Lifetime Parkland, Florida, resident Jared Moskowitz was in the state capital doing his job as a state representative when he found out his kid’s preschool was on lockdown due to the active shooter situation at his alma mater, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He immediately caught a plane home to be with his constituents.
After Moskowitz arrived and he met with the families waiting for details about their children, he said he began to realize what the families of the Pulse victims also knew: “My colleagues will do nothing.”
“You know what is going to happen after this? Nothing,” he said. “Politicians need to look these parents in the face and say: We will do nothing.”
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Moskowitz, a Democrat, lives just blocks away from the campus where Wednesday’s shooting left 17 dead. He graduated from the school in 1999, just like fallen football coach Aaron Feis, who died protecting students. He knows Parkland. His political career began there, as city commissioner. Since landing in the Sunshine State legislature, Moskowitz has historically stood for increased gun restrictions, long before a mass shooting landed in his lap.
“We’ve seen this show before,’’ he said Thursday. “Now it’s in my hometown. While my 4-year-old son was learning to write his name in preschool, his teacher’s daughter was killed in the shooting. We live in the most powerful country in the world and we have failed our children.”
Florida is also pretty dang gun-friendly. In 2017, Guns & Ammo placed it at No. 12 on its annual “Best States For Gun Owners” list. It made the same list in 2015, receiving this gushing review:
For many years, Florida’s gun laws have been the envy of gun owners nationwide. The Sunshine State places no restrictions upon modern firearms, magazines or NFA items, and the state has a healthy competitive shooting network.
Meanwhile, Parkland is known for being the “safest city in Florida, and appears to have no gun shops within city limits, though there are several in nearby Coral Springs, so the city’s zoning choices aren’t likely to keep guns out of anyone’s hands. It’s the laws of the “Gunshine State,” as much as federal laws, that Moskowitz says make it impossible to enact real change at the municipal level.
He noted that state law prevents local government officials from passing stronger laws to protect people from mass shootings, even allowing for the arrest of officials who do.
“This kid walked into a Broward gun shop and bought an assault weapon,” he said.
Moskowitz also shared some ideas for how to improve gun control, but acknowledged that it won’t be easy to implement change, even if politicians did go for it.
“We need the stronger background checks to include people who have mental health issues and people who are telling others they want to hurt people,” he said. “If someone is telling everyone they want to hurt people, if they broadcast it on social media, can’t we at least agree to change the law to prevent them from being able to buy a gun? If we can’t agree on that, we can’t agree on anything.”
But, Moskowitz added, “it’s not a lack of resources. It’s a lack of action and leadership.”
And as Moskowitz told CNN Thursday:
We’ve created this. We can pray to God, but God didn’t do this. This is a manmade issue, it’s only gonna be solved by man. And we’re not going to solve it, because the system is rigged.
Neither side will give an inch. They will do nothing.
Which begs the question: what has to happen so that lawmakers actually do something?