In an emotional gathering just one week after a gunman mowed down 14 students and three teachers at Stoneman Douglas High School, thousands of community members and students were meeting with politicians and others for a town hall on how to make schools safer.
The town hall follows days of sit-ins, walkouts and demonstrations in solidarity with survivors of the massacre.
“Tonight people who have different points of view are going to talk about an issue that I think that we all believe and that this should never have happened and it can never happen again,” Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican, told the crowd.
The shooting reignited the passionate national discussion on gun laws and how to keep communities safe, catalyzing a protest movement led by the young students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed, angrily addressed Rubio, wanting the senator to agree that semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 type used in the shooting were the problem.
“Sen. Rubio, I want to like you. Here’s the problem. … Your comments this week and those of our President have been pathetically weak,” he said to lasting applause and cheers. “Look at me and tell me guns were the factor in the hunting of our kids in the school this week.”
Guttenberg called on the senator to do something about guns. Rubio replied, “I’m saying that the problems we are facing here today cannot be solved by gun laws alone.”
Sheriff: ‘You will get it done’
Before the event, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel fired up the crowd in the arena, saying, “My generation, we did not get it done. You will get it done.”
Robert Runcie, the school system superintendent, told the audience the students at Stoneman Douglas have started a movement.
“These are the young people that are going to change the world for the better. And let me tell you, our students are ready for this moment. They have been preparing for this moment,” he said.
Runcie added that while some have called for teachers to be armed, they should be armed with better salaries.
Some of the student participants came straight from the state Capitol in Tallahassee after lobbying state lawmakers for tougher restrictions on weapons like the one used to kill their friends and teachers.
Both Florida US senators, Bill Nelson and Rubio, and Rep. Ted Deutch are at the event. National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch is also taking part.
President Donald Trump and Gov. Rick Scott declined to attend or appear by video.
Scott said he would be working on legislative solutions in Tallahassee. On Tuesday, he held a roundtable discussion on school safety and gun policy with state leaders and was set to meet with students Wednesday.
Trump held a listening session at the White House with those affected by some of the nation’s highest-profile deadly school shootings, from Columbine High School to Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
The President pledged to go to work after the meeting ended. “We don’t want others to go through the kind of pain you have gone through. It wouldn’t be right,” he said.
Meadow Pollack’s father, Andrew Pollack, said he was speaking Wednesday because his daughter couldn’t.
“We as a country failed our children,” he said.
Calls for compromise
Some students said Wednesday in Tallahassee that they blamed lawmakers for putting the gun in the shooter’s hands through what they described as lax gun laws.
“We were there. We heard the gunshots, we had to walk over the dead bodies,” said 15-year-old Nadia Murillo. She implored lawmakers to heed their calls for tougher gun laws.
“Please listen to us. We just never want this to happen again,” she said. “You need to listen to us because we are the future and we know what we want.”
Senior Jack Haimowitz, 18, said change will only come when people from both sides of the gun debate come together with the goal of compromise.
“Instead of viewing the issue for solving this as a two-headed monster in which conservative ideas and liberal ideas are the only two individual answers, we have to meld them,” he said.
“We have to maybe take the bullets out of the gun as well as putting on the vest and we have to make it harder for the shooter to get the guns, from the liberal perspective, as well as potentially putting in metal detectors in the schools so we can honor the conservative perspective.”
