Madam President, a year ago this afternoon, I was sitting in my office in the Russell Office Building when a news report began to flash about a shooting at a high school in South Florida. I was the…
Madam President, a year ago this afternoon, I was sitting in my office in the Russell Office Building when a news report began to flash about a shooting at a high school in South Florida. I was the father at the time--in the case of one of my two older children--of a child who was still a high school student in South Florida. You would normally be interested, just in being a Senator from the State, but you would be most particularly interested as a parent. As it turns out, the incident and the shooting took place at a school that was about 50 miles--about 50 minutes--from my home, and we all know of the story and of the lives that were lost in this terrible tragedy.
On a personal level, it is clearly an issue that has affected me, first, because I am one of two Senators who represent the State. Every person who was impacted--every victim, everyone who was wounded--is a constituent of ours. Yet, as I have also pointed out, my two oldest children are the same ages as the victims. When you see the pictures and you hear the stories, you can't help but recognize the stories and the pictures, maybe just not individually. I didn't know any of the victims personally, but the stories are familiar. They are the stories of my children and their friends, who are of the same age and are at the same times in their lives.
It is impossible to fully comprehend unless you have gone through the loss of a child--by the grace of God, I have not--particularly under such tragic and traumatic circumstances. Throughout the last 12 months, as we have reached different milestones in my two daughters' lives, whether it was their proms or graduation days, or whether it was dropping off my oldest at college or attending a class ring ceremony for a junior, we have been almost reminded, for just a moment, of the parents who had expected to have been doing the same during this time of the year but have been unable.
I have learned a lot from those parents, many of whom I have gotten to know personally and have worked alongside, in the last year, on a number of issues. In the year that has passed, they have, as have the students, turned their grief into effective activism. The parents, in particular, are the ones with whom I have interacted the most here in Washington on a regular basis, and it is why I thought it appropriate to come to the floor today. I think they would say that the best way to honor the memories of the children they lost is to take actions that will work to make sure that no other parent will ever have to face this again.
Several of the parents have publicly described what happened a year ago today as the most avoidable mass murder in American history, but what was it that enabled this to happen? Why was it avoidable? What could have been done to address it?
In the brief moments that we have here--my colleague from Florida will have additional statements as well--I want to point to some of the things we now know that we didn't know a year ago today or in the days that followed.
From it, not only should that spark outrage, but it should also spark ideas about how to fix those things so never again will any parent have to face what they did and none of my colleagues will have to stand here and give a speech like the ones my colleague from Florida and I have to give today.
At the outset, let me say that the credit for much of what I am about to speak about belongs to the extraordinary journalists at the South Florida Sun Sentinel, who have done a remarkable job over the last 10 months of revealing to the public many facts that would have been unknown otherwise.
At a time when there is so much debate about journalism and its role in our society and in public service and in politics, they deserve tremendous credit for bringing this to light, and I think it is an example of why journalism remains an important institution in our country.
A lot of the attention in this debate has been paid to the issues that we are familiar with and have been debating long before this tragedy: a ban on certain weapons, universal background checks, taking on what is described as the gun lobby. These issues dominated the national media coverage, and support for these positions is not new. They predate this tragedy.
In our Republic, people most certainly have the right to advocate for this or against it. They have the right to lobby for it. They have the right to vote for candidates who support these positions and to vote against those who do not. They are valid issues to debate on public policy, but at the end of the day, neither go directly to the heart of this particular case and to the facts that led up to it.
At the heart of this is that the killer, the perpetrator of this terrible tragedy, was known to be dangerous for a long time by many people in positions of power and authority at the school district, the sheriff's office, and at the FBI, and no one did anything about it. This is now a documented fact.
Early in the days after this, we saw images of the sheriff and the superintendent lecturing people and talking about what a great job they had done, but the facts will show that it was their incompetence that allowed this to happen, and, then, even worse, they tried to cover it up.
There is an article entitled ``Schools culture of tolerance lets students like [the killer] slide,'' by Megan O'Matz and Scott Travis, reporters at the South Florida Sun Sentinel. I am going to read from it, and then I am going to introduce it into the Record. I am not going to read the whole article.
Here is how it opens:
Broward schools have grown so tolerant of misbehavior that
students like [the killer] are able to slide by for years
without strict punishment for conduct that could be criminal.
The culture of leniency allows children to engage in an
endless loop of violations and second chances, creating a
system where kids who commit the same offense for the 10th
time may be treated like it's the first. . . .
[The killer] was suspended at least 67 days over less than
a year and a half at Westglades Middle School, and his
problems continued at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. .
. .
The South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained the killer's discipline records, they reviewed discipline policies, and here is what they found:
Students can be considered first-time offenders even if
they commit the same offense year after year.
The district's claim of reforming bad behavior is
exaggerated.
Lenient discipline has an added PR benefit for the
district: lower suspensions, expulsions and arrests along
with rising graduation rates.
It goes on to say:
Many teachers and parents say Broward has created a culture
in which teachers are expressly told or subtly pressured not
to send students to the administration for punishment so a
school's image is not tarnished.
One teacher who taught for 37 years in the district before retiring said she
retired early due to her concerns about student discipline.
Here is a quote:
It was so many things. I had three students bring knives to
my classroom. One was out of the classroom for one day.
Another had so many things on his record, he was gone for
five days. None were expelled.
