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Trump to Discuss School Shootings With Survivors, Including Florida Students
Parents and Students Plead With Trump: ‘How Many Children Have to Get Shot?’
(about 5 hours later)
WASHINGTON — Under mounting pressure to take action after the nation’s latest school shooting massacre, President Trump will sit down at the White House on Wednesday with about 20 parents and students from the high school in Parkland, Fla., where a gunman killed 17 people last week, a White House official said.
WASHINGTON — The father of an 18-year-old girl killed last week in a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., made an impassioned plea to President Trump on Wednesday at the White House to act quickly to protect children in the country’s schools.
The afternoon session in the State Dining Room also will include about two dozen others affected by school shootings, including survivors of the rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999, which claimed 12 students and a teacher, as well as the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, where 20 young children and six adults were killed. The White House official described plans for the meeting on condition of anonymity, without authorization to detail it in advance.
“We’re here because my daughter has no voice — she was murdered last week, shot nine times,” said Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was one of the 17 people killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. “How many schools, how many children have to get shot? It stops here, with this administration and me.”
The discussion was set to unfold as student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland were channeling their grief and outrage to press in an intensive public-relations and lobbying campaign in favor of tighter gun restrictions. Scores of them have descended upon their state capital in Tallahassee to demand changes in the law, while hundreds of others around the state staged walkouts on Wednesday in solidarity.
Mr. Pollack was an unannounced guest at a listening session in the State Dining Room of the White House, which called the session a discussion of school safety.
At the White House, the president was expected to make opening remarks and then open the floor for a discussion among attendees, including Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, about how to address the tragedy.
“We’re going to do something about this horrible situation,” Mr. Trump said as he opened the session, adding that his administration would be “very strong on background checks” of those wishing to purchase guns, and put “a very strong emphasis on the mental health of somebody.”
The discussion will be unscripted, the official said, although it was not clear how or whether White House aides vetted the invitees to determine their political stances or policy positions.
But what began with a recitation of somber statements and vows to act quickly became emotional when Mr. Pollack took the microphone, venting raw anger and grief.
Mr. Trump, who has privately been quizzing friends and allies about whether to support stricter gun laws and, if so, which ones, is working to signal an eagerness to act in the face of tragedy. But it is not clear how far he is willing to go.
“It should have been one school shooting, and we should have fixed it, and I’m pissed,” Mr. Pollack said, raising his voice as he looked at Mr. Trump, “because my daughter, I’m not going to see again.”
On Tuesday, he ordered the Justice Department to issue regulations banning so-called bump stocks, which convert semiautomatic guns into automatic weapons like those used last year in the massacre of concertgoers in Las Vegas.
Mr. Pollack said he did not favor adopting new gun restrictions, but pleaded for Democrats and Republicans to come together to create new school safety measures.
In tweets and in a statement from the White House, the president has also said he supports a bipartisan bill backed by the National Rifle Association to strengthen background checks.
“It’s not about gun laws right now — that’s another fight, another battle,” he said. “We need our children safe.”
Asked on Tuesday about measures the powerful gun lobby has vehemently opposed, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump was open to considering those as well.
On banning assault weapons, Ms. Sanders said that “we haven’t closed the door on any front.” Regarding imposing a nationwide age threshold for buying an AR-15 — the weapon used in the Parkland assault as well as many previous fatal shooting rampages — she said it is “certainly something that’s on the table for us to discuss.”
