This past week, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, became the latest front in the nation’s ongoing battle against gun violence. Helped along by those who treat the Second Amendment like Holy Scripture, in recent years, attackers have had ample opportunity to carry out mass shootings across the U.S., including this past week’s incident in Parkland that ended with 17 people dead.
The president and his Republican allies in Congress aren’t doing anything to address this problem, but the nation — including students from the school affected by this week’s shooting itself — have had enough.
On Saturday, in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, concerned Americans gathered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a rally in support of gun control.
One of the speakers at that rally was Emma Gonzalez, who is a student at the high school affected by this past week’s shooting and delivered an impassioned speech lambasting American leaders for their refusal to acknowledge the need to control items that can inflict mass carnage like that seen this past week in Parkland.
The president has stuck to the line that the way to address the problem is through fixing our nation’s ailing mental healthcare system; he tweeted a message to that effect recently that essentially went so far as to deflect blame from the government and onto the local community for not having taken care of the Parkland shooter’s alleged mental health issues.
Gonzalez addressed this in her remarks this Saturday, saying:
‘Since [the Parkland shooter] was in middle school, it was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter. Those talking about how we should have not ostracized him, you didn’t know this kid, okay — we did. We know that they are claiming mental health issues, and I am not a psychologist, but we need to pay attention to the fact that this was not just a mental health issue. He would not have harmed that many students with a knife.’
This simple fact is seemingly lost on many of those claiming that gun control is irrelevant to the situation surrounding the Parkland shooting. Gonzalez is certainly completely correct — one would be a fool to argue against her notion that the Parkland attacker couldn’t have harmed as many people as he did with a weapon like a knife.
Even still, leaders, including those who represent Florida in particular, refuse to do anything to restrict access to the kind of weapon that allowed the Parkland shooter to carry out his attack.
Gonzalez went on to be even more biting in her criticism of the president, who paid her community a visit this past Friday.
She pointed out the large amounts of cash that the National Rifle Association — the infamous gun rights advocacy group — has given to the president and to his Republican allies as well.
After noting that dividing the thirty million dollars Trump has received from the NRA by the approximate number of gun violence victims in the U.S. since the beginning of this year leaves a sum of about $5,800 per victim, Gonzalez commented:
‘Is that how much these people are worth to you, Trump? If you don’t do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur, that number of gunshot victims will go up and the number that they are worth will go down. And we will be worthless to you. To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you.’
Check out a video of Gonzalez’s powerful speech below.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
