‘Frozen in time.’ Kamala Harris tours bloodstained building where 2018 Parkland massacre happened

PARKLAND, Fla. — Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday toured the blood-stained classroom where the 2018 Parkland high school massacre took place, then announced a program to help states that have laws allowing police to temporarily confiscate guns taking people who are considered dangerous by judges.

Harris saw walls and floors riddled with bullet holes still covered in dried blood and broken glass left by the Feb. 14, 2018, attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which killed 14 students and three staff members and injured 17.

The hallways and classrooms in the three-story building are still littered with shoes left behind by fleeing students and wilted Valentine’s Day flowers and balloons. School books, laptops, snacks and papers are left on desks. She was told about each victim who died.

“Frozen in time,” Harris said repeatedly about what she saw. She was accompanied on the tour by relatives of the victims, some of whom pushed for more spending on school security and others for stricter gun laws.

Harris, who heads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, said there are lessons to be learned from Parkland, both in stopping school shootings before they happen and in mitigating them with measures such as ensuring the doors are closed. of classrooms are not locked from the outside. like they did at Stoneman Douglas. She pointed out that shootings are a leading cause of death for children and teens.

“We have to be willing to have the courage to say that at every level, whether you’re talking about changing laws or changing practices and protocols, we have to do better,” Harris said.

At Stoneman Douglas, former student Nikolas Cruz, then 19, fired about 140 rounds from his AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle during his six-minute attack, methodically working his way from the first floor, through the second, to the third. moved.

He pleaded guilty in 2021. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2022 after his jury did not unanimously agree that he deserved a death sentence, angering the victims’ families.

The building was preserved so that his jury could tour it. Since the school reopened two weeks after the shooting, it has loomed over the school of 3,600 students from behind a temporary fence. It is planned to be demolished this summer. No replacement plan has been announced.

After Harris’ tour, she announced a $750 million grant program to provide technical assistance and training to Florida and the other 20 states that have similar “red flag laws.”

Florida law allows police officers, with a judge’s permission, to temporarily seize guns belonging to someone who has been shown to be a danger to others or themselves. The statute has been used more than 12,000 times since it was enacted six years ago in response to the Parkland shooting.

Harris also called on both Congress and states without red flag laws to pass them. The Biden administration has called for a national red flag law.

Cruz had a long history of disturbing and bizarre behavior, including animal torture, before the shooting. In the weeks before the shooting, he had been reported to local police and the FBI by people who feared he was planning a mass shooting, but no action was taken. He legally bought 10 guns in the 17 months between his 18th birthday and the massacre.

“Red flag laws are simply intended to give communities a means to share information about concerns about potential danger or calls for help,” Harris said.

Sen. Rick Scott, a Republican who signed Florida’s red flag law as governor, issued a statement Saturday calling the Biden administration’s proposed national red flag law “radical,” saying it would be modeled after the California statute and would deprive gun owners of their rights. California’s law is broader than Florida’s in that family members, employers and others can initiate the process, but the removal must also be approved by a judge.

The California law “omits due process to more quickly and easily take away constitutional rights from law-abiding Americans. That is unacceptable,” Scott said.

Harris’ tour was the latest organized by elected officials, law enforcement and education leaders in recent months. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured it in January, and several members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have passed through it since law enforcement returned custody of the building to the school district last summer. FBI Director Christopher Wray and Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle visited the building in recent days.

“It’s important to walk these people through the building so they can not only see the horror that still exists there, but so we can point out the exact things that went wrong,” said Tony Montalto, president of Stand With Parkland, the group. that represents most of the victims’ families. His 14-year-old daughter Gina was killed in the shooting.

Some Stoneman Douglas families participating in the tours, along with Harris and President Joe Biden, want the sale of AR-15s and similar weapons to be banned, as was the case between 1994 and 2004, but there is not enough support the Congres. Opponents, including the families of other victims, argue such a ban would violate the Second Amendment and do little to curb gun violence.

Linda Beigel Schulman said the tour showed Harris the carnage that a mass shooting causes — it will no longer be an abstract concept for her. Beigel Schulman’s 35-year-old son, geography teacher Scott Beigel, was killed while helping students in his classroom to safety. The papers he was grading when the shooting started are still on his desk.

“She understands how important gun violence prevention is to us,” Beigel Schulman said of the vice president. “But when you go into the building itself and see what really happened, it doesn’t matter that it’s six years later. It really does something to you.”

Max Schachter, whose son Alex was killed in the shooting, is using the tours to convince officials to take school safety measures such as making doors and windows bulletproof. Alex, 14, died from shots fired through the window of his classroom door.

Schachter said that while there is disagreement over gun laws, school safety brings the parties together. In particular, he pointed to a fall visit by officials in Utah that led to that state implementing a $100 million plan to harden its schools.

‘I couldn’t save Alex. But every time officials come through that building, lives are saved,” Schachter said.