Fla. students to Trump: Take action
President offers proposals during emotional debate
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump hosted an emotional debate over guns and schools Wednesday at the White House, listening for more than an hour as student survivors and grieving parents parried ideas to prevent firearms deaths, their disputes hinting at the nation’s divisions.
The president offered proposals of his own, from stronger background checks for gun buyers to possibly arming teachers and perhaps reviving “mental institutions.”
Much of the debate touched on arming schools, far less on gun controls.
“I’m here because my daughter has no voice,” said Andrew Pollack, the father of student Meadow Pollack, who was among the 17 people killed on Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. “She was murdered last week and she was taken from us. Shot nine times on the third floor. We as a country failed our children.”
Sam Zeif, a student who survived the shooting, noted that he turned 18 the day after the massacre and added, “I don’t understand why I can still go into a store and buy a weapon of war.”
The accused 19-year-old shooter, a former student, had legally bought his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and ammunition.
Zeif, referring to past school massacres, asked, “How have we not stopped Andrew Pollack, whose daughter was gunned down last week, urges President Trump to fix school security Wednesday. this? After Columbine? After Sandy Hook? I’m sitting with a mother that lost her son” — he reached to touch Nicole Hockley, whose 6year-old son Dylan was killed in the Sandy Hook kindergarten, in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 — “and it’s still happening.”
He closed by saying, “We need to do something, and that’s why we’re here.”
In the rawness of their grief, a dozen survivors of the shooting at Stoneman Douglas wept and searched for answers.
Years after their children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School and Columbine High School, several parents served as reluctant experts in the policy options available to the president — and the disappointments of getting consensus on gun policy.
Attendees took turns making points, often at odds with one another over whether to arm teachers or lock up the mentally ill, or on whether it is time to set an age minimum for gun purchases or ban assault weapons.
Hockley, a veteran of gun debates, took issue with the idea of arming schools. One of Pollack’s three sons, however, demanded, “We need more firearms on campus.”
And Trump disparaged the widespread practice of designating schools as “gunfree zones,” saying it suggests to shooters, “Let’s go in and let’s attack.”
The president said that if a coach at Stoneman Douglas had had a firearm in his locker, he would have fired at the shooter and “that would’ve been the end of it.”
Trump repeatedly referred to the Florida shooter and other mass killers as deranged and he complained, as did a couple parents, about the limits to dealing with people mani- festing mental illness.
“Today if you catch somebody you don’t know what to do with them,” Trump said. “He hasn’t committed the crime, but he may very well. And there’s no mental institution, there’s no place to bring them.”
Hockley, along with Darrell Scott, whose daughter Rachel died at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, seemed to caution the president about speaking in broad, punitive terms about those with mental illness, instead of about supporting programs and treatment that promote wellness.
Hockley at one point appealed to Trump as a parent: “I implore you. Consider your own children. You don’t want to be me. No parent does.”
Pollack, his voice conveying both anger and sorrow, urged the president to fix security at schools and fight over gun laws later.
But the mayor of Parkland, Christine Hunschofsky, pressed for banning assault weapons. The senior class president at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Julia Cordover, encouraged Trump to follow through on his promise to ban so-called bump stocks that turn legal firearms into virtual machine guns. And Cary Gruber, who attended with his son, a sophomore survivor, urged a higher minimum age for purchasing guns.
“If he’s not old enough to go and buy beer,” Gruber said, “he should not be able to buy a gun at 18 years old. Please, Mr. Trump.”
Trump sat mute through most of the sometimes tearful discussion, listening as the participants tried to make sense of the senseless.
“In addition to what we’re going to do about background checks, we’re going to go very strong into age, age of purchase, and we’re also going to go very strong into the mental health aspects of what’s going on,” Trump said as he wrapped up the meeting.
Some of those proposals would require a significant about-face for the administration, which has proposed cuts in mental health programs, f or example. Trump’s suggestion of a new age restriction for gun purchases would depart from previous pledges to gun rights supporters to oppose new federal restrictions on gun sales.
Republicans in Congress and Trump rolled back an Obama-era regulation that required the Social Security Administration to send records of people receiving benefits for mental illness for inclusion in the background check system.
Meanwhile, in Florida, thousands of students and protesters rallied Wednesday at the state Capitol in Tallahassee to demand that lawmakers curb the sale of assault rifles.
“Thoughts and prayers won’t stop my brothers and my sisters from dying — action will,” declared Sheryl Acquaroli, 16, a student at Stoneman Douglas. “They died because you failed.”
Inside, state lawmakers focused on new waiting period and age restrictions for buyers of semi-automatic rifles.
The proposals represent a break from the state’s traditional response to other shootings.