and retrieved a firearms case he’d checked with Delta. He loaded his 9mm semi-automatic pistol and began shooting people in the baggage claim area. Firing 14 rounds, he killed five people and wounded six. After emptying his magazine, he surrendered by lying down on the terminal floor. It all ended 85 seconds after it began.

The drama in the airport was only beginning, however, as 2,000 law enforcement officers descended on the airport, creating havoc. Abandoned police cars hindered evacuation efforts and blocked a 44-foot sheriff’s office van that was supposed to be a command center. Ninety minutes after the shooter surrendered, officers started a panic by sounding the alarm of a second shooter. This was untrue, and led to general panic. Airport passengers were trampled in the melee. “Nobody knew anything,” Gary Bryant, a Canadian tourist stranded for 10 hours, told the Florida Sun-Sentinel. “Nobody had any idea what they were doing. Somebody’s got to be responsible for this.”

The responsible jurisdiction was Broward County. Its sheriff, Scott Israel, boasted to the newspaper, “Everything was done excellently.” A 99-page report by the county reached a different conclusion. “The confusion, chaos and magnitude of the event tested all involved,” it said. “Mistakes were made, lessons were learned and the self-effacement of key role players carries on …”

Those lessons were not learned by Israel’s department, however. Its deputies’ response to the Valentine’s Day high school shooting was also characterized by poor communication and lack of leadership. One armed school resource officer and perhaps several other Broward deputies cowered outside the school while the shooter, who’d been removed from Stoneman Douglas last year, gunned down 14 students and three educators.

By the time the cops, armed like soldiers, further traumatized students by ordering them out of the school at gunpoint, the killer was gone. But law enforcement’s inadequate response to these two shootings was only half of the problem. The other was this: Why were either of these people allowed to have firearms at all?

Two months before his rampage, the airport shooter took his gun and infant son to an FBI office in Anchorage, Alaska, where he told field agents the CIA was exerting mind control over him, forcing him to watch ISIS videos. Agitated, he said he was preparing to fight for ISIS. The FBI called local cops who were familiar with him because he’d been arrested on domestic violence complaints. They referred him for mental evaluation. Afterwards, they gave him his gun back. Not that it would have mattered: He could have purchased a new one because no court adjudicated him to be mentally ill. The FBI didn’t put him on a terrorist watch list, meaning he could fly anywhere he wanted. He bought a one-way ticket to Fort Lauderdale, checked in four hours early and brought no luggage other than his weapon.

As for the Parkland school shooter, his repeated interactions with authorities had been the one constant in his life. He bit other children, cursed teachers, started fights, and tormented animals. Broward cops regularly visited his house since the kid was in elementary school — 39 times, according to Sheriff Israel’s admission. Of the 23 separate 911 calls about him, one came from the woman who took him in. “All he wants is his gun” she said, adding that he’d held guns to the heads of his brother and his mother.

A startling number of callers warned that he was going to attack a school. Two similar warnings went to the FBI, which did nothing. So what happened?

The FBI just dropped the ball, as it has admitted. Mistakes happen, but this would be easier to accept if the bureau hadn’t ignored the Fort Lauderdale airport shooter’s ravings and dismissed reports that Orlando’s Pulse nightclub mass killer was a jihadist. The upshot is that in all three of Florida’s recent mass shootings, the killer had come to the FBI’s attention before his rampage.

For sheer incompetence, it’s hard to outdo the Florida Department of Children and Families, which opened a file on the Parkland school shooter in late 2016 after the depressed young man began cutting himself and posting disturbing images on social media. The agency’s conclusion? That he was “not a risk to harm himself or others.”

The Broward Sheriff’s Office resorted to its own bureaucratic gobbledygook, telling reporters that none of his behavior “appeared arrestable under Florida law.” This is false. It’s not legal in Florida to hold a gun to your mother’s head, or menace the family that took you in, or threaten to shoot up a school. Authorities could also have pursued an involuntary commitment to a mental facility under Florida’s “Baker Act,” which might have given him the psychological treatment he needed and seems to crave. It also might have made him ineligible to legally purchase firearms.

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Hold off on Ruth Bader Ginsburg replacement: Tom Campbell Scott Israel knew all this on Feb. 14, which is why he immediately allied himself with the gun control narrative embraced by stricken students and the national media. The National Rifle Association is an easy target. If I were in Congress, I’d support what Democrats call “common-sense” gun control. Banning high-capacity magazines, restricting firearm purchases to Americans over 21, eliminating the gun show loophole, sure, why not? Banning “assault-style” weapons is trickier. Such a law was on the books from 1994 to 2004 and though research shows its effects were negligible, the right to bear arms survived.

But what’s the point of such laws if we entrust enforcement of the ones we already have to dunces? In 2016, Israel, a former football coach and SWAT team leader, was accused of using taxpayer funds to build a de facto political machine inside the sheriff’s office devoted to his re-election. “Lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep,” was his rejoinder. Israel compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi, and, later to Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and former Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula. Questioning the hiring of his cronies was akin to criticizing “a team that won the Super Bowl,” he said. What did he do that was comparable? A decline in the crime rate, he replied, and his department’s practices of issuing thousands of civil citations to juveniles instead of arresting them. Juveniles like the Parkland school shooter, apparently.

We don’t live in the insular world of “Andy of Mayberry” anymore and most of us wouldn’t want to. But when did we put Barney Fife in charge of keeping us safe?

Carl M. Cannon is executive editor and Washington Bureau chief of RealClearPolitics.