“A day you pray will never happen, has happened,” Senator Marco Rubio said on Fox News referring to another mass shooting that happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday, 14th February.
A heavily armed young man barged into his former high school about an hour northwest of Miami, opening fire on terrified students and teachers and leaving a death toll of 17 that could raise even higher, the authorities said. Some of students and adults were shot outside the school and others inside the building.
Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old who had been expelled from the school, had killed 12 people inside the school and three outside it, including someone standing on a street corner, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said. On Thursday, the authorities charged Mr. Cruz with 17 counts of premeditated murder.
Mr. Gard, a math teacher at the school, said that after the shooting, he learned from several students that Mr. Cruz was obsessed with a girl at the school to the point of “stalking her,” a point the authorities did not raise in news briefings near the scene.
Sadly, this is not the first case of mass shooting in schools in America. As the ruling party, Republicans must resolutely deal with the prevention of such disasters, but they don’t do that. Instead they offer “condolences and prayer.” Prayers don’t prevent terrorists or mentally ill people from taking their weapons and opening fire on terrified and innocent people. Historically guns have been fired on school property in the US at least 18 times so far this year, according to incidents tracked by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group. During the first seven weeks of the year, there have been eight shootings at US schools that have resulted in injury or death.
The massacre called to mind the country’s two mass shootings that have come to be known by the name of the schools: Columbine, the high school outside Denver where 12 students and a teacher were killed in 1999; and Sandy Hook, the elementary school in Newtown, Conn., where 20 students and six adults were shot dead in 2012, the New York Times reports.
Congress refuses to tighten restrictions on gun ownership, even after 20 children and six educators were massacred in 2012 in Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut. On the other hand, Congress has approved hundreds of millions of dollars in federal spending to help put police officers in public schools, including $45m in 2013, the year after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting. Easy access to guns is the primary contributor to these shootings; tighter laws are instruments for preventing illegal gun possessions and not prayers.
Photo Credits: DailyDot
