Several Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students and parents met with President Donald Trump Wednesday afternoon, one week after 17 students and staff were killed in a mass shooting at the Parkland school.
“I don’t know how I’m ever going to step foot in that place again,” Douglas student Sam Zeif said. “Or go to a public park after school or walk anywhere. Me and my friends, we get scared when a car drives by. We need to let ideas flow and get the problem solved. I don’t understand. I turned 18 the day after. I woke up to the news that my best friend was gone.
“I don’t understand how I can still go in a store and buy a weapon of war, an AR (shooter Nikolas Cruz used an AR-15 rifle),” Zeif said. “I was reading today a person 20 years old walked into a store and bought an AR-15 in five minutes with an expired ID. How is it that easy to buy this type of weapon? How have we not stopped this after Columbine, after Sandy Hook? I’m sitting next to a mother who lost her son (at Sandy Hook). It’s still happening...”
The televised meeting also included parents whose children died in the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and the 2012 mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
Read more at our news partner, the Miami Herald.