The father of slain Parkland shooting victim Jaime Guttenberg, after being escorted out of the State of the Union following an outburst, explained his actions in an interview on CNN Tuesday afternoon.
Fred Guttenberg, 54, was invited to the president’s address last week as a guest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. As the president praised the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, Guttenberg could be heard yelling, “What about victims of gun violence like my daughter?” He was removed from the House floor.
“Earlier in the speech, he spent time talking about violence — but talking about violence against Americans by ‘illegals,’ as he would say, and how the way to address violence is to do all this awful, nasty stuff. And all I could sit there thinking about was: My daughter was killed by an American teen male. And so I was getting angry because he wasn’t addressing, actually, the cause of all the violence in this country,” he began.
Guttenberg went on to denounce the claim that the Second Amendment is “under attack.”
“Later on in the speech, when he got to the part about the Second Amendment and he said, ‘I will defend your Second Amendment rights, which are under attack and under siege all over this country,’ he’s saying to his followers that people like me want to attack the Second Amendment,” he continued. “And that’s just an absolute, brutal, disgusting, vicious lie. Under no circumstance, in no place in this country, is the Second Amendment under attack, and no legal, lawful gun owner feels the sting of gun safety measures that are being proposed.”
Jamie Guttenberg was one of 17 people slain by a lone gunman on Feb. 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
