School massacre’s anniversary renews safety debate
US president says he is ‘recommitted to ensuring the safety of all Americans’
A year after the shooting massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, students across the United States honored the 17 victims with a moment of silence and somber vigils.
The Valentine’s Day shooting by a former student at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High school took the lives of 14 students and three school staff members.
Students at 1,000 schools in Florida remembered the victims during a moment of silence at 10:17 am — the exact time the shooter unloaded his assault weapon. Stoneman Douglas also held a quiet interfaith service.
To help the healing, the city of Parkland organized an evening vigil at a park near the school, the same site where students had called for gun control shortly after the shooting.
David Hogg, an 18-year-old student who became an outspoken voice for gun control and co-founded the March for Our Lives movement, said the pain stretches on.
“We can’t move on from this, when it’s something that never should have happened. You can’t move on from your sister constantly crying, every day, because she doesn’t have her four best friends anymore,” he said.
In the nation’s capital, young people calling for stricter gun control placed 671 white T-shirts (with the names of teenage gun violence victims in 2018) on a fence outside the Bethesda Chevy Chase High School as a “Memorial to Our Lives”.
US President Donald Trump on Wednesday called the day a “somber anniversary” and said he was “recommitted to ensuring the safety of all Americans”.
It was the activism by teenagers at Stoneman Douglas that helped shift public opinion on gun control, according to the Washington-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.
“Prior to Parkland, we had seen changes that had happened, small incremental statewide changes … but Parkland and the way that the movement grew from the students out of it, really changed the culture and discussion,” Andrew Patrick, the media director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told China Daily. “You saw businesses dropping their affiliation with the NRA [National Rifle Association]. You saw lawmakers refuse to pledge to take NRA money when they had previously.”
Former president Barack Obama praised the students, saying on social media that they “marched, organized and pushed for the way things should be — helping pass meaningful new gun violence laws”.
On Wednesday, the US House Judiciary Committee signed off on a bill that would require universal background checks for gun purchases. With Democrats now controlling the House, the panel voted along party lines to approve the bill, 23-15. But it has little chance of approval in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Congressman Peter King, a Republican from New York, was one of two sponsors of the legislation.
King told China Daily in a statement: “There is no single law that can put an end to mass shootings or gun violence, but there are certainly proactive steps we can take to keep guns out of the hands of felons, domestic abusers, and the dangerously mentally ill. When background checks are used, they keep guns out of the hands of people we all agree shouldn’t have guns.”
The US has suffered a spate of devastating mass shootings in the past three years, including one at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which left 49 people dead in 2016; a shooting at the Fort Lauderdale airport in 2017 in which five people were killed, and the killing of 59 concertgoers in Las Vegas by Stephen Paddock, who fired repeatedly from his hotel room overlooking the concert in October 2017.