Two years ago, on a day known for its celebration of love, tragedy struck Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when a gunman killed 17 people and injured 17 others with a semi-automatic rifle on Feb. 14, 2018.
“Someone was hunting my classmates – someone was trying to kill everyone in that class,” said Brooke Harrison, a student who was in a classroom where three students died.
The massacre shocked the nation, dominating the political conversation with student activists leading protests like “March for Our Lives” to end gun violence.
In memoriam of the two-year anniversary, ABC released a documentary on Wednesday, Feb. 12, which played in more than 100 theaters across the nation. “After Parkland,” directed by Emily Taguchi and Jake Lefferman, tells the intimate and moving story of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School families as they navigate their way through grief and search for new meaning in the immediate days, weeks and months following the attack.
Hofstra’s screening of the film, sponsored by the Office of Residence Life, Hofstra University Honors College, Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Division of Student Affairs, was followed with a talkback by Reed Alexander, a journalist and Columbia University student.
Back in 2016, Hofstra hosted a similar event for the documentary “Newtown.” Senior Sean Runkle, a speech language and hearing science major, arranged for this screening during his first year at Hofstra because he is from Newtown, Connecticut. “I brought this story [“After Parkland”] here for a similar reason as to why I brought “Newtown” here – to help those indirectly affected by mass shootings [and] understand the impact gun violence has on communities,” he said. “It was about what the Hofstra community needed, even if they didn’t know they needed it.”
Since the mass shooting at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, the United States has seen more than 230 school shootings, not including ones at colleges and universities, according to data from The Washington Post. Parkland is ranked as the fourth-deadliest school shooting in the country.
“It should have been one school shooting and we should have fixed it,” said Andrew Pollack, father of Meadow Pollack, who was shot nine times during the Parkland shooting. “You can’t get the nation together on gun control – it’s not gonna happen – but I just want everyone to come together now and focus on school safety.”
Pollack advocated for change, and on March 9, 2018, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act was signed into law in Florida.
The bill raises the minimum age to buy all guns to 21 and establishes a three-day waiting period for most firearm purchases. It does not ban assault-style rifles like the one used in the attack, despite students’ requests. It does, however, allow certain school employees to arm themselves on a voluntary basis.
In the years since Parkland, there has been a school shooting about every 12 days, according to CNN’s count. “Since my school, there’s been plenty of other school shootings that nobody talks about,” said survivor Victoria Gonzalez, who lost her boyfriend Joaquin Oliver in the Parkland massacre. “It shouldn’t be a normal thing ever. The only thing we can do is move forward, fix what we need to fix so that it won’t happen ever again.”
“There’s just, like, this normalization [around school shootings],” said Hofstra senior film major Mitch Holson. “We all turned around [in the theater] whenever people opened the door.”
“Society is stuck in a deadly loop. There were [more] mass shootings in 2019 than there were days in a year,” said Runkle. “Gun violence is a pandemic; and with each school shooting more and more kids have to fight for their lives when their biggest problem should be getting into college or asking out their high school crush.”
Following the Stoneman Douglas attack, a national debate emerged over whether gun use or mental illness is to blame for the frequent mass shootings in the U.S.
“When it comes down to it, people who defend guns and gun legislation will say 99.9% of people out there in the world are not out to hurt you – and that’s true – but it’s about eliminating the resources that those [other] people have, because ultimately, the device that someone has is [what’s] doing the killing,” Holson said.
“And then [limiting] the access to guns. There’s a gun shop right across campus; I could walk in there right now. It’d be a funny photo if I just took a large panoramic of the gun shop and Hofstra right next door.”
On the other hand, “guns don’t fire themselves,” said freshman health science major Shai Har-Nov, a Hofstra student and Parkland survivor. “No sane person just picks up a gun and shoots people.”
“[“After Parkland”] speaks to the real heart of the issue – we understand that there are people seriously hurting, who are suffering mentally, but many of those people won’t raise their hands,” said Alexander, who has covered the aftermath of Parkland extensively.
“They may not know that they’re necessarily suffering. In the case of the shooter, he actually did know, and spoke out a lot and asked for help and didn’t get it.
The goal of “After Parkland,” however, was not to blame guns or mental health for the tragedy that struck Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. “The goal of this movement was to find renewed hope, and I actually think there was a great deal of hope that came out of that movement,” Alexander said.
“This is a conversation a lot of people know,” Har-Nov said. “If you don’t know Parkland, you know ‘March for Our Lives’ because it was so big.”
“The whole reason we’re being these annoying kids and fighting this fight is so that we don’t have to worry about going to schools or going to parks or going to concerts, or going to [the] movies or hearing a loud noise anywhere,” said Samuel Zeif, a friend of Oliver.
“This has been the most hopeful story [I’ve done], and people look at me and think that I must really not know what I’m talking about,” Alexander said.
“But the fact of the matter is, this is such a dark and heartbreaking story, but you meet people in Parkland that are fighting back, and they’re finding a reason to live and it’s not always fighting back in big marches, which are incredible, [but] it’s [about] fighting back in small ways.”
