Katherine Clark: “Last month, I joined my colleague Jared Moskowitz on a tour of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland…”

“Last month, I joined my colleague Jared Moskowitz on a tour of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The school is frozen in time. It is just as it was 6 years ago today when a gunman stole the lives of 17 people. There was a box of chocolates left in a classroom on a stack of textbooks, a stuffed animal with a Valentine's Day balloon sitting on a chair, writing assignments left unfinished, whiteboards covered in lesson plans. It was so ordinary, so hauntingly familiar. It is what you would see today if you walked into any high school on Valentine's Day. And then there was the horror--the broken glass, the bullet holes, the blood stains, the outlines left by children's murdered bodies, two of them right next to the teacher's desk where their classmates and teacher were hiding inches away. Three dads joined us that day. One by one, each of them led us to a spot where his child had been shot to death. One told us of how his daughter had run for safety in a stairwell, how she had missed safety by a split second, and how a single bullet ended her life before it had even begun. Her blood and the blood of her classmates mark the floors of that hallway, and they mark the soul of a country that could have saved them but chose not to.…”