The mother of Alyssa Alhadeff, a student who was killed in her English class during the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, stood before a room full of lawmakers and state officials on Wednesday. 

Lori Alhadeff held a portrait of her daughter in her arms as she applauded Utah for becoming the sixth state to pass “Alyssa’s Law,” legislation mandating silent panic alarms in classrooms that are directly linked to law enforcement.

“We are taking momentous steps forward in safeguarding our children’s well-being,” Alhadeff said, adding the bill represents “our collective commitment to providing a secure learning environment for every child in Utah.”

Anti-school shooting bill

The 2024 Utah Legislature last month passed , and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed it into law on March 12. The sweeping school safety and security bill includes not only “Alyssa’s Law,” but also creates a set of uniform, minimum safety standards all Utah schools must adhere to. It designates armed school employees as guardians, requires threat reporting if employees are aware of a particular safety concern, and links the state’s SafeUT Crisis Line to Utah’s intelligence database.

To enact HB84, the Utah Legislature approved $100 million one-time money and $2.1 million in ongoing funding.

To highlight HB84 — along with seven other bills packaged together as legislation that will benefit Utah’s future generations — Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson ceremoniously signed the bills on Wednesday at the University of Utah’s Bennion Center.

HB84’s sponsor, Rep. Ryan Wilcox, R-Ogden, said his bill is meant to address a reality in the U.S. that “isn’t going away for us.” School shootings, he said, are not a tragedy that “we can pretend isn’t happening.”

He thanked the parents of the Parkland, Florida shooting victims for helping craft Utah’s legislation and ensuring “when our kids go to school, all they’re worried about is learning rather than catastrophic violence.”

“That isn’t something that they should have to worry about. But it is something that we do,” Wilcox said. “It is a responsibility of parents, the schools, of the adults who can do a lot more to prepare and make sure that they don’t have to worry about it.”

Henderson stood in for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who originally was expected to attend the signing but was unable to due to a family emergency. His wife, first lady on Wednesday to remove degenerative discs in her neck after “weeks of debilitating pain,” according to the governor’s office.

Henderson applauded HB84 and other bills aimed at improving opportunities for Utah’s youth and parents.

“We are a family friendly state,” Henderson said. “We care about our children, our educators, our education system. We care about the future. And this is an opportunity that we put our money where our mouth is.”

The full list of bills Henderson ceremoniously signed included:

• provides $1.5 million to provide instruction on child sexual abuse and human trafficking. It was supported by the nonprofit , which hopes it will help reduce sexual abuse.
• allows a state employee to use parental leave for a variety of reasons, including time for a child or an incapacitated adult with whom the employee is assuming a parental role, including foster care. It also allows a state employee to use postpartum recovery leave to recover from a childbirth that occurs at 20 weeks or greater and provides flexibility so they don’t have to use the leave in a single continuous period of time.
• uses $8.4 million in one-time state money to increase the amount of funding available to teachers for classroom supplies. It provides $500 to go to elementary school classroom teachers and $250 to go to middle and high school teachers specifically for classroom supplies.
• mandates school districts to develop paid leave policies for parental and postpartum recovery. It requires a minimum of three weeks off for someone adopting, becoming a foster parent, a grandparent taking custody, or a spouse of someone giving birth, as well as requiring six weeks of paid postpartum leave for Utahns who give birth.
• uses $8.4 million to give stipends of $6,000 to support educators while they’re full-time student teachers.
• raises legal standards in child custody cases with the intention of protecting kids from abusive parents. It was named “” after Leah Moses’ 16-year-old son, Om Moses Gandhi, who was murdered by Moses’ ex-husband.
• uses over $100 million in one-time money and $2.1 million in ongoing funding to increase .  uses $3.3 million to create a pilot project called the , which provides stipends and scholarships to young adults who participate in a year of community service, according to the University of Utah. Participants would receive an hourly stipend and a $7,400 scholarship in exchange for 1,700 hours of service with an approved partner organization.

Florida lawmakers approved a bill aimed at increasing school safety on the sixth anniversary of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Meanwhile, they also were considering rolling back a state law that increased the minimum age for purchasing a gun that lawmakers passed following the shooting.

Lawmakers in the House Education & Employment Committee held a moment of silence Wednesday morning following their vote to approve the school safety legislation to commemorate the 17 people killed in the shooting. The proposal, , from Republican Rep. Dana Trabulsy of St. Lucie County, would require entry points and classroom doors in public schools to be locked unless a staff member is guarding them.

