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    Trump is now a member of the mass shooting survivor’s club – will it change anything?

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    The assassination attempt on Donald Trump has put the former president in a category that hundreds of other Americans have been forced into in recent decades: the victim of a high-profile mass shooting.For those who have been at the scene of public shootings or lived through the media whirlwind that followed a loved one’s death to mass violence, the past week has felt like a “rinse and repeat” of more than a decade of this type of violence, said Christian Heyne, the chief officer of policy and programs at Brady, a gun violence prevention organization named after the former White House press secretary Jim Brady, who was shot in the head during an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.“Every time this type of gun violence happens, it dredges up a lot of trauma,” said Heyne, whose mother was killed and father was injured in a shooting rampage in Thousand Oaks, California, in 2005. In addition to Heyne’s mother, a police officer was killed in the attack, and five other people were injured.After Saturday’s shooting, Heyne was brought back to the day his mother was killed and his community was terrorized. He is troubled that more people now face the trauma he has lived with for nearly 20 years.“The thing that baffles me is that we can be in this cycle of rinse and repeat but we’re not tapping into a conversation about how we prevent the next shooting,” he added.For many like Heyne, Saturday’s shooting was a reminder of their own losses and a stark reminder that gun violence can touch anyone, including a presidential nominee surrounded by armed law enforcement. The policy solutions, they say, are the same they have asked for following every mass shooting tragedy.“The fact that a 20-year-old with an AR-15 was able to get that close to killing a previous head of state is the reason that we have to focus on the gun at the end of the day,” said David Hogg, co-founder of March for Our Lives, a violence prevention group founded after 17 of his classmates were killed at their high school in Parkland, Florida.As the news of the Trump rally flooded television, one of Hogg’s first thoughts was of his mother, who he says is deeply affected by news of shootings. Then, he began calling out what he sees as the fallacy that more guns will ensure protection from mass shootings. “We’re not going to bulletproof our entire society,” he said.Now, he is looking forward with hope that the near-killing of the leader of the Republican party will push lawmakers to build the trust among themselves needed to pass gun policies at the state and federal levels.“The former president of the United States has heightened security and additional Secret Service, and this still happened. We need to change the conversation.“We have to have some semblance of trust between these major party political leaders,” Hogg continued. “Do I think Republicans are actually going to step up to the plate and do something? I don’t think so. But I hope so after the crown jewel of their movement was threatened.”The only similarity Hogg saw between the Parkland shooting and Trump’s assassination attempt was the deluge of conspiracies, speculation and misinformation that have become commonplace following high-profile shootings at Parkland and Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. “This is America, people love conspiracy theories in general,” he said.“There’s this range of public outcry that we continue to live through,” echoed Mark Barden, whose seven-year-old son Daniel was one of 26 people killed in the 2012 tragedy in Connecticut. “There’s sympathy, empathy, outrage and anger. There’s sadness, there’s horror and fear and then conjecture.”After 12 years of advocacy through Sandy Hook Promise, the organization he co-founded with Nicole Hockley another parent whose child was killed in the attack, Barden says he has grown used to the intense news cycle that follows high-profile shootings. He has found a way to move past the ugliest parts of the post-mass shooting news cycle, he said, to focus on spreading awareness about identifying the warning signs and behaviors that often precede mass public violence.“I spend all of my intelligence and mental capital on getting people to know the signs and giving them the tools to make an intervention on themselves or somebody else,” he said.“I think this could be – depending on how this unfolds – a catalyst moment,” Barden said of the rally shooting in Pennsylvania on Saturday. “There’s an opportunity for folks to understand that this doesn’t have to be our way of life.” More

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      Parkland survivors call for GOP extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene's resignation

