Governor: Ban gun sales to underage, mentally ill
As teachers returned Friday to a high school where a shooter killed 17 people, Florida’s governor proposed banning the sale of firearms to anyone younger than 21.
Gov. Rick Scott announced the proposal as part of a plan to prevent gun violence.
He also called for a trained law enforcement officer for every 1,000 students at every school in Florida by the time the 2018 school year begins. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland had one armed resource officer, who never entered the school during the Feb. 14 shooting.
That failure plus reports of a delay in security camera footage scanned by responding police and several records about the 19-year-old suspect’s troubled background added to what the Florida House speaker called an “abject breakdown at all levels.”
The Valentine’s Day shooting has reignited national debate over gun laws and school safety, including proposals by President Donald Trump and others to designate more people — such as Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School assistant principal Denise Reed hugs a school employee as she returns to the school Friday.
trained teachers — to carry arms on school grounds. Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, have redoubled calls for bans or further restrictions on assault rifles.
Teachers have begun returning to the school to collect belongings from classrooms that have been off-limits since the slayings. After an orientation Sunday for teachers and students, classes re-
sume Wednesday.
“Our new normal has yet to be defined, but we want to get back to it,” said geography teacher Ernest Rospierski, whose classroom is on the third floor of the threestory building attacked Feb. 14. Officials have said that building will be torn down.
History teacher Ivy Schamis was teaching a Holocaust class when the shooter fired into her classroom. She’s planning to return Monday to collect items from the room, including a yellow banner that reads, “Never Again,” referring to the Holocaust. She wants it hanging in her next classroom. “That’s a Holocaust banner and now that’s what our slogan is becoming after this tragedy.”
The school resource officer took up a position viewing the western entrance of that building for more than four minutes after the shooting started on Feb. 14, but “he never went in,” Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said at a news conference. The shooting lasted about six minutes.
The officer, Scot Peterson, was suspended without pay and placed under investigation, then chose to resign, Israel said. When asked what Peterson should have done, Israel said the deputy should have “went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer.”
The sheriff said he was “devastated, sick to my stomach. There are no words. I mean these families lost their children. We lost coaches. I’ve been to the funerals ... I’ve been to the vigils. It’s just, ah, there are no words.”