“Sadly, there are 17 victims and their friends and families that will never look at Valentine’s Day the same, and that’s why the school safety bill was born six years ago, and that’s why we continue to hear a school safety bill every year so that we can continue to build upon what we’ve learned from previous years and instances,” Trabulsy said.

Additionally, the law would require the Office of Safe Schools to conduct unannounced inspections of schools to ensure they comply with all safety requirements. Those inspections would happen every three years, and schools found out of compliance would face reinspection within six months.

The proposal passed the committee with unanimous support.

Backslide

On Tuesday, the eve of the mass shooting’s anniversary, in the House that would lower the age of purchasing a firearm from 21 to 18 and allow someone to get a gun if the Florida Department of Law Enforcement can’t determine that person’s eligibility within three days.

“So as far as I’m concerned, candidly, that bill and so many others in this building this year are a slap in the face to my community, to the victims and their families, and really is absurd,” said Broward County Democratic House Rep. Dan Daley during the remote Tuesday news conference.

Under the school-safety bill, people would also be prohibited from flying drones over any school without permission from the administration. Republican Rep. Randy Fine said that had been a problem for Jewish day schools, which the committee also approved to receive additional funding Wednesday through a bill he sponsored.

“I just want folks to know this was an issue that came up after Oct. 7, where drones started flying over Jewish day schools, and FDLE told us, ‘There’s nothing you could do. They can fly them over,’” Fine said. “While the issue is only affecting Jewish day schools, frankly, drones shouldn’t be flying over any schools.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

Prosecutors had sought the death penalty but, “under Florida law, a death sentence requires a unanimous vote on at least one count. While jurors found that the aggravating evidence was sufficient to warrant a possible death penalty for the gunman, at least one believed the mitigating factors outweighed aggravating ones.”

Watch the moment circuit judge Elizabeth Scherer read the recommendations to the packed courtroom: 

The verdict concluded a graphic and emotional three-month trial, during which the killings of all 17 victims were detailed and recreated. 

The jury’s recommendation is binding and Judge Scherer will pronounce the sentence at a Nov. 1 hearing. That day, survivors of the shooting will also be offered an opportunity to speak publicly on the verdict. 

Some of our past coverage of the Parkland shooting: 

—Fąô˛š˛őłó˛ú˛šłŚ°ě: Parkland school shooting suspect pleads guilty to murdering 17 (Read more) 

—F˛šłžžąąôžąąđ˛ő: FBI to pay nearly $130 million to Parkland families in ‘unprecedented’ settlement (Read more) 

—T°ů˛šłÜłž˛š: Research shows heavy toll on survivors of school shootings (Read more)Ěý

—What Comes Next: Principals traumatized by school shootings release guide to recovery (Read more)

“He called me up and said, ‘Frank, you don’t even know what you need, but here’s my number,’” DeAngelis said during an event Monday at the Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colorado. The road to recovery, DeAngelis would soon learn, isn’t a sprint but a marathon. Help from others who had lived through similar tragedies was instrumental.

DeAngelis hoped he’d never have to make a similar phone call, but in the decades since Columbine, the retired principal has reached out to traumatized educators across the country who similarly became part of “a club in which no one wants to be a member.” 

“Unfortunately, that membership continues to grow,” DeAngelis said. “But we can’t give up hope.”

On Monday, DeAngelis and nearly two dozen school leaders before their schools became crime scenes. While campus shootings remain statistically rare — and no two tragedies are identical — the guide aims to provide practical tips for principals as they begin to lead their communities to recovery. 

The guide was produced by the Principal Recovery Network, a group of current and former school leaders who have experienced school gun violence. “I wish, when that horrific event happened, that we had that recovery guide,” DeAngelis said. “When those events happen, your mind is spinning, and this guide, hopefully, will provide that strength.”

The recovery network was formed by the National Association of Secondary School Principals in 2019, a year after the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, reignited a national conversation on the effects of gun violence. Though the guide was years in the making, its release took on new urgency after the May school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 elementary school students and two teachers were killed. 

Following such tragedies, network members reach out to the affected school leaders to offer advice and a place to vent. After all, nobody knows what’s needed in the aftermath of a campus shooting better than school leaders who’ve survived one, said Ronn Nozoe, the association’s CEO.

“This is something that nobody wants to go through, and there is no step-by-step manual on how to handle it,” said recovery network member Michelle Keford, principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. But, “Having their advice, having their input and having their shared experiences really helps me as a leader, and I hope to pass that along.”

The 16-page guide spells out things to consider before reopening a school, the importance of attending to students’ and staff mental health, how to include student input in district plans and practical advice on managing offers of help from outside groups. 

