Why the vice president’s Parkland visit still matters 6 years after school shooting

In the six years since a teenage gunman murdered 14 students and three faculty members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the school’s bullet-pocked freshman wing has been documented by investigators, traversed by jurors and toured by procession after procession of politicians aiming to better understand and prevent school shootings.

On Saturday, the building, which is to be demolished this summer, will be opened for at least one more tour, this time by Vice President Kamala Harris, the head of the Biden administration’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

Billed by the White House as an effort to “continue her leadership on addressing the epidemic of gun violence,” Harris’ visit is being met with hope by Parkland parents and politicians determined to continue pushing for a better way to address school safety and guns, even as gridlock in Washington makes the possibility of progress slim.

“This idea that the vice president of the United States is committing her time to walk through the building where my daughter and 16 others were murdered, all in the hope of walking out with a better capacity to communicate and plan for ways to protect our kids and those who educate them, is a really big deal and I hope America understands that,” said Fred Guttenburg, whose daughter, Jaime, would have turned 21 this July had she survived the shooting.

Early on, Building 12, preserved as it was on Feb. 14, 2018 for the purposes of criminal and civil trials, was an early, powerful tool in pushing for change by state and federal lawmakers. The day after the shooting, which occurred as Florida legislators were meeting in Tallahassee for their annual legislative session, state Sen. Lauren Book organized tours of the building with the state’s most powerful Republican lawmakers, leading to the passage of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act.

The legislation — signed into law by then-Republican Gov. Rick Scott — raised the age to purchase a rifle to 21 and created the state’s red flag law and a program to arm trained school faculty, among other aspects. Since then, some Republican lawmakers in the Florida House tried unsuccessfully to roll back the purchasing age of a rifle to 18 years. And the state is now led by a governor, Ron DeSantis, who has said he would have vetoed the legislation.

Book, the Democratic leader in the Florida Senate, credits the visits to the school in the days after the shooting with helping to convince the Legislature to take action.

“I’ll go so far as to say had we not been in a legislative session at that time, had we not brought legislative leaders and leadership to the school, had we not fostered those relationships, we would never have passed a bill like that,” Book said in an interview.

Book said the building – which is set to be demolished this summer now that the trial for the shooter has been concluded, with Nikolas Cruz receiving a life sentence – still carries a disturbing power that remains relevant to the ongoing debate over guns and school safety.

“It’s a haunting piece of our reality and the fabric of our community,” said Book. “A horrific reality that we cannot run away from, because when you do, it starts to erode the good work that we have done, and I do believe that those who forget their past are damned to repeat it.”

Finding solutions

Like Americans across the country, the parents of slain Parkland students and politicians involved in touring the school have different priorities. Some focus on national standards for school safety. Some want stronger gun-control measures.

With Harris’ visit, they at least get the awareness that comes with her presence, and the ear of one of the most powerful politicians in the country and leader of the nation’s White House gun-violence prevention office.

U.S Representative Jared Moskowitz, who will be in Parkland on Saturday, sees Harris’ visit as a chance for the Office of Gun Violence Prevention to understand closely the pitfalls that allowed for a tragedy like Parkland’s to occur and to take what they learn to help work on implementing national standards on school safety.

“This is a unique circumstance where you have a shooting in a high school that was literally preserved as a crime scene because it was used in the trials, so I think the visuals are going to be impactful. I also think listening again to the failures of the response and the building is also going to be impactful,” said Moskowitz, a Democrat.

In the same vein as Moskowitz, Guttenberg and other Parkland parents like Tony Montalto and Max Schachter are hopeful that Harris and the Office of Gun Violence Prevention will use this visit to push forward change.

“I want her to see that six years later, this building still exists and to think about how this continues to affect the community,” said Guttenburg, who said he’d reached out to the White House to encourage Harris to come tour the school. “We have to start to be honest as a country about this reality, that we’ve allowed our gun laws, or lack of, to put us in a place where we have to rethink safety the way we once thought about protecting people from fire — we now have to think about protecting them from gun violence.”

He said that although some state lawmakers have attempted to roll back the efforts they’ve accomplished on gun safety, that’s not representative of what the majority wants. He urged people to remember to vote in upcoming state and national elections.

Tony Montalto, President of Stand with Parkland, said that he doesn’t want people to overlook the accomplishments and progress that has been made for school safety since 2018. Montalto’s daughter, Gina, was one of the victims in the shooting.

Montalto has revisited the building where the shooting occurred multiple times with policymakers and political leaders. He said that although revisiting the building is incredibly difficult, he does it because he wants to honor his daughter’s legacy and save as many lives as he can.

“We’ve seen a lot of people from both sides of the aisle come together and we’ve gotten some successes. They’re not fast enough for my family, they never will be with the loss of our beautiful daughter, but we know that when we talk to people, we don’t just talk about the tragedy and the pain. We’re there to bring them solutions,” said Montalto.

Max Schachter, whose son Alex was killed in the shooting, said that schools are safer than they were since the tragedy happened based on the legislation that’s been passed. He remains hopeful that the Florida Legislature will continue to focus on protecting schools.

Like Montalto, Schachter has also made multiple visits to the school with policymakers and will continue to do so until the building is demolished.

“I do it because I know that I couldn’t save Alex, but I can save others and I know that these visits do that,” he said. “They make schools safer and they save lives every time I do it.”