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Survivors of Florida school shooting launch gun control push


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Survivors of Florida school shooting launch gun control push

By Katanga Johnson

 

2018-02-20T221500Z_1_LYNXNPEE1J21L_RTROPTP_4_FLORIDA-SHOOTING.JPG

Sen. Bobby Powell, D-Riviera Beach, looks on his computer at gun control bills moving through the Senate as he talks with students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and those that support their cause, following last week's mass shooting on their campus, in Tallahassee, Florida, U.S., February 20, 2018. REUTERS/Colin Hackley

 

PARKLAND, Fla. (Reuters) - Dozens of students and parents from the Florida high school where 17 teens and staff members died in a shooting rampage boarded buses on Tuesday for a trip to the state capital Tallahassee to push for a ban on assault rifles.

 

Last week's massacre, the second-deadliest shooting at a public school in U.S. history, has inflamed a national debate about gun rights and prompted teens from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and across the United States to demand legislative action. The incident has galvanized advocates for stricter gun controls, including many survivors of the shooting.

 

"I am not going back to school until lawmakers, and the president, change this law," said Tyra Hemans, a 19-year-old senior, referring to Florida's law permitting the sale of assault rifles. "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."

 

Fourteen students and three educators were killed in the Feb. 14 attack at the school in Parkland, near Fort Lauderdale. Authorities have charged Nikolas Cruz, 19, with 17 counts of premeditated murder for allegedly returning to the school from which he had been expelled and opening fire with a semiautomatic AR-15 assault rifle.

 

The youth-led protest movement that erupted within hours of the shooting attracted a prominent celebrity supporter on Tuesday when actor George Clooney and his wife Amal, a human rights lawyer, said they would donate $500,000 to help fund a planned March 24 gun control march in Washington.

 

A Washington Post/ABC News opinion poll released on Tuesday showed 77 percent of Americans believe the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress is not doing enough to prevent mass shootings, with 62 percent saying President Donald Trump, also a Republican, has not done enough on that front.

 

Trump said on Tuesday he had signed a memorandum directing the attorney general to draw up regulations banning devices that turn firearms into machine guns, like the bump stock used in October's mass shooting in Las Vegas.

 

MARCHES IN FLORIDA, TENNESSEE

 

Students in states including Florida and Tennessee staged sympathy protests on Tuesday, according to local media reports. Miami's WTVJ-TV showed video of about 1,000 teens and adults marching from a high school in Boca Raton to the site of the Parkland shooting, about 12 miles (19 km) to the west.

 

Florida's Republican-controlled legislature has taken up at least two bills during its current session intended to provide broader access to guns.

 

On Tuesday the state House turned down an attempt to bring up a bill that would block sales of assault rifles, News Service Florida reported.

 

State Senator Bill Galvano, the chamber's next president, called for a bill to limit sales of assault rifles to people at least 21 years old, with some exceptions, up from the current minimum age of 18. The legislature's current session ends on March 9, leaving little time for a vote.

 

Current U.S. high school students were born after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado in which a pair of teen gunmen killed 13 people. There have been numerous mass shootings, not just in schools, since then in the United States, and students in this age group have grown up in an environment where they regularly train for the possibility of being targeted by a shooter on the loose in school.

 

Gun ownership is protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and remains one of the nation's more divisive issues. The Washington Post/ABC News poll found that fewer than seven in 10 Republicans support the idea of a ban on assault weapons, the reverse of Democrats, 71 percent of whom support it. A federal ban on assault weapons, in force for 10 years, expired in 2004.

 

Funerals continued for the young victims of Wednesday's attack. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday said it made a rare posthumous letter of acceptance to Peter Wang, a student of the school killed in the shooting. A Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps cadet, Wang had aspired to attend the elite academy.

 

(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton in Washington and Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and James Dalgleish)

 
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-- © Copyright Reuters 2018-02-21

 

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This is one of the good things what has come from the tragedy. Schoolkids speaking reason with clear message. 

 

These kids are standing up after the adults failed to do so. 

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#OneLess sounds like a good start to the right direction.

 

Quote

ONE LESS: Scott Pappalardo owned his AR-15 rifle for more than 30 years. He even has a Second Amendment tattoo on his arm. This weekend, he destroyed his gun “to make sure this weapon will be ever be able to take a life.” http://abcn.ws/2CwBdL2

 

 

 

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Young Americans!

 

"Fifteen-year-old Peter Wang, who was killed while trying to help classmates escape from a gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, was posthumously accepted to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday “for his heroic actions on Feb. 14, 2018” and then buried in his Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) uniform. "

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/west-point-military-academy-admits-parkland-student-peter-wang-who-n849721

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Well, seeing as the state of Florida has a history of loosening gun laws rather than the opposite and convincing the 1.3 million legal gun owners in that state (that are overwhelmingly mostly of the responsible type) to accept anything at all is going to be very hard. A couple hundred 19 year-olds demanding this and that and expecting some magic wand to be waved is dream land. Many fail to realise why this (gun control) has never really happened...there is an aweful lot of support for the 2nd amendment.