In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, the guide recommends that school leaders meet with faculty at the school to explain what happened and assess their needs. Principals should quickly provide mental health supports, from trauma-informed counselors to therapy dogs. And they should consider keeping school closed until all funerals have taken place and all physical damage to the building is repaired. 

Among the network’s members is Michael Bennett, superintendent of Greenville Central School District in upstate New York, who was shot in 2004 as an assistant principal wrestled a gun-wielding 16-year-old student to the ground. Shotgun pellets remain lodged in Bennett’s calf. 

“That’s going to be a permanent part of who I am,” Bennett, who was a teacher at Columbia High School at the time, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “One of the things you start to learn as you go through this process of recovery is that it’s an ongoing process. It will ebb and flow based on some of your own experiences and how you’re dealing with those.” 

Bennett said he recently offered support to a high school band director in Highland Park, Illinois, who reached out after seven died in a mass shooting at an Independence Day parade. The high school band had marched in the parade, and their teacher was concerned that students’ return to classrooms this fall and their performances at football games could be traumatizing. After getting shot, Bennett said, the sound of fireworks at a homecoming game was alarming. 

In his contributions to the guide, Bennett noted the importance of meeting with staff after a shooting to ensure that everyone is up to speed about what happened and has a chance to ask questions. This is a lesson he learned from personal experience: When Bennett returned to work weeks after the 2004 shooting, some colleagues approached him unsure about what had happened.

“The challenge there for me is that it was reliving the moment again,” he said. “It became a bit of a confusing time for me, and it slowed my process of healing down quite a bit.” 

Following the Uvalde shooting, President Joe Biden signed the most substantive gun-control law in decades. But if history tells us anything, the shootings will continue, the group warned. That’s why it’s so important, DeAngelis said, that educators have each others’ backs. 

“I’ve been doing this for 23 years, and sometimes my wife says, ‘Why do you continue?’ ” he said. “But I made a promise that I was going to do it in memory of our beloved 13.”

Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo was placed on administrative leave Wednesday, schools Superintendent Hal Harrell announced in a . The move came after Steven McCraw, the director of the state Department of Public Safety, told state lawmakers Tuesday that Arredondo’s decision to wait more than an hour to confront the gunman during a May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School “put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.” Two teachers and 19 students died in the attack, which is now under investigation by multiple agencies. Harrell said it was the district’s intention to wait until those investigations were complete before making any personnel decisions. But because of “the lack of clarity that remains and the unknown timing of when I will receive the results of the investigations,” the schools chief said he decided to place Arredondo on leave effective Wednesday. A lieutenant in the six-member department will take over. The Texas Tribune reported that a district spokeswoman if the leave was paid or unpaid.

Police and school security experts are questioning why the Uvalde, Texas, school police chief remains on the job nearly a month after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at the local elementary school.

While Chief Pete Arrendondo’s fiercest critics have following reports that officers under his command waited more than an hour before confronting the shooter, school safety and police accountability experts criticized education leaders for failing to remove him as head of the six-member school police force, even temporarily. 

Placing cops on “paid administrative leave or in a no-contact assignment” after an officer-involved shooting is , according to the world’s largest professional trade group for police chiefs. Those standards, experts told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, are critical to the public’s confidence in the ensuing investigations, the school community’s safety and even the chief’s well-being. 

“It’s just baffling that you would have this conversation days after the incident, much less weeks or a month out,” said school safety consultant Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services. Trump said the standards for officer-involved shootings should apply to Arredondo, a nearly 30-year law enforcement veteran whose response to the Robb Elementary School mass shooting is the subject of investigations by the local district attorney’s office, state law enforcement and elected officials and the U.S. Department of Justice that will likely take months. 

Investigators will scrutinize why officers waited outside a classroom door for more than an hour despite from the children inside begging for police to save them and that there were others trapped with the gunman who were injured but still alive. Eventually, Border Patrol agents and other law enforcement stormed in and killed the shooter. Arredondo, who as the incident commander on the scene, reportedly made the call not to go in immediately.

Steven McCraw, the director of the state Department of Public Safety, on Tuesdayresponse an “abject failure,” and said the classroom door was apparently unlocked despite the cops’ decision to wait for a key before entering the room to confront the gunman. Just minutes after the first shots were fired, he said, the police had enough firepower and protection to act.

“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander,” McCraw told Texas state lawmakers. Instead, Arredondo “decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.”

Before those statements, Trump said that Arredondo should be taken out of his leadership role with the school district.

