7 years after the Parkland school massacre, is America any safer from guns?
Manuel Oliver won’t commemorate Friday's seventh anniversary of the Parkland school shooting. Instead, he and his family keep that tragedy alive every day.
Oliver’s 17-year-old son, Joaquin – known to friends as “Guac’’ – was one of the 17 people killed Feb. 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, the country’s deadliest high school shooting to this day.
The bloodshed at the hands of a teenager with a semiautomatic rifle spurred unusual activism from surviving students. Led by Cameron Kasky, David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez and others, they helped bring about the March for Our Lives, a massive demonstration and now an organization demanding lawmakers tighten gun laws.
With the national media shining a light on them, the high schoolers spoke out and called for action. Gonzalez went as far as saying during a rally: “We will be the last mass shooting,” a prediction that has not come to pass.
Others like Oliver and his wife, Patricia Padauy-Oliver, have taken on a different type of activism, providing daily reminders of the devastating impacts of gun violence even as a nation largely inure to such calamities moves on after them.
'The American dream turns into a nightmare'
Oliver said his family of four, which immigrated from Venezuela in 2003, had gained U.S. citizenship a year before former Marjory Stoneman Douglas student Nikolas Cruz, 19, gunned down 14 students and three members of the school staff.
“We had gone through all the stages of being an immigrant, and when you least expect it, the American dream turns into a nightmare, and there’s no going back from that,’’ Oliver said.
Oliver, 57, and his wife founded a nonprofit called Change the Ref, which seeks to increase awareness of mass shootings and influence the social response to them. He now appears in a one-man play he co-wrote called “GUAC’’ – currently at a Washington, D.C., theater – that tells the family’s story and how it was so dramatically altered seven years ago.
Oliver says it’s one of the many ways they honor Joaquin’s memory and thrust the way he died front and center.
“Some families choose not to keep the tragedy fresh. We choose the opposite,’’ he said. “We choose to remind people daily – on many occasions every day, through social media, interviews, campaigns, art, theater – that this happened, that this is a reality that has been normalized in our country, and that it should not be that way.’’
A new obstacle: Trump orders review of firearms rules
The efforts of gun safety activists like him, the Parkland survivors and many others may run into a monumental obstacle in the administration of President Donald Trump, who a week ago signed an executive order calling for a broad review of federal firearms regulations.
Experts see that as the first step toward reversing gun laws enacted under former President Joe Biden and possibly going further in deregulating firearms.
John Feinblatt, president of the Everytown for Gun Safety advocacy group, pointed out that mass killings in recent years prompted legislators on both sides of the aisle to bolster gun laws, such as when Florida raised the minimum age to buy rifles from 18 to 21 after Parkland.
He warned against taking a step back.
“In the wake of the mass tragedy in Parkland, Florida, then-Gov. Rick Scott and a Republican-dominated legislature enacted a Red Flag law,’’ Feinblatt said, also noting that Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act weeks after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022.
“This bipartisan action has helped drive violent crime to a 50-year low, which drives home the key point: Any attempts to roll back recent progress will only put our nation’s law enforcement and families at risk.”
Experts fear 'adverse consequences' of reversing gun laws
Though limited in scope, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was the first major federal gun control legislation enacted in nearly three decades. It boosted background checks for buyers under 21, clarified what constitutes a “federally licensed firearms dealer’’ and forbade gun sales to convicted domestic violence abusers in a dating relationship.
In addition, the Biden administration prompted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to strictly enforce regulations for gun dealers and also cracked down on “ghost guns,’’ untraceable firearms without a serial number that are assembled from parts.
According to the Department of Justice, the number of ghost guns recovered by law enforcement skyrocketed from 1,758 in 2016 to 19,344 in 2021, a surge of more than 1,000%. Nearly 700 of those weapons were involved in suspected homicides or attempted homicides.
Robert Spitzer, adjunct professor at the College of William and Mary School of Law and the author of six books on gun policy, said he expects laxer ATF enforcement under Trump and the reversal of restrictions on ghost guns and at gun shows, saying those moves will eventually have “adverse consequences.’’
“Most Americans don’t agree with these things, but it will be below the radar screens of most people,’’ Spitzer said. “There’s so much going on, so much overhauling, agencies that are being dismantled, etc., that guns are not the No. 1 issue for most people.’’
Parkland, like Sandy Hook, was thought to be a game changer
The subject often grows in importance after high-profile massacres such as the one in Parkland, which Spitzer believes had an impact on the 2018 midterms – where Democrats regained control of the House – and the 2020 election of Biden, a longtime supporter of gun control.
The students’ stunning reaction shortly after the shooting, refusing to succumb to their grief and calling out ineffectual politicians, captured the nation while also drawing backlash from the far-right. Time magazine named them on its list of the most influential people of 2018.
“(They) said, ‘This didn’t just happen. This is a failure of our leaders. We don’t want your thoughts and prayers. We want you to do what you were voted into office to do, which is to enact legislation to protect people,’’’ Spitzer said. “It had positive effects for those promoting gun safety.’’
Now the question is whether those effects will endure.
The 2012 slaughter of 20 young children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was thought to be the turning point in the long-running clash between gun safety and gun rights advocates − yet it resulted in no significant congressional action.
The legislative gains for those seeking to prevent gun violence have been incremental since then, at least at the federal level.
Tragedies still leave a legacy of gun violence prevention
But Kristin Goss, a professor of public policy and political science at Duke University who has studied the gun debate, said the impact of those horrendous tragedies should be looked at from a larger perspective.
Though no major piece of legislation came from the Sandy Hook rampage, Goss noted several state laws changed, organizing picked up, more people got involved and money started flowing toward the gun control cause. Parkland had a similar effect, she said.
“Each of these tragedies brought more people and more constituencies into the gun violence-prevention group,’’ Goss said. “I think what Parkland brought in was a very public platform for young people. They started an organization, they developed chapters around that. It was another piece of this mosaic of gun violence-prevention advocates.’’