Cameron Kasky, a survivor of last week’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, has slammed Republicans for caring more about cakes at same-sex weddings than school shootings.
In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Kasky referenced the Supreme Court case of a Colorado cake shop which refused to bake a cake for a gay couple, PinkNews reported.
On February 14, former student at the school Nikolas Cruz killed 17 students using a legally purchased AR-15 assault rifle.
Cruz had expressed violent hatred for LGBTI people and other minority groups in the past, responding to another member of an Instagram group chat who made homophobic remarks with the message, “Shoot them in the back of head.”
“Everything I’ve heard where ‘We can’t do anything’ and ‘It’s out of our hands, it’s inevitable’ – I think that’s a facade that the GOP is putting up,” Kasky said.
“I think that’s what they want us to think. I think that after every shooting, the NRA sends them a memo saying: ‘Send your thoughts and prayers, say let’s not talk about it now, say this happens.’
The 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, then the deadliest single-perpetrator mass shooting in American history, wrung similar sentiments out of pro-gun politicians.
“This is the only country where this kind of thing happens. I’ve been hearing things from people; they don’t have gun drills the way we do.
“We had to prepare extensively at Stoneman Douglas, and that shocked people. This is something that can be stopped, and this is something that will be stopped.”
Kasky labelled historically anti-LGBTI Republicans like Marco Rubio and Florida Governor Rick Scott as “the only people who don’t care” about stopping mass shootings.
Responding to Cooper mentioning that some believe gun control legislation shouldn’t be discussed yet, Kasky said, “This is the time to talk about guns.”
“Thoughts and prayers are appreciated…but there’s much more that can be done, much more that needs to be done, and much more that people like Marco Rubio and Rick Scott are not doing,” he said.
“It’s scary to think that these are the people who are making our laws, when our community just took 17 bullets to the heart.”
Laurence Barber | Star Observer
