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At times their voices broke with emotion or rage, but each person who addressed the Rally to Support Firearm Safety Legislation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Saturday was united in their message: The Parkland school shooting should never have happened. "If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a 'terrible tragedy,' I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the NRA," said Marjory Stoneman Douglas High sophomore Emma Gonzales. In the crowd, students held up photos of their classmates who were killed, and at times responded to speeches with chants of "vote them out." |
Days after 17 people were killed in a horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, hundreds gathered in nearby Fort Lauderdale for a gun control rally.
At Saturday’s rally — which coincides with President Donald Trump’svisit to the area — Marjory Stoneman Douglas student Emma Gonzalez delivered a fiery speech in which she said that the students were going to help change the laws to stop further mass shootings. And she specifically called out the president and the NRA.
Noting that many are now pointing out accused shooter Nikolas Cruz was ostracized by classmates and the other mental health red flags raised by his prior behavior and actions, Gonzalez exclaimed that even with those warning signs Cruz couldn’t have done as much damage without a gun.
“We know that they’re claiming that there are mental health issues and I am not a psychologist but we need to pay attention to the fact that this isn’t just a mental health issue,” she declared. “He wouldn’t have harmed that many students with a knife! How about we stop blaming the victims for something that was the shooter’s fault?!”
Saying the fault lies with those who helped get the gun in Cruz’s hands and didn’t take it away when he showed “homicidal tendencies,” she then hit the president for his close relationship with the NRA.
“If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association,” Gonzalez pointedly stated.
After highlighting how much Trump has received in donations from the NRA, she shouted “shame on you” to every politician that has accepted contributions from the gun lobby.
She went on to “call BS” on those who say gun control won’t work to stop shootings:
“The people in the government who are voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and our parents to call bs. Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers nowadays saying all we are is self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submissions when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation. We are prepared to call bs. Politicians, politicians who sit in their gilded houses and Senate seated funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call bs. They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call bs. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call bs. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call bs. No, they say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call bs. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about. That we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call bs. If you preregistered to vote, contact your local Congresspeople.”
Currently, the president is staying at Mar-a-Lago, which is only a short drive away from where the rally was held Saturday.
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