Horrified Florida students beg the adults: Please, do something about guns

The kids in South Florida are fed up. With the adults.

After a mass shooting left 17 students and faculty dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Parkland, many area students — instead of withdrawing into the solitude of grief — have thrown themselves into the spotlight in anger and frustration.

They're too young to vote. But in national TV interviews, in viral posts on social media, at protests outside schools, the students have chosen to make a noisy message clear to the politicians who represent them: They want stronger gun control.

"Stop apologizing. Get to work. Pass legislation that actually saves children's lives," Douglas junior David Hogg, 17, said Friday as he stood outside his school by police tape and pro-gun-control signs reading "Make school safe" and "Kids don't need guns."

The students speaking up this week are part of a post-Columbine generation that has grown up with school shootings in the news and an ever-present topic of discussion in their schools and homes.

Now that tragedy has come to them, they have lost all confidence in the ability of adults to protect them — a feeling reinforced by details that have emerged since the massacre.

The FBI revealed that over the last year it received two tips warning that suspect Nikolas Cruz, 19, might carry out a school shooting. But Cruz was never questioned.

The Broward County Sheriff's Office said it had received 20 calls for service about Cruz in recent years, and Cruz was kicked out of school for disciplinary reasons.

But Cruz was still able to legally buy an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle after he turned 18. In the end, the school district's preventative measures — which included safety monitors, on-campus police officers and school-shooting drills — were unable to prevent the massacre.

It's not that the school wasn't prepared, said Taylor Yon, a 16-year-old sophomore.

"We had been doing drills on this in the past month," said Yon, who survived the shooting by crouching in a corner of her second-floor classroom, listening to gunshots and screams outside the door. "In every single class period, my teachers had gone through safety protocols. We have safety zones, we have protocols for every single emergency, and this thing still happened."


SOURCE :- latimes