Wednesday’s Miami Herald carried a compelling story about the father of a slain Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School senior who blames “gutlessness” rather than guns, and amounts to a blistering indictment of official incompetence and Democrat exploitation.
Reporter Glenn Garvin’s gripping, sometimes heart-wrenching profile of Andrew Pollack, who is moving away from the community where his daughter, Meadow, would have graduated from the Parkland, Fla. high school in June, is listed as one of the Herald’s “trending stories.” It tells the compelling tale of a man who has experienced his share of ups and downs, but nothing like the cratering of his life when his daughter didn’t come home from school forever following the Valentine’s Day slaughter that claimed 17 lives; an attack that – according to the story – Pollack believes might have been thwarted but for incompetence.
At one point, Pollack is quoted as he plays a video that was apparently from a police body cam recorded outside the school.
“Hear that,” Pollack asks. “Those are gunshots. That’s my little girl being shot. That’s my little girl being murdered. While this deputy gets dressed. It took them 11 minutes to get to the hallway where she died.”
But his anger goes beyond what lawmen didn’t do that day.
“All the Democrats wanted to talk about was guns,” Pollack told the newspaper, about the aftermath of the mass shooting. “That’s what’s on their agenda, and they wanted to hijack the shootings to advance their cause. They don’t want to look at the actual facts.”
Pollack has become an activist, and his perspective evidently does not fit well anymore with the community. As the story notes, “In the process, he’s been heaped with vicious abuse — more than one, many more than one, Twitter troll has said losing his daughter was a just reward for supporting President Donald Trump — and has lost friends. Worse yet, he’s lost faith in his neighbors.”
Pollack and his wife have left the area “for parts unknown,” the story says.
Perhaps he should have stuck around a few days longer. A draft report released last week by the commission appointed to examine the Parkland tragedy included several recommendations, including one that has infuriated the gun prohibitionists: arming volunteer teachers. Pollack was a member of that group until he resigned in June to pursue his own investigation and support candidates for the school board.
According to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Congressman Ted Deutch, a Democrat, ripped the idea.
“Teachers want to teach, not be armed for combat in their classrooms,” Deutch contended. “Law enforcement cannot push their responsibilities to make our communities safer on to civilians that should be focused on educating their students.”
But Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, who serves on the panel, had a much different opinion.
“In the ideal world, we shouldn’t need anyone on campus with a gun, but that’s not the world we live in today,” the sheriff observed to the newspaper. “One’s not enough. Two’s not enough. We need multiple people in order to protect the children.”
According to the Miami Herald, Pollack believes there has been far too much focus on “trying to re-engineer America into a gun-free society.” That much is obvious to Second Amendment activists from coast to coast, who have witnessed sustained efforts to erode their rights over the past few years.
Heading in 2019, Democrats remain on the warpath against gun owners and the Second Amendment. They’re not even being subtle about it. New Jersey just criminalized possession of ammunition magazines that hold more than ten rounds. Washington anti-gunners just passed an initiative that strips 18-20-year-olds of their right to purchase and possess any semiautomatic rifle, while re-classifying all semi-autos as “assault rifles.”
Some Capitol Hill Democrats plan to push so-called “universal background check” legislation and others want to revive and make permanent the Clinton-era ban on so-called “assault weapons.”
And this week the Trump administration signed an order banning bump stocks and similar novelty devices, turning them into a symbol against which activists and anti-gunners could collide.
Lawsuits are in the works to challenge the ban, and with Democrats taking control of the U.S. House, rights activists are preparing for a very bumpy ride.
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