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      Survivors of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, are asking congressional Republicans to publicly censure Marjorie Taylor Greene for suggesting the school shooting was a “false flag” and for harassing a teenage survivor on Capitol Hill in 2019, as well as calling for Greene’s resignation.Greene, the newly elected Georgia congresswoman who is known for her support of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory, was filmed in March 2019 as she followed 18-year-old David Hogg, one of the students who survived the shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school, outside Capitol Hill.In the clip from 25 March, Greene can be heard calling Hogg a “coward”, demanding that he explain how the students were able to set up meetings with so many lawmakers, and telling him that she herself was a gun owner. Greene tells Hogg that gun control will not work, and that his classmates would not have been killed if one of the law enforcement officers assigned to guard the school had “done his job”.She later addresses her viewers, echoing false yet frequently spread conspiracy claims that mass shooting survivors and family members of victims are “crisis actors” and the attacks that killed their loved ones were staged as a plot to pass gun control laws.“She hasn’t disowned any of it,” Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was among the 17 students and staff killed in the shooting, told the Guardian on Wednesday. “She hasn’t said, ‘I was wrong.’ She hasn’t said, ‘I’m sorry to the families I’ve hurt.’ She hasn’t said, ‘I accept the truth around Parkland, Sandy Hook, and 9/11.’ She has let the lie live. That makes her incapable of serving as a representative in Congress.”Guttenberg said he had told Greene publicly via Twitter that he would be “more than happy to share proof with her” that his daughter’s murder was real, but that he received no response.Guttenberg called on the top Republican in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, to take a public stand against Greene. “McCarthy loses any ability to talk about integrity, about unity, about service to the country if he refuses to deal with this,” Guttenberg said.Hogg himself wrote to McCarthy on Twitter, arguing Greene “basically has threatened to kill” gun violence survivors, “trying to trigger our PTSD”. “In that video you see a group of people most of whom are 18 or 19 acting calm, cool and collected – what you don’t see are the sleepless nights, the flashbacks, the hyper-vigilance and deep pitch-black numbness so many of us feel living in a society where we are told our friends dying doesn’t matter, “ Hogg wrote.“Take her Committee assignments away,” Hogg pleaded. Greene’s committee assignments have not yet been announced, but the congresswoman has said she will sit on the education panel.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, protested on Thursday.“Assigning her to the education committee when she has mocked the killing of little children at Sandy Hook, when she mocked the killing of teenagers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas – what could they be thinking?” she said, referring to the 2012 elementary school shooting in Connecticut and the school at Parkland.The committee chair, Democrat Bobby Scott, said in a strongly worded statement that House Republicans must explain why they appointed Greene to the committee, after her documented history of promoting conspiracy theories.On Wednesday, the California representative Jimmy Gomez said he would be introducing a resolution to expel Greene from Congress.Hillary Clinton said she should be “on a a watch list”, not in Congress.March for Our Lives, the youth gun violence prevention advocacy group founded by students from Parkland, is collecting signatures on a petition calling for Greene to resign, with the message: “Conspiracy theorists have no place in Congress.”Greene in recent days has faced renewed scrutiny of her past social media comments, with CNN reporting that past posts indicated support for executing Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Responding to those revelations, McCarthy has said that he “planned to have a conversation” with Greene.Greene’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.On the day of the incident, Hogg was on Capitol Hill along with other student activists to mark the anniversary of the 2018 March for Our Lives, delivering letters from constituents pushing senators to pass a law mandating criminal background checks on every gun sale. Greene was a rightwing commentator at the time.“I’m a gun owner, I’m an American citizen and I have nothing. But this guy with his George Soros funding and his major liberal funding has got everything. I want you to think about that,” Greene told her viewers.In reality, said Eve Levenson, one of the college students who helped organize the advocacy event, the advocacy event and the meetings with senators had been organized by college kids, including herself, from the floor of her dorm room.Another student activist who was present that day said Greene’s behavior had been “scary” and had left her shaken. Linnea Stanton, a college student and March for Our Lives activist from Wisconsin, recalled that Greene had first confronted the students as they delivered letters to lawmakers inside a Senate office building.“All of a sudden, this blonde woman was yelling, and someone was recording us with an iPhone,” Stanton said.After the students started chanting to get the Capitol police to intervene, Greene left, but she waited for the group outside the building, where she continued to harass and film them once they exited, Stanton said.Stanton said she had only learned on Wednesday that the woman who had harassed her group in 2019 was now an elected member of Congress. “It’s just kind of horrifying,” she said. “It’s bizarre to me that someone who can act like that towards another human being, much less towards a teenager who survived a mass shooting, is allowed to hold power.“I would love to see some accountability, or her acknowledging what she did, but it feels like wishful thinking,” Stanton added. “The last four years have showed time and again there will be no consequences.”Additional reporting by Amanda Holpuch in New York More