Part of this leniency is a program called the Promise program, which the superintendent of the district claims has a 90-percent success rate by keeping students from reoffending. That is a misleading statistic because, ``A student can commit a subsequent infraction without being considered a repeat offender as long as it's not the exact same violation, in the exact same year.
Each year they start with a clean slate.
In the interest of time, I ask unanimous consent that the rest of this article be entered into the Record.
The second article--I will be brief on this--is from the Sun Sentinel, by Scott Travis: ``Broward schools fought against 2013 plan for more security money.''
They turned down a proposal to levy $55 million in tax dollars for school safety, and one of the quotes is this:
One of the school board members slammed the proposal. They
said they'd rather ask voters for money to improve technology
and renovate old schools, which they did in November of 2014.
In hindsight, that was a terrible mistake.
There is another article from the Sun Sentinel: ``What's being done to stop another school shooting.'' Again, it is a very long article. I will just say this:
Once he decided to shoot up a school, there wasn't much to
stop [the killer].
His threats were ignored, the campus was wide open, the
school doors were unlocked and students had nowhere to hide.
What has changed after 10 months since the shooting? This was back on December 29, 2018.
At least a quarter of campuses do not have single-entry
points to control intruders. Safe spaces to protect children
in classrooms haven't been identified.
The killer wasn't welcome at that high school, by the way.
He was known by former classmates and even administrators
as a potential school shooter. And still he walked right onto
campus.
It goes on to say:
[The killer] didn't keep his homicidal urges quiet. But the
schools incompetently handled the threat he represented to
his fellow classmates and teachers.
[The killer's] lust for violence had been documented
officially 69 times in his life. At least 30 people knew of
his troubling behavior before the shooting.
In fact, I have here with me the record of those 69 discipline points. It is extensive, and I ask unanimous consent that that record be entered into the Record.
Wrapping up on this point, there is another article from the Sun Sentinel entitled ``Hide, deny, spin, threaten: How the school district tried to mask failures that led to Parkland shooting.'' It talks about efforts that were made by the school district to keep from the public the sorts of things that we are now finding out.
Finally, ``Here's what the [school district] knew about the Parkland shooter'' is another article that talks about, time and again, how this killer told people he was going to do this--not just one person, but multiple people--and nothing was in place to do anything about it.
I wrap up with a couple of points. The first is that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission empaneled by the State looked at these shootings and from it, I think, are pretty instructive of some of the things I hope we can work on together. It looked at a 20-year period and found that 48 individuals committed 46 of these attacks, and 35 were students, and 10 were former students. So 45 of the 48 were either students or former students.
It found that the most typical weapon used was a semiautomatic pistol. It found that 50 percent of these attacks were done with weapons that were taken from the home--not even purchased, but taken from the home. It found that in four of five incidents, at least one person had some knowledge that they were going to do this, and in more than half of the cases, at least two people knew they were going to do this.
It is on the basis of these discoveries, working with many of the parents whose children lost their lives a year
ago today, that last year we pursued on a bipartisan basis and passed the STOP School Violence Act, which provides, over a 10-year period, $100 million a year for strengthening school security, providing school training to identify threats before they take action, and creating school threat assessments and crisis intervention. That has passed.
It is why this year I have reintroduced the Extreme Risk Protection Order and Violence Protection Act, which will dedicate the Department of Justice funds to incentivize States to give law enforcement the authority to prevent individuals that pose a threat to themselves or others the ability to purchase or possess firearms, so that if information like what was available to authorities in Parkland is available to people now, they can actually go to court--to prove their case with due process, and take the guns away from this person before they go out and commit this crime. More importantly, they can alert their parents to secure the guns at home so they don't use that gun to commit the crime.
I have also introduced a bipartisan bill, the Threat Assessment Prevention and Safety Act. It creates a task force of experts to provide recommendations for a national strategy to keep our communities safe from targeted violence through threat assessment and management, which experts say is the best way to identify potential killers before they act.
If something like this had been in place, it is highly likely that authorities, putting all this together--what we know today--would have said this individual is a serious threat and we need to do something about it before they take action.
And, finally, yesterday, Senator Grassley and I reintroduced the EAGLES Act, which would reauthorize and expand the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center to help communities proactively mitigate threats of violence in schools.
It is my hope that this terrible tragedy and what we have learned about it will guide us and will provide us a road map of concrete steps that we can take to empower communities, schools, and police departments and parents and families with the tools they need, not just to identify people who are potentially violent but to prevent it from happening and to get out ahead of it--maybe it is a risk assessment or maybe it is institutionalized mental health or wraparound services, but anything that can be done.
I raise all of this today because if you were to speak to the families, as I know my colleague from Florida and I often do, they will tell you that the most important thing we can do to honor the memory of their children whom they lost in this terrible tragedy is to make sure it doesn't happen to anybody else.
Now, there is one more thing we would like to do to honor the victims of this tragedy. My colleague Senator Scott and I have put forth a resolution that commemorates this day. It honors the survivors. It pledges continued support for their recovery. It recognizes the strength and resiliency of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the community that surrounds it. It expresses gratitude to the emergency medical and healthcare professionals of the community for their efforts in responding and caring for the victims and survivors. Most of all, it commemorates the victims who were killed in the attack, and it offers the Senate's heartfelt condolences and deepest sympathies to the families, loved ones, and friends of the victims.
Madam President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 71, submitted earlier today.
I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
I yield the floor.
