For those who don’t know who Fred Guttenberg is. He is a parent of one of the Parkland victims. When Parkland happened, I spoke against the gun control being pushed by Republicans.
And when it was sadly passed, I told the House Speaker that he was a piece of crap for passing it. Guttenberg was there when I said it.
Ever since then, Guttenberg has been pushing gun control.
I feel for the guy, I’m a parent myself and I was an SRO in my LE career. So, I’m not heartless. But he is using the death of his daughter to violate the rights of Floridians and Americans.
That’s not right. He’s not willing to look at the truth and accept that sadly, his daughter died because of the compounded failures that was the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, the Broward County School Board, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and others. He simply blames law-abiding people who wish to freely exercise their rights.
I’m not gonna say anything negative about the parent of a child killed in a school shooting, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t correct.
He’s gonna be a LONG way past a rape victim. Logic, reason, sensibility and all of those things have abandoned him. He is searching for two things.
The simple answer that has eluded everyone all this time that will prevent future tragedies from every happening and he’ll never find it because it doesn’t exist.
The reason, that will make the fact that it happened acceptable, and right now part of that reason is him becoming an anti gun crusader because then there will be some level of acceptance regarding the tragic death of his daughter.
The alternative, that his daughter was just another victim of an event rooted in gross incompetence from school house to sheriffs office (both funded by his own property taxes) that was perpetrated by a mentally impaired individual who never should have been walking free and provided ample warning of his intentions, coupled with the fact that this might have been the most preventable school shooting in history and the system still failed from top to bottom is going to understandably be difficult for him to reconcile with let alone accept.
And while I understand your perspective, if it were me, I’d be more inclined to tell the guy “I wish I was there that day, I wish I was there with a gun to protect those kids. I wish I could have saved them all.”
I (re)watched “Thank You For Smoking” with my kids when they start high-school. Great story about debate, argument, and ‘optics’. In it, the ‘hero’ gives his son a lesson on not winning an argument and getting your opponent to change their mind, but convincing people that are watching…
Well said. I would have probably said the following;
If the cop on duty had done their job and FBI who initially investigated had done their job, and Sheriff Dept had responded appropriately to the 30+ tips on the kid we wouldn’t be here, but coming after my rights when I haven’t even had a speeding ticket in the last 15 years sounds super reasonable.
Decent chance his mind was made up long before the shooting. If that is the case that means he has always supported a plethora of factors that effectively enabled things to play out in the way they did.