“If there indeed is something found where he made some fatal errors in his decision making, then you don’t want that person still there making decisions on that or other situations,” Trump said. Arredondo witnessed one of the deadliest mass school shootings in U.S. history, a traumatic event that Trump said could cloud the chief’s decisions. “Why would you put somebody under that duress — whether they’re consciously aware of it now or at a later point in time — in a position where they could encounter another stressful or life-threatening situation?”

Arredondo’s position at the police department’s helm remains uncertain as he avoids public appearances and Uvalde district officials . But evidence suggests he’s taken on additional responsibilities since the May 24 shooting, with his attorney that the chief has picked up extra shifts to cover for grieving officers. The Texas Rangers had asked Arredondo to participate in an interview for their investigation into the immediate police response, attorney George Hyde told the news outlet, but he was too busy filling in for his officers.

Arredondo also made time to go to City Hall and as a newly elected Uvalde city councilmember a week after the mass shooting. The New York Times reported that the Uvalde City Council voted Tuesday not to offer Arredondo a leave of absence. The chief has not attended meetings since his swearing-in, its story said, and could be forced to give up his seat after missing three meetings.

The Uvalde school board at its first meeting since the armed assault, whether to reassign or fire Arredondo, but after chose not to take immediate action. Board members and a district spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

The law firm representing Arredondo said he declined to comment for this article, but the 50-year-old police chief defended the police response in his extensive June 9 interview with The Texas Tribune. Arrendondo pushed back against statements that he was the incident commander, saying he did not consider himself to be in charge of the scene and did not give orders to other responding officers, including holding off cops who were impatient to breach the door.

“Not a single responding officer ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put themselves at risk to save the children,” Arredondo told the nonprofit news outlet, though his comments appear to obtained by The New York Times and later the Tribune itself. “We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced. Our objective was to save as many lives as we could.” 

McCraw reiterated Tuesday that Arredondo had assumed the role of on-site commander by issuing orders and directing action.

‘He really failed’ 

Since the horrific shooting, Trump and other school security experts have been highly critical of officers’ decision to wait in the hallway. For decades, law enforcement has been trained to confront the gunman — even at the cost of their own lives. 

Such standards grew out of the 1999 mass school shooting at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, with a realization that every second counts during a mass shooting, most of which are carried out in a matter of minutes. A more aggressive response at Uvalde, experts argue, could have saved lives, perhaps including one teacher in an ambulance and three children who passed away at nearby hospitals.

Public information about Arredondo’s actions that day — and his own admissions that he ran into the school without his police radio or quick access to the key he said was necessary — raise significant questions about his ability to perform his job, said Samuel Walker, a national expert on police misconduct and professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Those questions, he said, necessitate action as investigators examine his conduct. 

“It appears that his actions were not appropriate and it’s entirely appropriate that he be on leave,” Walker said. “Unless some new evidence comes to light, it looks like he really failed in his responsibility and I think that disqualifies him from working any job in that school district.” 

Sheldon Greenberg, an education professor at Johns Hopkins University and a former police officer, said that disciplinary procedures for cops vary greatly across the country and officers often benefit from policies and labor contracts that protect them from facing repercussions for failures on the job. 

Several factors complicate this particular situation, Greenberg said. For one, as chief, Arredondo would typically make disciplinary decisions for officers in his department. In the case of the chief, that responsibility would fall to the district superintendent and the school board, who may have little to no experience in police disciplinary matters, Greenberg said. Additionally, he said it’s notably difficult to hold an officer accountable for failures to perform job duties. 

“There’s a difference between a police officer who commits an act,” like the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd “where the officer had his knee on his neck and was forcing compression on his neck for nine minutes,” Greenberg said. With Arredondo, “what he did you might categorize as omission, which is very different.” 

Officers at the 4,100-student Uvalde school district, including Arredondo, had been trained as recently as last year on how to respond to an active shooting, and materials by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement urge cops to “Display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent.” 

“As first responders we must recognize that innocent life must be defended,” according to the state training materials. “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.” 

Despite the hardline language in the training materials, Greenberg said an officer isn’t helpful during an emergency if they get killed. 

“You can’t do much if you’re dead or disabled,” he said. “You still go in with reasonable caution, just don’t go barging into a room unless you’re sure you have a genuine opportunity to stop the gunman.” 

Trump, the school safety consultant, said that placing Arredondo or any officer on administrative leave shouldn’t necessarily be framed as a disciplinary measure. While Arredondo’s continued role in the department could raise concerns about obstruction in the active investigations and about his capacity to keep the community safe, he said that any officer who responded to the elementary school should have a chance to go on leave to recover from the traumatic event. 

