[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 26 (Wednesday, February 8, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H744-H745]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1030
                      REMEMBERING PARKLAND TRAGEDY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Florida (Mr. Moskowitz) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. MOSKOWITZ. 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. There is 
no wedding. There is no tomorrow, no future.
  My 4-year-old went to school right around the corner from Marjory 
Stoneman Douglas, one traffic light away. He was in a writing class 
that day because he needed to learn how to write his name. The teacher 
that put him into a closet when they went into a lockdown procedure 
during the shooting was Jen Guttenberg, Fred Guttenberg's wife. She was 
protecting my son when her daughter Jaime was killed at Douglas.
  Five years later, my 4-year-old is now 9, but Jaime and the other 
kids are forever the age they were. She is forever 14.
  On February 14 of this year, the 5-year anniversary of the shooting 
at Parkland, parents will do what they have been doing for the last 5 
years, visiting their children at a cemetery.
  I remember the parents telling me that the only thing they did wrong 
that day was send their kid to school. That is not a statement. It is 
an indictment on us. Government failed those families that day.
  We did respond. We did pass the Marjory Stoneman Douglas School 
Safety Act. We did raise the age in Florida to buy any gun to 21. We 
did institute red flag laws that have been used 9,000 times since we 
put them there. We did place more school resource officers and

[[Page H745]]

mental health counselors in all of the high schools. We passed that on 
a bipartisan basis. We passed it with Democrats and Republicans. It was 
signed into law by a Republican Governor who became a Republican 
Senator. Not one Republican who voted for that law to make kids safe in 
school lost their reelection, not one.
  I am going to read the names into the Record, Mr. Speaker, and then I 
am going to use the rest of my time to take a moment of silence for the 
victims:
  Alyssa Alhadeff, Martin Duque Anguiano, Scott Beigel, Nicholas 
Dworet, Aaron Feis, Jaime Guttenberg, Chris Hixon, Luke Hoyer, Cara 
Loughran, Gina Montalto, Joaquin Oliver, Alaina Petty, Meadow Pollack, 
Helena Ramsay, Carmen Schentrup, Alex Schachter, and Peter Wang.

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