Shooting survivors launch gun control push
WASHINGTON: Dozens of students and parents from the Florida high school where 17 teens and staff members were slain last week in a shooting rampage arrived in the state capital of Tallahassee on Tuesday to lobby for a ban on assault-style rifles.
Last week’s massacre, the seconddeadliest shooting at a public school in US history, has inflamed a national debate about gun rights and prompted young people from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and across the US to demand action for stricter firearms controls.
Students from the South Florida high school were tearful as they stepped down from the bus in Tallahassee to be welcomed with waves, cheers and somber applause from fellow teens.
“We’re here to make sure this never happens again,” Diego Pfeiffer, a senior at Stoneman, told the crowd that included hundreds of students from a Tallahassee high school over a crackling microphone.
On Tuesday, less than a week after the shooting, the Republican-controlled Florida House of Representatives rebuffed a bid to bring up a bill to block sales of assault-style rifles in the state.
“I am not going back to school until lawmakers, and the president, change this law,” said Tyra Hemans, a 19-year-old senior who travelled to the state capital.
“Three people I looked to for advice and courage are gone but never forgotten, and for them, I am going to our state capital to tell lawmakers we are tired and exhausted of stupid gun laws,” Hemans said.
Fourteen students and three educators were killed and 15 other people were wounded in the Feb 14 attack.
Nikolas Cruz, 19, a former student expelled from Stoneman Douglas High for disciplinary problems, was arrested and charged with premeditated murder.
Authorities say he was armed with a semi-automatic AR-15 assault-style rifle that he legally purchased from a licensed gun dealer last year when he was 18.
The youth-led protest movement that erupted within hours of the shooting attracted prominent celebrity supporters on Tuesday when film star George Clooney and his wife Amal, a human rights lawyer, said they would donate US$500,000 (RM1.9 million) to help fund a planned March 24 gun control march in Washington.
Director Steven Spielberg and media mogul Oprah Winfrey later joined in, contributing US$500,000 each toward the march. – Reuters