In many police departments, he said the move is routine procedure, yet it’s unclear what policies are in place for the school district’s six-person police force. A notes that the police chief  “shall be accountable to the superintendent,” but a review of the rules did not yield any insight on leave of absences. Arredondo and any other officers who are placed on leave should continue to receive a paycheck, Trump said. 

“They shouldn’t have to worry about income for their family, but they should have that paid leave for them to debrief, to decompress, to process, to not be exposed to continual trauma,” Trump said. While any police-involved shooting can cause distress for the officers involved, the Uvalde shooting resulted in the deaths of 19 children. “They’ve been exposed to major trauma and stress of the worst kind.” 

Trump was less sympathetic to Arredondo’s assertion that he’s been too busy to participate in interviews with investigators. Making himself available for questioning, he said, should be the chief’s number one priority. In fact, it’s another reason to put Arredondo on leave: To ensure he has the time and flexibility to cooperate. Meanwhile, officers from outside police departments across the state . 

“I can’t think of anything that anybody should or could be doing that would make them too busy to participate in an investigation into a major school shooting like this,” Trump said. “It’s among the biggest and the worst [mass shootings] that we’ve ever had. That answer certainly doesn’t carry water with most anybody, including the school community.”

‘Coward of Broward’

Arredondo is not the first school-based police officer to face scorn for his performance during a deadly crisis. School resource officer Scot Peterson was placed on administrative leave in 2018 for failing to confront the gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. 

Peterson ultimately chose to retire and was subsequently charged with seven criminal counts of child neglect. Prosecutors said he took cover behind a wall while the gunman killed 17 people. Those actions earned him the nickname the “Coward of Broward” by ardent critics in his Florida county. Even his boss, then-Sheriff Scott Israel, said at the time that Peterson’s actions made him “sick to my stomach.” 

But Peterson the steps taken against him as a “political lynching.” His attorney, Mark Eiglarsh, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ this week that with both his client and the Uvalde school police chief, “The court of public opinion is unfortunately so quick to condemn responding officers and the incident commander without knowing all the facts.” 

“Unfortunately, due to the unprecedented and irresponsible decision” by prosecutors to charge Peterson, he said in an email, he fears that other officers, including Arredondo, “may also be stripped of their liberty and face decades in prison solely because a finding is made after the fact that things could have been handled differently.”  

The case against Peterson is in September. 

Despite the numerous investigations into the Uvalde shooting, the accountability that many in this small Texas community are demanding , according to legal experts. Qualified immunity, which protects cops from liability for their mistakes on the job, could challenge civil lawsuits. Meanwhile, charges against police officers — like the ones against Peterson — are extremely rare. But Walker, the police misconduct expert, expects the federal investigation to uncover failures in Uvalde that could help districts nationwide respond to similar attacks moving forward. 

“It looks like he failed, and if you fail and cause the death of a number of children, then it’s pretty serious,” Walker said. Yet such shortcomings likely extend beyond Arredondo, he said, and it’s important that the chief doesn’t become the scapegoat. “Clearly there’s what we would call systemic failure, and the school board probably failed in some respects” if it lacked sufficient policies to respond to such a lethal event. 

“Our elected officials have seen American after American drop from a bullet,” said Corin, a survivor of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, then the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior class president. As a co-founder of March For Our Lives, her advocacy in 2018 galvanized a countrywide movement that brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the National Mall to demand new firearms laws. “And instead of waking up to protect us, they have been hitting the snooze button. But we’re here to shake them awake.” 

Yet four years after youth activists chanted “never again,” some might argue that America is still sleepwalking through wave after wave of gun violence. The latest mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, are once again wreaking havoc on American communities and student advocates are once again preparing to hit the streets to force an end to the carnage. 

On Saturday, Corin and other advocates with the youth-led March For Our Lives, including David Hogg and X Gonzalez, will return to Washington for a second rally to press for new firearm restrictions and a slew of policy changes they believe could thwart a gun violence rate that’s . 

Their insistence that children should never again be allowed to die by gunfire in school was belied — again — by  the reality of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 children and two educators were shot and killed May 24.

“Four years ago we said ‘never again,’ there’s never going to be another Parkland, and unfortunately that has not reigned true,” Corin told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. Since then, Corin has graduated high school and is now a rising senior at Harvard University, where she studies government and education. During those years, mass shootings have continued to grow more common, with the Uvalde assault  becoming the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. “A large reason for that is because barely anything has been done on a national level.”

Along with , organizers have planned hundreds of , all in a matter of weeks. Ahead of the event, March For Our Lives advocates are to promote their agenda. 

