Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to remind this body of the 5-year anniversary of the shooting at my high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, in my hometown of Parkland on February 14, and the 17 lives we lost that day. I remember that day like it was yesterday. My wife called. I was on the floor of the Florida legislature, and she told me that she had just passed the high school, and she had never seen that many police officers in her life. We would soon find out that 17 people didn't make it out of the building, most of them children. I went home. I went to the school. I saw what it looks like when a mass shooting comes to your neighborhood, to your high school. I went to the hotel where they were keeping the families of the children that were missing. I knew they weren't missing. Eight hours those families were in a hotel ballroom waiting to hear from the local police department and the FBI what floor their kid died on in the building. I didn't hear crying. I heard screaming. It haunts me. I brought my colleagues to the school from the Florida legislature, Republicans and Democrats. They got to see what it looks like when backpacks are piled up outside, when bullet holes are trying to go through classroom glass, what it looks like when homework is scattered in the hallway and where there is blood outside the front door where someone passed away. These parents now have empty rooms in their homes, empty chairs at the dinner table. There is no graduation. There is no college.…”