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The father of one of the victims in the 2018 Parkland, Florida, high school shooting blasted politicians for focusing on gun control in the aftermath of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last week, saying the focus should be on hardening school security instead.
Andrew Pollack lost his 18-year-old daughter, Meadow, on Feb. 14, 2018, when a lone gunman opened fire on students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. In the years since that shooting, Pollack has repeatedly advocated that public officials implement stronger security measures in schools. But in the wake of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, he sees a familiar narrative taking place.
“When politicians talk about gun control, it takes away from what we could focus on, and that’s real solutions,” Pollack told the Washington Examiner. “All you hear is Democrats talking about background checks. Background checks only work if they arrest people.”
SCHOOL SAFETY COMMISSIONS RECOMMENDED SINGLE ENTRY POINT AFTER PARKLAND SHOOTING
The “real solutions” Pollack wants to see range from implementing single entry point security to increasing armed security in schools and allowing trained teachers to carry firearms. Each policy was among the recommendations made by two separate government school safety commissions established in the wake of the Parkland shooting.
One of those commissions was the Federal Commission on School Safety, which was established by then-President Donald Trump and included Pollack among its members. And there’s little doubt in his mind that the events in Texas last week would not have occurred if the school had implemented the recommendations of the commission.
“If they would have listened to the president’s recommendations, those children would be alive today,” Pollack said of the Uvalde elementary school. “If they had listened to those recommendations, that shooting wouldn’t have happened.”
In the years since the Parkland shooting, Pollack published a book titled Why Meadow Died with American Enterprise Institute education expert Max Eden and has launched his own initiative on school safety with a self-defense company, but the Texas shooting has reinvigorated his angered amid the education system’s failures to keep schoolchildren safe.
“It just angers me that in Uvalde, they didn’t make the necessary changes at their school to put the community, the kids, in a safe place,” Pollack lamented. “It’s heart-wrenching that they went through this.”
The school safety activist told the Washington Examiner that he had reached out to the office of Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) and offered to help the governor set up a commission to investigate what occurred at Robb Elementary School and what measures schools can take to keep their campuses safe.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“I’m hoping he takes me up on my offer to help them put a safety commission together, like we did in Florida, to analyze everything,” Pollack said. “You can’t just analyze and look into the failures. … You need to look into the shooter and what went wrong [with him], where did we fail society … so we can make changes in society and fix the system so these things don’t keep happening.”