They hope for a different outcome this time, but acknowledge the obstacles that have blocked change in the past remain as challenging as ever. In , President Joe Biden questioned “how much more carnage are we willing to accept?” before calling on Congress to ban assault weapons — or to at least raise the age from 18 to 21 for those looking to buy one. He also pushed for a ban on high-capacity magazines, strengthening background checks and adopting a federal “red flag” law that would allow courts to temporarily remove weapons from people deemed an imminent threat to themselves or others. At the same time, he lamented that “a majority of Senate Republicans don’t want any of these proposals even to be debated.” 

After the Parkland shooting, the Trump administration , a device that uses the recoil of a semiautomatic gun to mimic an automatic rifle. Yet even though then-President Donald Trump embraced an effort to raise the age on rifle sales, efforts fell flat. 

Earlier this week, in negotiations with Republicans over gun proposals after the Uvalde shooting while pointing out that compromises would be crucial to progress. Instead of major firearm restrictions, a bipartisan deal could encourage states to adopt red flag laws and new funding for campus security upgrades — a reaction that for years has followed virtually every mass school shooting. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, “it will be embarrassing” if Democrats and Republicans in the Senate fail to reach a legislative response to Uvalde. 

​Meanwhile, a ruling this month from the U.S. Supreme Court a decades-old New York law that puts sharp limits on who can carry guns in public. 

For Corin, having a Democrat in the White House isn’t necessarily an encouraging sign. Biden has been president for a year and a half, yet “we haven’t seen anything done,” she said. While Biden has sought to pass the issue onto Congress, Corin said her group has called on the president to appoint a gun violence prevention director, to create a task force focused on the issue and to “declare gun violence a national emergency — but that hasn’t happened either.” 

“No one is exempt from doing work on this issue,” Corin said. “I know the executive office doesn’t have all of the power, but ultimately everyone has a role to play.” 

Corin is very aware that the post-Parkland focus on gun violence had a larger impact at the state level, where . In her native Florida, for example, lawmakers passed a red flag law, raised the age to buy rifles from 18 to 21, created a three-day waiting period on gun purchases and authorized certain educators to be armed at school. In New York, lawmakers responded swiftly to the Buffalo shooting and approved a new law on Monday to strengthen gun control measures, including a red flag law that was implemented after Parkland. 

“I can only hope that the same sadness and fury that the country is feeling now, as we all did back in 2018, will fuel the continuation of these changes on the state level and ultimately — hopefully — on a national level,” said Corin, who the former Marjory Stoneman student who pleaded guilty in October to opening fire on the school. 

In its policy platform, March For Our Lives blames American gun violence on a culture of “gun glorification,” political apathy, poverty and “armed supremacy” in which the threat of guns are used to “reinforce power structures, hierarchies, and status.” And while they recognize a national mental health crisis exists, they oppose “scapegoating” those with mental illnesses as being a threat to others when they’re actually more likely than those without such disorders to .

Solutions, according to the group, include a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines and a national firearm buy-back program that could reduce the number of firearms in circulation by some 30 percent. There are an estimated 393 million guns in circulation across the U.S. — that’s more guns than people. 

But the group’s platform extends far beyond firearm policies to prevent violence and encompasses a slew of policies generally associated with Democrats. Those include ending the “war on drugs,” combating the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and reducing the scope of policing. 

For RuQuan Brown, a D.C. native whose stepfather was killed in a 2018 shooting, the conversation, he said, needs to “focus more on love than legislation.” RuQuan, who is Black, said that urban gun violence has long failed to garner the same urgency as mass shootings like the ones that played out in Parkland and Uvalde despite . 

Through his work with March For Our Lives, Brown said he’s been able to help ensure that the experiences of all gun violence victims are reflected in reform efforts. 

“I’ve been able to work with March to make sure that when we talk about March For Our Lives, that all peoples’ lives are included in that,” said Brown, who also attends Harvard. For him, uplifting disenfranchised communities will be the key to gun violence prevention. “This country and its ancestors are extremely comfortable with the deaths of Black and brown people, it’s almost a part of the fabric of this country. America wouldn’t be what it is without the deaths of Black and brown people, the genocide, the rape and the forced labor.”

He said it’s critical that lawmakers develop compassion for, and a commitment to help, society’s most marginalized people. If they were “committed to furthering the well-being of all people,” he said, “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation about gun violence.” 

With the midterm elections approaching, Corin predicted the recent mass shootings, including at the Uvalde elementary school and a Buffalo supermarket, could once again make gun violence a top issue on the campaign trail. It’s more important than ever, she said, for candidates to let people know on which side of the issue they stand. 

