(FreedomBeacon.com)- The father whose 14-year-old daughter was slain in the Parkland school shooting said that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and GOP politicians around the country were at least partially to blame for the recent mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo.
Fred Guttenberg has been at the forefront of campaigning for tighter gun control since his daughter Jaime was one of the people killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Recently, he spoke to Newsweek and said there isn’t much that can be done to stop another mass shooter from just continuing on this same path, since they have easy access to deadly firearms.
He said:
We have a gun problem in America. The next person who wants to do this can very easily today, go acquire all the means to do it. We must deal with the reality of easy access to weapons.
“This is not an attack on gun owners. This is not an attack on the Second Amendment. It’s an attack on the reality [of] gun violence, and we ned to attack that problem.”
To that end, Guttenberg said that he believes lawmakers who say they’re pro-Second Amendment and wield guns around in public proudly are partly to blame for other mass shootings like the one that happened recently in Buffalo.
He explained:
“There is absolute data and research that shows troubled young people are inspired by the imagery that they see of powerful people with guns.
“The problem is, you can’t pretend that we don’t have a problem with easy access for guns to those who intend harm. And we have these young people who, unfortunately, think they can solve issues this way. They can’t.”
The suspect in the Buffalo shooting, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, is an apparent White Supremacist who targeted the Black community with this shooting. In addition to traveling hours to get to the grocery store, where he killed 10 people, he also told authorities that he studied previous mass shootings before he did so.
What has made matters worse is that Gendron was actually investigated in the past. In June of 2021, authorities looked at him after he made a threat to instigate a shooting at his high school.
He was never charged with a crime for that incident and didn’t have any further contact with law enforcement. All that happened at the time, according to a report from The Associated Press, is that he was taken to a hospital to receive a mental health evaluation, and then he was released.
Guttenberg has said that part of the issue with the gun violence is that GOP politicians seem to be embracing it rather than denouncing it. He specifically pointed to DeSantis, who didn’t condemn rallies held by neo-Nazis earlier in the year.
As the Parkland father said:
“Whether or not he’s intentionally embracing it or not, in Florida, over the past few months, there have been multiple instances of white supremacists showing up and being really disgusting and evil.
“The governor and his administration, rather than call it out and call it what it is, which is abhorrent, disgusting, despicable, and it has no place in Florida. They instead said, ‘Oh, those aren’t our people. We don’t know anything about it.'”
