Florida school shooting: ‘The sickness that gripped our country’
"'My kid is dead' goes through my head all day and all night. I keep hearing it over and over," the father of Meadow Pollack said at the funeral for his daughter at Temple Kol Tikvah last Friday, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
“‘MY kid is dead’ goes through my head all day and all night. I keep hearing it over and over,” the father of Meadow Pollack said at the funeral for his daughter at Temple Kol Tikvah last Friday, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
“I have always been able to protect my family,” Andrew Pollack told more than 1000 mourners including Florida Governor Rick Scott. “Our kids should be safe but my princess wasn’t safe.”
Meadow, 18, was one of the 17 students and staff members killed in the high school shooting last Wednesday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, five of them Jewish: four students, Meadow, Jaime Guttenberg, Alyssa Alhadeff and Alex Schachter, and one teacher, Scott Beigel.
Safety, or the lack of it, was also paramount in the mind of Jaime’s aunt Abbie Youkilis. She doesn’t want prayers. She wants action.
In an emotional Facebook post published last week, her aunt called guns a national disease and demanded change.
“Fred and Jen are the world’s most loving and over-protective parents but they could not protect Jaime from the sickness that has gripped our country,” she said of Jaime’s parents.
“Unless we change, nobody can protect us. My friends and fellow citizens, your guns are not protecting you. Your guns are killing our kids.”
Youkilis wrote that her niece was a beautiful girl who looked out for others, and that she one day hoped to become an occupational therapist and have kids of her own.
“She was a pretty girl with the world’s best smile and her soul was sensitive and compassionate,” Youkilis wrote.
“She was intelligent and feisty and she danced with beauty and grace. She always looked out for the underdog and the bullied and she probably had been kind to the student who shot her.”
Youkilis, a doctor, wrote that her brother, Jaime’s uncle, recently died from a cancer stemming from the September 11, 2001 terror attack in New York.
She compared the national response to mass shootings with the massive legislative and military response to 9/11.
“Our country came together after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to overcome evil,” she wrote. “We fought 2 wars, we subjected ourselves to onerous changes in air travel security, and we willingly gave up civil liberties to give ourselves the illusion of safety.”
She blamed the National Rifle Association and pro-gun politicians for mass shootings. She said voters should demand gun control legislation and politicians who care about life more than gun rights.
“My family does not want your hopes and prayers,” she wrote. “We want your action. Join us in fighting the NRA. Join us in deposing any politician who cares more about campaign contributions than my beautiful Jaime. Join us in supporting leaders who will bravely fight for our children’s lives.”
Youkilis’ post has resonated, being shared more than 6700 times in the first 17 hours since it was published.
Not surprisingly, not everyone agrees with Youkilis or other victims’ family members who think this week’s tragedy is an occasion for debating gun control.
Rep. Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who was gravely wounded in a shooting last year, told Fox News on Thursday that Americans should “Go pray for these families, care about these families. Don’t try to promote your agenda in the middle of a tragedy.
“Any time there’s any kind of tragedy, I mean a shooting, a bombing whatever – immediately you’ve got a group of legislators that go run out and start calling for gun control to take away the rights of law-abiding citizens,” Scalise said.
“Look at their bills. Read their bills, they have nothing to do with these kinds of shootings.”
But Youkilis disagrees. “Don’t tell me not to politicise this. Jaime would want me to. This is political and now this is personal. If not now, when? If not us, who?” she wrote, quoting the 1st century sage Hillel. “If we don’t finally ACT, the sickness of gun violence will kill us all.”
The call for urgent action was shared by the mother of 14-year-old Alyssa Alhadeff, who also lost her life last Wednesday.
In an intensely emotional interview with CNN, Lori Alhadeff yelled at the camera and begged Trump to take action.
“The gunman, a crazy person, just walks into the school, breaks down the window of my child’s door and starts shooting, shooting her, and killing her,” Alhadeff said.
“President Trump, you say what can you do? You can stop the guns from getting into these children’s hands. Put metal detectors at every entrance to the schools.
“What can you do? You can do a lot. This is not fair to our families, that our children go to school and have to get killed. I just spent the last two hours putting the burial arrangements for my daughter’s funeral, who’s 14. President Trump, please do something, do something, action, we need it now!”
JTA
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