“If people aren’t clear on their stances and if they don’t act with courage, they’re going to be voted out,” Corin said. “And you know what, we’re going to vote in someone that doesn’t believe that children should be shot in their seats in school.”

The settlement follows an admission by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that it failed to properly investigate two tips warning federal law enforcement that a former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student was planning an armed attack. Just 40 days before the Valentine’s Day massacre, a female caller to the FBI tip line reported that the former student had purchased guns and she feared he was “going to slip into a school and start shooting the place up.” She told the FBI, “I know he’s going to explode.” 

Another tip alerted officials to a comment on YouTube believed to be made by the suspected gunman, announcing plans to become “a professional school shooter.” Neither report was forwarded to the FBI’s South Florida office and the former student, who had  been expelled a year earlier, was never contacted. 

The court settlement’s details are confidential, but a person familiar with the agreement the government will pay $127.5 million to resolve a lawsuit from 40 families accusing the FBI of negligence. The tragedy resulted in the deaths of 14 students and three faculty members and left injured. The 23-year-old defendant pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. A trial scheduled for early next year will decide whether he receives the death penalty or life imprisonment. 

Settlements from federal agencies have been exceedingly rare, said consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services who provides expert witness testimony in school shooting litigation. 

“I cannot remember in my 30-plus years in the school safety field a time where I’ve ever seen a federal agency — in this case obviously the FBI — sued and settled, especially to this extent,” said Trump, who was hired as an expert witness by defense attorneys representing Broward County Public Schools following the Parkland shooting. He’s also worked on lawsuits following the 2012 mass school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and the 2017 tragedy in San Bernardino, California. 

In a similar move last month, the an $88 million settlement with the survivors and families of those killed during a mass shooting at a South Carolina church in 2015. That lawsuit accused the FBI of failing to prevent the shooter — a self-proclaimed white supremacist who hoped to start a “race war” — from purchasing a gun to carry out the attack. 

Speaking about school safety litigation, Trump told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, “It could be potentially unprecedented to see the FBI actually settle a case like that, which means it has to be clear internally that some significant balls were dropped to the point where they determined it’s not winnable. I’m sure that most federal agencies don’t want to set a precedent that they’re going to easily settle lawsuits unless there’s really something there.” 

Kristina Infante, an attorney representing the Parkland families, that her clients had devoted their lives “to making the world a safer place” despite having suffered “immeasurable grief.” 

“Although no resolution could ever restore what the Parkland families lost, this settlement marks an important step toward justice,” Infante said. 

Andrew Pollack whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow was killed in the shooting, commended the FBI for accepting wrongdoing and said that other agencies, including the local school district and sheriff’s office, have failed to acknowledge their mistakes. 

“The FBI has made changes to make sure this never happens again,” he told the Associated Press.

The Parkland victims’ families with the Broward County school district last month. 

Trump said that financial settlements following the Parkland shooting should serve as a wake-up call to districts across the country. Similar to the litigation against the FBI, campus safety lawsuits against school districts generally center on alleged failures by people or lapses in procedures and training. Such litigation doesn’t typically focus on faults in the districts’ physical campus security systems, he said. It’s important, he said, for school officials to compare their written policies against their real-world responses. 

“So many times there are gaps between policy and practice,” Trump said. “And when you have those gaps, those gaps create a greater safety risk and, in turn, a greater liability risk.”

The accused perpetrator of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, pleaded guilty to all counts on Wednesday. The development unfolded in a Broward County courtroom, where the suspect was charged with 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. Fourteen students and three faculty members were killed in the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

During the hearing, which was attended by the families of those killed in the school, the suspect responded “guilty” 34 times as the judge read each charge along with the victims’ names. Judge Elizabeth Scherer asked the suspect if he understood that he faces “a minimum, as a best case scenario, of life in prison,” a reality the man acknowledged.

In a statement to the victims’ families, the suspect removed his face mask and offered an apology.

“I am very sorry for what I did and I have to live with it every day, and if I were to get a second chance I would do everything in my power to try to help others,” he said. “I have to live with this every day and it brings me nightmares and I can’t live with myself sometimes but I try to push through because I know that is what you guys would want me to do.”

While he went onto to say he thought it was the victims’ families who should decide “where I go, and whether I live or die,” the judge reminded him that would be left to a jury. Jury selection in the penalty phase of the trial is set to begin Jan. 4.

The man accused of carrying out the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, will plead guilty to killing 17 people, bringing the yearslong case a step closer to its resolution, one that could end with a jury sentencing him to death. 

