Parkland gun control advocate David Hogg responded to the “swatting” incident that occurred at his Florida home, saying the person responsible for it wasted “hundreds of thousands” of taxpayer dollars and law enforcement resources, and was trying to “distract us from trying to save lives.”
The incident at Hogg’s family home occurred Tuesday morning, when someone made a hoax call to the Broward Sheriff’s Office and claimed someone inside the home had a weapon.
A SWAT team responded, and Fire Rescue and police units were staged outside the house.
Hogg, though, wasn’t home at the time. He was in Washington, D.C. Tuesday to accept the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.
When asked what kind of person would be behind the “swatting,” Hogg said it was someone attempting to distract from the issue of gun violence.
“Somebody that’s trying to distract from these issues and somebody that is willing to waste hundreds of thousands of taxpaying dollars and waste the resources of law enforcement, and it’s somebody that wants to distract us from trying to save lives,” Hogg told Politico.
David Hogg, a Florida high school shooting survivor and gun control activist, addressed the incident where a prank caller sent a SWAT team to break into and occupy his home pic.twitter.com/5hbgqoe5Rn
— POLITICO (@politico) June 5, 2018
The former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School said he is trying to “save children’s lives” and boost youth participation in elections.
“It’s an attempt to distract from what we’re trying to do, which is save children’s lives and fix these issues at hand by getting the largest youth voter registration push in American history, led by youth. And just boosting the voter turnout rate in our country,” he said of the “swatting” incident. “That’s what we have to do to change these issues. The people that are affected by these issues most tend to vote the least, and we have to make sure that they vote on these issues so that we can elect morally just leaders to serve our country and serve our people, because right now, they’re not.”
Hogg has become a well-known gun control advocate in the wake the Feb. 14 shooting at his former high school in Parkland, Fla., during which 17 people were killed.
He and others from his Parkland high school launched a movement following the shooting to urge Congress to pass more stringent gun laws.
