Emma Gonzalez survived the Florida school attack. Watch her impassioned plea for it to be the 'last mass shooting.'
Floridians gathered in downtown Fort Lauderdale Saturday to rally for stricter gun laws in response to Wednesday's deadly shooting at a high school in nearby Parkland. The crowd of several thousand heard from students who survived the attack.
"We are going to be the last mass shooting," said one student, Emma Gonzalez, whose impassioned speech was shared widely online. "We are going to change the law. That's going to be Marjory Stoneman Douglas [High School] in that textbook."
Gonzalez targeted President Trump for special criticism. "If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a 'terrible tragedy,'" she said, "I'm going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association." As Gonzalez noted, Trump's presidential campaign was supported by about $30 million in ad buys by the NRA.
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"If you don't do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur," she charged, "that number of gunshot victims will go up and the number that they are worth will go down. And we will be worthless to you." Watch the full speech below. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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