A survivor of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School said it’s folly to put more power in the government’s hands to stop gun violence when governmental failures have enabled so many mass shootings.
Kyle Kashuv told CBS’ “Face The Nation” said Sunday he doesn’t agree with his classmates’ push for more gun control because he thinks if the government did its job then mass shootings would go down.
“We need to see that we have to hold our government accountable,” Kashuv said. “We have to. Because this can happen again if our government does not do what it’s supposed to do. I find it ironic that after all this — we’ve seen so many different government failures we want to trust the government even more.”
Kashuv is one of the few students from the Parkland, Fla., high school who has spoken in favor of Republicans and gun rights since the Feb. 14 shooting that left 17 people dead. He’s often been a counterweight to his classmates’ fight to pass gun control legislation and lay the blame on Republican politicians for thwarting gun control measures in the past.
However, Kashuv said there are more people at his high school that agree with him than many across the country know.
“There’s a silent minority at Stoneman Douglas who agrees with me completely,” he said.
He said other programs that put more guns in schools can actually be beneficial.
He pointed to “something called the marshal program, which was registered, implemented in Florida, in which would allow properly trained officers and veterans, unemploy[ed] veterans to acquire the training to protect our school because we’ve seen in Maryland, only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he said.
