Parkland dads cast diverging viewpoints in Republican and Democratic conventions

“He listens, you know? It just meant a lot to me that he listened and he followed through. He could’ve just taken a picture with the dead student’s father and did nothing. But he’s not like that, President Trump. He’s had me to the White House in different meetings. He truly cares,” Pollack told CNN.

“Just last week he mentioned my daughter’s name at a press conference. With the world on his shoulders, he’s thinking about my daughter,” he added.

“Behind every failed policy that led to my daughter getting killed was some type of unethical Democrat in Broward County,” he said.

“I’m pissed. It was my daughter I am not going to see again. She is not here. She is not here. She is in North Lauderdale at whatever it is, King David Cemetery, that is where I go to see my kid now,” he said at the event, which came after he met with the President privately in the Oval Office.

“How many schools, how many children have to get shot? It stops here with this administration and me. I’m not going to sleep until it is fixed. And Mr. President, we’ll fix it. Because I’m going to fix it. I’m not going to rest,” he continued.

The fathers have since taken divergent political paths with the common goal of ending gun violence.

Divergent paths

Last week, wearing a tie in Jaime’s favorite color, orange, Guttenberg was front and center during the Democrats’ roll call vote.

Pollack, meanwhile, has emerged as a conservative voice in the anti-gun violence movement, and has met with the President and other top administration officials multiple times since the emotional East Room remarks.

Her father continues to speak out against Democratic policies, particularly restorative justice, and calls on parents to get involved in education issues at a local level.

“The Democrats were pushing gun control before the dirt was over my daughter’s coffin, that’s what they did … and they didn’t look at the facts. I wasn’t a hard-right conservative before this and so I looked into the facts and learned what got my daughter murdered. It wasn’t gun control laws, it was policies and people that did nothing,” he said.

As for other Parkland parent activists, Pollack has no hard feelings: “Any parent, in my eyes, that their child was murdered, gets a free pass to say or do what they want.”

Trump administration’s response

In the immediate aftermath of the Parkland massacre, Trump heard emotional stories from people affected by the nation’s deadliest school shootings at that February 2018 listening session, vowing to find a solution to the scourge of gun violence. Despite initial hints of compromise, nothing materialized, and the White House and Congress fell back into blame-shifting.

In February 2019, the newly Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a measure that would require background checks on all firearm sales in the country. Currently, under federal law, only licensed gun dealers must perform background checks for anyone seeking to purchase a firearm, which leaves the sale of guns between individuals largely unregulated. That bill has since been held up in the Senate.

House Democrats advanced a number of other measures through the House Judiciary Committee, but lawmakers have yet to find agreement on any legislative fixes. When Attorney General William Barr met with lawmakers to float a background check proposal, it was met with stiff opposition from some conservatives, and the White House later distanced itself from it.

For his part, Trump never made a decision about which efforts he wanted to endorse — an act that leading Republican lawmakers said they were waiting for before moving forward with legislation.

In addition to the school safety commission, the administration did enact the Fix NICS Act, which incentivizes state authorities to report more data to the country’s gun background check system, in 2018. Congress also passed the STOP School Violence Act in 2018, which aims to provide more training for school officials and local law enforcement to respond to mental health crises, as well as, among other things, money to develop anonymous reporting systems for threats and deterrents like metal detectors and locks.