A survivor of the Parkland school shooting on Saturday called out US President Donald Trump over his ties to the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), as several thousand rallied in Florida to demand urgent action on gun control.
Three days after a troubled teen armed with an assault rifle killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, 18-year-old Emma Gonzalez delivered a fiery address from the steps of the Broward County Federal Courthouse to a crowd of students, parents and residents in nearby Fort Lauderdale.
The shooter “wouldn’t have harmed that many students with a knife!” she yelled, shedding tears as the crowd cheered her on.
Photo: AFP
“To every politician taking donations from the NRA, shame on you!” she thundered, assailing Trump over the multimillion-dollar support his campaign received from the gun lobby.
The crowd chanted in turn: “Shame on you!”
“We are going to be the last mass shooting... We are going to change the law,” she said — slamming the fact 19-year-old gunman Nikolas Cruz was able to legally buy a semi-automatic firearm despite a history of troubling and violent behavior.
“The question on whether or not people should be allowed to own an automatic weapon is not a political one. It is question of life or death and it needs to stop being a question of politics,” Gonzalez told reporters following her speech.
In Washington, the political response has made clear that the powerful NRA pro-gun lobby remains formidable, while Trump himself suggested the root cause of mass shootings was a crisis of mental health.
“If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and ... how nothing is going to be done about it, I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association,” Gonzalez said in her impassioned address.
“It doesn’t matter because I already know. Thirty million,” she said, citing the sum spent by the NRA to support Trump’s election bid and defeat former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.
She then ran through a list of the pro-gun lobby’s talking points — for example, that “a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun,” that no law could ever stop a madman intent on killing — answering each argument with “We call BS.”
Gonzalez criticized Trump for overturning a measure implemented by former US president Barack Obama that required extra scrutiny of some gun buyers with a history of mental illness.
“Politicians who sit in their gilded House [of Representatives] and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS,” Gonzalez said
Trump tweeted a day after the massacre that neighbors and fellow students had failed to flag Cruz to the authorities.
“We did,” Gonzalez fired back, her voice shaking with emotion as she insisted the community had done its best to raise the alarm. “Time and time again. Since he was in middle school. It was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter.”
The young woman’s powerful address immediately went viral, with her name a top trending topic on Twitter.
The FBI on Friday said it received a chilling warning in January from a tipster who said Cruz could be planning a mass shooting, but that agents failed to follow up.
Cruz was also known to local police after his mother repeatedly reported him for violent outbursts, while records obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel show authorities investigated Cruz in 2016 after he cut his arms on messaging app Snapchat and threatened to buy a gun.
The newspaper, citing Department of Children and Family Services documents, said the investigation came four days after Cruz turned 18 — legally an adult, and thus able to buy a firearm.
Investigators said there were “some implications” for the teen’s safety, but concluded that his “final level of risk is low as [he] resides with his mother, attends school and receives counseling” as an outpatient at a mental health center, the Sun Sentinel said.
Cruz later passed a background check, allowing him in February last year to buy the AR-15 rifle used in the massacre.
Trump on Saturday said on Twitter that the FBI was so caught up in the Russia probe that it failed to heed signs which could have prevented the shooting.
“Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable,” he wrote. “They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign - there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!”
Additional reporting by Reuters
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