The development, morning court hearing, comes more than three and a half years after the Valentine’s Day shooting unfolded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that led to a massive uprising among young people over gun control and a national debate about school safety measures. The 23-year-old man, a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, plans to plead guilty to 17 counts of premeditated murder and 17 counts of attempted murder during a court hearing Wednesday. 

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The suspect, who made a court appearance in plainclothes Friday, pleaded guilty to attempted aggravated battery in a separate incident after he was while being held inside a Fort Lauderdale jail nine months after the shooting. 

The tragedy, one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, resulted in the deaths of 14 students and three faculty members. On Oct. 19, it was announced that the families of the 17 victims and nearly three dozen others who were wounded or traumatized with the Broward County school district. District officials had come under intense scrutiny for their handling of school security and disciplinary issues involving the accused gunman.

His guilty plea in the criminal case comes without an agreement with prosecutors and a jury will ultimately decide his fate. Prosecutors argue the suspect should receive the death penalty while his defense seeks 17 consecutive life sentences. The trial is expected to be held in January. 

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ is not naming the suspected gunman in accordance with , an effort to deprive perpetrators of media attention. A growing body of research suggests that perpetrators and that media coverage of mass shootings can inspire copycats. 

Hunter Pollack, whose 18-year-old sister Meadow was killed in the shooting, that it’s time for “this monster” to face sentencing. “Our families need justice to be served,” he wrote. “It’s 1,338 days overdue.” 

Manuel Oliver, whose 17-year-old son Joaquin was killed in the shooting, told that the announcement Friday wasn’t a revelation to the victims’ families.

“We all know he is guilty, and finally, he knows he is guilty and will share that,” Oliver said. “That is fine.” 

As people reacted to the news Friday, many survivors and victims’ families sought to move attention toward those who lost their lives in the shooting and away from the suspected perpetrator. 

In a tweet, shooting survivor and co-founder of the youth anti-gun violence group March for Our Lives Ryan Deitsch called on people to honor the lives lost in the attack — and “not their killer.” “Was already under intense ptsd all week, this verdict has worsened my state of being,” . “It was bound to happen but [after] so many years, that [high school] building still up while memorials were torn down, breaks my heart.”  

https://twitter.com/Ryan_Deitsch/status/1449034563515256835?s=20

Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was killed in the shooting, offered a similar sentiment. His only comment on the guilty plea, he tweeted, is “to remember the victims.” 

Giffords, the gun control group co-founded by former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords who was shot in a 2011 assassination attempt, of each of those killed: Carmen Schentrup, Aaron Feis, Martin Duque, Scott Beigel, Nicholas Dworet, Gina Montalto, Peter Wang, Alaina Petty, Alyssa Alhadeff, Jaime Guttenberg, Joaquin Oliver, Cara Loughran, Alex Schachter, Chris Hixon, Helena Ramsay, Luke Hoyer and Meadow Pollack. 

Forensic psychologist Jillian Peterson, a criminology professor at Hamline University in Minnesota who built what researchers believe is the largest database on mass shooters ever created, said she was grateful that the Parkland community didn’t have to go through a grueling trial to determine if the suspect was guilty of carrying out an attack that police say he already admitted to committing. Peterson, who previously worked as an investigator on death penalty cases, said that in such instances a guilty plea usually comes after prosecutors and defense attorneys agree on a sentence. 

That’s not the case here, and prosecutors have been unwilling to take the death penalty off the table. 

Among mass shooters who live through their attacks, 12 percent receive the death penalty and about 20 percent get life with or without parole. Ultimately, Peterson said that several factors could play into the suspect’s sentence including his impact on the school community, his past disciplinary record and his own mental health. The perpetrator had a lengthy disciplinary record and was expelled from the Parkland high school a year before the tragedy. Meanwhile, just three months before the shooting, his mother and sole parent died of pneumonia. 

She compared the case to the one against the shooter who killed 12 people at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012. In that case, prosecutors sought the death penalty but the gunman, 24 at the time of the shooting,  pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He was ultimately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. 

“If we have the death penalty and the jurors who are sitting on that jury are williing to implement the death penalty, it’s hard to imagine a crime that is more deserving, with this many victims,” said Peterson, co-founder of , a nonprofit think tank. “That being said, we also know this shooter has a really significant trauma history and mental health history so it’s just hard to know how those two things are going to weigh against each other.” 

Oliver that he is glad the death penalty remains on the table. 

“The death penalty that Joaquin received was four shots with an AR-15 in the middle of his school,” Oliver said. “With kids dropping on the floor and bleeding out, screaming. That’s how my son died.”