Parkland Students & Pain After Pro-Gun Candidates Win: 'I'm Shaking With Anger'
Despite months of tireless campaigning, student activists watched with frustration as Florida races failed to bring change. The Guardian, Nov. 7, 2018. Election night brought new sadness and frustration to Parkland, Florida, where a school shooting in February left 17 people dead.
Gun control made some advances nationwide. Democrats, who have embraced gun control as a winning campaign issue, took control of the House of Representatives, where only two years ago, lawmakers held a sit-in on the House floor because Republican leaders refused even to allow a vote on stricter gun laws.
Some Republicans backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) lost their races, including in Virginia, Texas and Colorado, where a gun control advocate defeated the NRA-endorsed incumbent who had represented Columbine and Aurora, the sites of two of America’s deadliest mass shootings.
But in Florida, less than nine months after one of the country’s deadliest school shootings, and just days after a mass shooting at a yoga studio in the state’s capital, voters selected pro-gun candidates in the state’s two major races, for governor and for US Senate.
After months of nonstop campaigning to vote out the politicians blocking gun laws, the students who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting this February, and the parents of their classmates who were killed, will be living in a state with an NRA-endorsed governor and two senators with a long history of NRA support.
“I’m shaking with anger right now,” Jacyln Corin, a high school senior who helped found the March for Our Lives student movement, told a room of fellow activists at an election watch party in Parkland on Tuesday night. “It’s like the same feeling I was getting the night of 14 February, so angry that I don’t know what to do with that anger.”
“We’re not going to stop fighting,” she promised, looking at the father of Joaquin Oliver, the 17-year-old murdered at their school. “I can tell you, I’m doing this for the rest of my life.”
After months of nonstop campaigning to vote out the politicians blocking gun laws, the students who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting this February, and the parents of their classmates who were killed, will be living in a state with an NRA-endorsed governor and two senators with a long history of NRA support. -Read More...
(*Note: FL Senate & Gov. candidates Nelson & Gillum are requesting election recounts).
More, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/07/parkland-student-activists-florida-races-pro-gun-nra
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when little else does. I applaud their efforts and continued work for safety and justice for our country!