 

Once the news cycle moves on it will all fizzle out and nothing will happen. If they can get more robust background checks or a couple things like that then it should be considered as a major victory....but won't go much further than that. Seems like the Florida Senate has poo-pooed the idea already of proper far-reaching new gun control laws (not a surprise really) if I'm reading news reports that are accurate. Also, the 2nd amendment and banning guns are two different things coupled with the fact that over 40 states have their own laws that allow gun ownership on their own terms...not to mention getting the 2/3 majority in Congress on getting amendments passed to the constitution, good luck with that. Unfortunately, the top-and-tail of it is that the general publics' democratic vote will not support seriously restrictive gun ownership laws in the US...too much of a love affair for too many and their political representatives are very wary of this. That's just a realistic diagnosis of the situation, not a personal view.

Edited by Sir Dude
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A different White House position:

Donald Trump Jr. “liked” a pair of tweets attacking a teen survivor of the mass school shooting in Florida that left 17 people dead — including one that suggests the boy was a fabrication of the “mainstream media.”

https://nypost.com/2018/02/20/trump-jr-likes-tweets-attacking-florida-massacre-survivor/

 

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On 2/21/2018 at 7:51 PM, Srikcir said:

A different White House position:

Donald Trump Jr. “liked” a pair of tweets attacking a teen survivor of the mass school shooting in Florida that left 17 people dead — including one that suggests the boy was a fabrication of the “mainstream media.”

https://nypost.com/2018/02/20/trump-jr-likes-tweets-attacking-florida-massacre-survivor/

 

That is truly disgusting. 

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"trump" had a white house "listening" meeting and invited some Parkland (and other massacre) survivors. But I'm not sure it's widely known that the "trump" regime deliberately did NOT invite any of the more vocal Parkland student activists. It turns out it was a reality t.v. stunt only to push "trump's" sick and dangerous agenda of almost no action on gun control and instead being a shill for the NRA to put guns in schools.

 

Here is a real "democratic" event on the gun massacre issue from a media outlet that "trump" calls fake news. It's the opposite --

 

 

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On 2/20/2018 at 7:06 PM, oilinki said:

This is one of the good things what has come from the tragedy. Schoolkids speaking reason with clear message. 

 

These kids are standing up after the adults failed to do so. 

I agree. It is heartening to see the spontaneous and genuine outpouring of civic outrage coming from these young people. I think they are about to learn a lesson however about how grassroots movements can be co-opted by monied interest groups. Both on their opponents side and their own.

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On 2/20/2018 at 11:37 PM, oilinki said:

#OneLess sounds like a good start to the right direction.

 

 

 

 

 

Very interesting. I wonder what his problem is. Is he afraid he can't control his emotions, that the evil AR-15 might make him murder someone? Very silly idea. It's all about education, attitude and training. Fools do stupid things with guns. Trained, educated people don't.

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3 hours ago, MajarTheLion said:

 

Very interesting. I wonder what his problem is. Is he afraid he can't control his emotions, that the evil AR-15 might make him murder someone? Very silly idea. It's all about education, attitude and training. Fools do stupid things with guns. Trained, educated people don't.

 

He might want to make sure his AR-15 is never going to be used as weapon of mass killing. That way he can be sure that even if his AR-15 is stolen, it will not become part of the large spool of illegal weapons. Now he can be sure of that.

 

It's also quite possible that he wishes to show that he is a bigger man. Responsible gun owner, who understands that the country he lives in, is better off, if there is less assault rifles on the market and therefore on the streets. 


One stronger man shows the path for sheeps to follow. Big gun does not make one a man. Ability to think of the larger picture and act accordingly does. Even if it means losing some of the personal fun. 

 

Ps. I do know how much fun is it can be to shoot AK-47 and similar war weapons. A lot more fun than for example fully automatic Clock, which sprays bullets to the ceiling when handled by a novice.  

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12 hours ago, MajarTheLion said:

 

Very interesting. I wonder what his problem is. Is he afraid he can't control his emotions, that the evil AR-15 might make him murder someone? Very silly idea. It's all about education, attitude and training. Fools do stupid things with guns. Trained, educated people don't.

"Latour uses the example of guns: if someone shoots another with a gun, who is doing the shooting – is it the person or the gun? “Weapons kill people,” say proponents of gun control, while opponents say, “people kill people.” 

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/philosophy-of-technology/0/steps/26326

"You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-philosophy-of-the-technology-of-the-gun/260220/

 

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These kids are sharp and have sharp tongues. 

Quote

We should change the names of AR-15s to “Marco Rubio” because they are so easy to buy.

 

 

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