Student: The News Won’t Share What I Have To Say, So… Here I Am (Parkland, Florida)

My submission is out of pure anger and what is becoming a disgust towards the local authorities in my area and the other kids that I go to school with.  I’m 17 years old, I’m a Senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and I’m only willing to say that my name is J.  I grew up in Parkland, Florida, was born and raised here and have attended school here my entire life.

What I have to say is all truths and facts and to be honest, there’s nobody out there that’s really willing to hear the story from my point of view or a lot of our point of views (at leas that’s how they make me feel).  It seems like the news only wants to talk to those of us that have to say what “they want us to say”.  I’m not saying I haven’t spoken to the news, because I have, but they don’t ever publicize what I’ve said.  They also don’t publicize what some of my friends have had to say and I know this because they talked to the media (CNN) right after I did.  It’s obviously not what they want to hear, or my point of views don’t matter to them. So here I am, and I found this site when I searched on Google incase you’re interested, so here I am.

First off, the cops in our city are like magnets on us.  If we drive home from school and go a few miles over the speeding limit, we get pulled over right away.  If there’s too many of us riding around in a car, we get pulled over right away, that actually happened to me last month.  If we swerve to the left or to the right, we get pulled over.  If we don’t stop at a stop sign, we get pulled over.  Yet, when the shooting started in our school, the same cops that pull us over, stayed outside.

This is what we’ve been saying on the news the whole time.  The cop who can be a total asshole to us in school and question us to no extent over some weed in school or one time when a friend of mine was caught with a porn magazine, this same cop was called into the office.  Yet, here he is hiding with his gun when we needed him the most.  If he would have just came into the school and did his job, who knows what would have happened?  This is what his training was for and obviously he got scared.  He was inside the school until that happened and then he left, abandoning us all.  Then there’s the other cops that were on the scene who just stayed outside while we were all hunkered down, getting shot at and scared for our lives.  We were left alone and abandoned.  I’m literally shaking as I type this because I could have died and almost did.

COBRA Says:  The cops that bailed on that school should be ashamed of themselves.  Furthermore, they all should be stripped of their badges, removed from their posts, banned from being a law enforcement officer for life.  It’s PROTECT & SERVE, not RUN & HIDE, Scumbags…  

So when the media came and started hounding us, they weren’t there out of compassion or out of kindness, they were there for the story.  I thought for sure that I would see my face on the news along with some of my friends and other kids (students) I know.  Instead, the news only had some of us on there even though they talked to a lot of us and then they just kept talking to those same ones over and over again.  Because what they had to say is what “their stories” were tied into.

The reality is that the majority of us, me, my friends and at least a dozen other people I know that were interviewed and talked to CNN and other news outlets all told them how we felt.  They asked us all the same type of questions.  “How are you feeling”,  “Did you witness the shooter?”, “How do you feel about guns?”, “Did you know anyone that was hurt today”, “What do you think should be done moving forward to prevent this type of thing from happening”.  Questions like that.

“if someone wants to kill someone, they are going to kill someone.”

I talked to about 5 different people who had microphones and one guy who had a recorder (whoever you are please put this in quotes because this is basically what I said, and I want this to be known because I’m upset and angered that they’ve used this shooting and my friends and even me and my city and everyone like puppets for their agenda.  They don’t even care about us, it’s all about something that they want to do or something that they want to accomplish that helps them, not about helping us, not about caring about what happened).  “The fact is that removing guns just doesn’t make sense.  If you remove guns from people you’re taking the guns from law-abiding individuals, those are the people that are documented that have guns.  How do you go about removing the guns from the undocumented people, the criminals for example that you don’t even know have them?  How do you justify removing guns from good people while obviously leaving millions of guns in the hands of people who aren’t good.  How do you tell if someone is good or bad?  You don’t.  The reality is to prevent something like this from happening, you have a cop in the school with a gun who can stop them, he failed his job, he let this happen.  His gun could have ended what happened to us a lot faster and sooner and could have saved who knows how many lives.  Does less guns really prevent something like this from happening?  I don’t think so.  The next thing that will happen is there will be metal detectors and then the people that really want to do the killing will start making bombs using the anarchists cookbook or something.  It won’t end.  The reality is that if someone wants to kill someone, they are going to kill someone.  If someone is a murderer they are a murderer.  A gun makes it easier for someone to kill, but that doesn’t mean that if they can’t get access to guns that they wouldn’t start making other devices and using other methods to achieve their end goals.  It should be common sense.  Instead what I think should happen is that there are armed police in each school – who are trained specifically for a school shooting and maybe even teachers (not all) but a certain percentage in each school should have a CCW and carry a gun.  It’s not practical to have all teachers carry guns because some are against it, but there are probably half in the school who would like to, so why not allow them to opt for it?  Why not allow teachers that have CCW’s or want to get CCW’s to allow them to do that and bring in guns?  I think that if teachers had guns and there was an armed police officer on the scene and someone started shooting a gun in school that there would be a good chance that he would be in one of the teachers classes, he could have been shot and killed instantly from that teacher or from a nearby teacher.  It’s just common sense.  So I think that’s the common sense approach and I also think that the war on guns is specifically a marketing target for agenda’s and I think that the agenda is to remove guns from as many people as possible to be able to have them depend on the cops, these same cops that failed us and to create an even more police presence in our lives.”

That is pretty much what I’ve stated over and over again.  Like I said I have friends who have said the same stuff.  I just can’t help but feel like I’m voiceless and don’t matter because my opinion doesn’t match what someone at the news feels like it does.  Why is it that they are just parading around the same fellow students as mine on TV?  I think that they are doing that for a reason and the reason is because they just don’t care about my point of view or my friends point of views.  Why else wouldn’t they put me and the rest of us on the news?  I am tired of watching the same people saying the same things and speaking for all of us, it’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s not right.

There is something seriously wrong when the cop that was there to protect us and the other cops that arrived didn’t even come in to help us.  Why are they cops?  There’s something wrong when people think that removing guns solves the problems.  You can’t say that a gun is the problem when it’s the person who has a problem.  Next thing is they will start driving cars when school lets out and running us over, or who knows what.  More guns could prevent more deaths, not the other way around in my opinion.

Not sure how many people visit this site, but I’m sure you’ll allow my submission because you seem to allow any type of content.  If not, then I guess I don’t matter to you either.  I’ve sent along some personal identification to verify I am who I say I am, please don’t submit that information in this article because my Mom would freak out if she read this and saw that it was me on this article, she doesn’t want my name on this article.  My Mom says I am one of the “Silent Majority”, I never understood what that even means, but I think I’m starting to, it’s like I’m not even here, it’s like I don’t even matter.

Thank you,

J.

The Bottom Line:  You do matter and we are hearing you.  What you had to go through, unthinkable, unbelievable, and the mere fact that you’re here writing this at all is a feat in itself.  You know, I wish we could publish the video you sent, perhaps you could reconsider that if the reception goes well?  We’re sorry you had to go through and experience what you did.  Our prayers are with you and all of your friends and fellow students.  Stay strong and keep staying positive.  Never allow yourself to be silenced out of fear, doing what you did to find Scumbagged, not sure if we’re the best place, but we will always run something like this.

SCUMBAGGED Tip:  J. touched on a really valid point.  It’s the person that is the issue, not the gun.  If someone is truly intent on bloodlessly killing and murdering that is what they are going to do.  More guns = more stability, not the other way around.  Having some teachers at schools opt in to carry is probably the smartest thing I’ve ever heard.