Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was one of the victims at the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day 2018, slammed President Biden for using the third anniversary of the shooting to push his gun control plan. Pollack told Newsmax TV’s Grant Stinchfield that he was disgusted with Biden’s course of action.
Pollack, the author of “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students,” was asked by Stinchfield, “How do you sum up the state of school security three years later, and all the work that you’ve done to keep kids safe?”
“I was so disgusted that Biden, on the anniversary of my daughter getting murdered, announced — you know, his administration announced — that they were going to do all these, put all these gun control measures in place,” Pollack answered. “And he mentioned the Parkland shooting. Every one of those [gun control measures] that he wants to put in place wouldn’t have made a difference in my daughter getting murdered in Parkland. They’re not capable of looking at solutions.”
“What I did, I took a step back when the media — mainstream media — was attacking our Second Amendment,” he continued. “I took a step back, and I looked into the failures in Parkland, and I dissected them one by one, Grant, ’cause I wanted to make a difference, I wanted to help law enforcement with their response to a mass shooting, and that’s what I did. I came up with an organization called ‘School Safety Grant.’ Any law enforcement agency, I urge them to go on schoolsafetygrant.org. Go on my website, we dissect all the failures. When you put just gun control measures in, you mask solutions, okay, because they’re very simple-minded, you know, they’re not able to look at, really, the failures. And that’s what we did. There were so many failures in Parkland. All those students and the media, they jumped on the gun control bandwagon.”
Pollack spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention, where he stated:
In 2018, a gunman walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and changed my life forever. My name is Andrew Pollack, his name isn’t worth saying. One of the seniors walking in the hallways that day was my beautiful daughter, Meadow. She was just months away from graduating and beginning a new life. We were so proud of the woman she had become, but in the hallway on that third floor, the gunman saw Meadow and shot her down the hallway, hitting her four times.
After she was shot and on the floor, she crawled over to another student, a freshman girl to protect her. She draped her body over her and then the scumbag gunman shot my daughter at point blank range five more times killing Meadow and the girl she was shielding. She had a whole life ahead of her and in that life, she could have done anything and been anything. So many moments that I waited so long for were taken from me. I didn’t get to drop her off at college. I didn’t get to walk her down the aisle, but every moment was taken from her, and for what?
I never wanted this to become a political spectacle, but it did. I never wanted to meet the president like this, but I did. I was invited to the White House. The truth is I had just buried my daughter that week. I really wasn’t interested in public events like a tour or a photo op. I was interested in answers and solutions. So, if the president wanted to meet me personally, I said I’d go. They said of course that was his plan.
At the White House, my family and I sat with the president in the oval office and told him about Meadow. I told them what we knew. I told them that his administration needed to take a closer look at what went wrong and why. I got to see who President Trump really is. He’s a good man and a great listener and he cuts through the BS. Then the president did what he said he would do. He took action. He formed a school safety commission that issued dozens of recommendations to make school safer, but I’ll bet you never heard about that. Instead, the media turned my daughter’s murder into a coordinated attack on President Trump, Republicans and our second amendment.
In fact, when President Trump asked me and other parents of children that were murdered in school shootings to join him as he announced the commission’s findings, the media’s first question wasn’t about protecting kids. Shockingly, they asked about the government shutdown. President Trump turned to me appalled and said, “Andy, can you believe these people? We’re trying to talk about school safety and this is what they do.” But, I could believe it.
After my daughter’s murder, the media didn’t seem interested in the facts. So, I found them myself. I learned that gun control laws didn’t fail my daughter, people did. The gunman had threatened to kill his classmates before. He had threatened to rape them. He had threatened to shoot up the school. Every red flag you could imagine, but the school didn’t just miss these red flags, they knowingly ignored them. Far left Democrats in our school district made this shooting possible because they implemented something they called restorative justice. This policy, which really just blames teachers for student’s failures puts kids and teachers at risk and make shootings more likely, but it was built as a pioneering approach to discipline and safety. I was just fine with the old approach to discipline and safety. It was called discipline and safety, but the Obama-Biden administration took Parkland’s bad policies and forced them into schools across America.
When President Trump rescinded Obama’s guidance on restorative justice policies, he put an end to that and that meant the world to me. It’s hard to tell how much Mr. Biden understands about what happened at Parkland. Mr. Biden has campaigned on bringing back restorative justice as part of his unity platform with Bernie Sanders and has pledged to implement in school districts across America, but he doesn’t even seem to know when the shooting happened. He said that he was vice president when it happened, but he wasn’t.
Mr. Biden may not know when my daughter was murdered, but I do, February 14th, 2018. Mr. Biden may not know that these policies make shootings more likely, but I do. Mr. Biden may not know who was vice president that day, but I do. It wasn’t Joe Biden. It was Mike Pence. Thank God. I know who the president was too. It wasn’t Barack Obama, it was President Donald J. Trump and he took action. I truly believe the safety of our kids depends on whether this man is reelected. I hope you’ll join me in helping to make that happen.