Since Tuesday’s tragic shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Democrats across the country have blamed the shooting on guns and the lack of gun control policies, politicizing the deaths of 19 children and two teachers.
However, families of victims of past mass shootings disagree with that sentiment.
On Wednesday, the father of a Parkland, Florida, school shooting victim told Fox News that government leaders have not “learned anything” from past school shootings. He insisted that expanding gun laws is not the solution to preventing future shootings.
“Evidently, they didn’t learn anything,” said Andrew Pollack. His daughter Meadow was killed at her school in Parkland in 2018.
Pollack referenced another shooting in a Texas school that left ten dead and noted that more could be done to increase security in schools in all the instances.
“They didn’t learn anything from what happened in Texas at that school shooting; they didn’t learn anything from what happened in Parkland at that shooting, they didn’t learn anything from what happened at Sandy Hook,” Pollack exclaimed. “When you focus on just gun control, this is what happens. It’s happened again.”
Pollack said he believes that every school should have armed guards with a single point of entry.
He highlighted the need to address the common thread of apparent mental illness in all shooters who commit such violent acts. He said schools need to have a system to identify and protect students against that struggle.
“I guarantee you this kid didn’t just wake up one day and say I want to kill my grandma,” Pollack said. “There had to be red flags that went off, and it’s a big problem.”
The shooter in Tuesday’s school shooting appears to have displayed many signs of mental illness before committing the mass murder. He had reportedly been cutting his face with a knife, getting into fistfights at school, fighting with his mother to the point where police were called, and posting pictures of guns online.
Pollack noted that more gun laws were not the issue, and politicians like Beto O’Rourke, along with most of the leadership in Washington, D.C., are focused on the wrong thing following this week’s events.