A bus is touring Florida to talk about gun violence. In Miami, Demings, Taddeo share visions

More than four years ago, gun violence changed Fred Guttenberg’s reality. And he channeled his pain into activism.

Guttenberg’s daughter Jamie was one of 17 students and teachers who died in the Parkland school shooting.

“I visit my forever 14-year-old daughter at the cemetery,” Guttenberg said.

Guttenberg shared his experience as the father of a victim of gun violence at a Thursday afternoon press conference at Regatta Park, the first stop in a bus tour to promote candidates who embrace gun-safety efforts. The event was organized by Giffords Florida, a gun-violence prevention organization whose namesake, former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head in 2011 by a would-be assassin while meeting with constituents in Arizona.

U.S. Rep. Val Demings, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, state Sen. Annette Taddeo and former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell were at the Dinner Key park as well.

Guttenberg shared his support for Demings, the former Orlando police chief and Democratic nominee challenging U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio. And he explained his frustrations with Rubio.

Three weeks after the Parkland shooting, Guttenberg said, he was in Rubio’s office and the senator refused to release a message in support of a bill that eventually passed this June.

“I, unfortunately, learned the hard way that my current senator failed me,” said Guttenberg, who has been hot-and-cold on Rubio for years. “He failed Florida and he continues to fail all of us.”

Thursday’s event was peppered with messages targeting Hispanic voters. Mucarsel-Powell, the first U.S. congresswoman born in Ecuador, spoke about the effects of gun violence on the Latino community, with Hispanics twice as likely to die by gun violence than white people.

“Polling is showing us that [for] voters, especially in Latino communities, gun violence is a top concern,” said Mucarsel-Powell, who has spoken publicly at times about her father’s death by gunfire in Ecuador. “It’s time to secure un futuro sin violencia.”

Some nights, said Taddeo, the Democratic nominee now facing Republican U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar, she has to sit down with her daughter and make a difficult decision: Should she send her the next day if there was a threat at her school?

“Our kids should not have to hide under a desk, or [learn] how to get out or how to run,” Taddeo said. “They should be learning and worrying about their test grade, and where they’re going to go to school and what they’re going to do down the future.”

Taddeo told the Miami Herald the first thing she would do, if elected, is co-sponsor a ban on assault weapons.

“I am the daughter of a military man who actually taught me how to shoot,” she told the Herald. “And he also taught me that weapons of war have no business in our streets.”

Gun violence is a crisis, and Americans are tired of leaders’ silence, Demings said. As Orlando’s police chief from 2007 to 2011, she said she helped reduce violent crime and got guns out of the hands of dangerous people.

“We don’t think it’s OK for our children to be gunned down in first grade, in fourth grade, in high school, on a college campus,” she said. “[Or] in a movie movie theater, at a concert, at a mall, in a nightclub in my congressional district in Orlando, at a church or a synagogue.”