Littwin: The FSU shooting is different — at least for students who had already survived the 2018 Parkland massacre
We shouldn’t expect anything to change, though, after the 81st mass shooting of the year. Trump has already said as much.
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You may have missed this story amid the nonstop Trump/Musk/MAGA-produced crises facing our democracy and our economy and so much else, but there was another school shooting, just a few days ago.
Whatever else is happening in the world, the latest mass shooting, this one on the Florida State University campus, demands our attention. According to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are shot, it was the 81st such shooting of the year in the United States.
You can’t blame Donald Trump for that, or at least not entirely. In talking to reporters Friday, he said the FSU shooting was “terrible,” but that as a “big advocate of the Second Amendment,” he didn’t think any new laws were needed. After which he managed to repeat the NRA-style idiocy, saying “the gun doesn’t do the shooting, the people do.”
He didn’t mention that the people who do the shooting often have easy access to the gun — or that gun violence is the No. 1 killer of young Americans, something you’d think a president wouldn’t be advocating.
Even so, we could pay attention for at least a few days. Maybe even for a week. Maybe even after the thoughts-and-prayers caucus responds as it usually does — with thoughts and prayers and utter inaction.
But the story has already moved off the front pages of many newspapers. So we’d better get to it.
This shooting was more just the normal gut-wrenching horror show. There was even more than just your typical amount of anguish and depth of mourning. There were the flowers and the ballons and the notes and vigils and the trauma that, for most, will never leave them.
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We know this because in this shooting, there were actually FSU students on campus who were also students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during the 2018 Parkland, Florida, massacre, when 17 were killed and 18 injured.
Yes, there are students who have endured the trauma of school massacres twice in one young lifetime. Once is too many. Twice is unimaginable.
As Joshua Gallagher, an FSU law student, posted on social media, “I never thought it would happen again…No matter your politics, we need to meet — and something has to change.”
Stephanie Horowitz, a master’s student at FSU, also survived the Stoneman Douglas shooting.
“I never thought it would happen to me for the first time, and here we are,” she told “CBS Mornings.” “Unfortunately, this is America for you.”
Two died and six were injured at the FSU shooting. The gunman, a 20-year-old
Florida State student, is the son of a veteran Leon County deputy sheriff. The gunman used his mother’s former service weapon — which she purchased after the county adopted an updated service weapon — but, according to reports, only after the shotgun he also brought with him had jammed.
The gunman, identified as Phoenix Ikner, was a member of the sheriff department’s youth advisory council and, according to the sheriff, had participated in many of the department’s training programs. His mother was apparently serving as a school resource officer just a few miles away from the shooting. The school, of course, went into lockdown.
Meanwhile, at the Florida state Capitol, just a little more than a mile away from the FSU campus, legislators have been busy — as you might expect — working to pass bills that would weaken gun safety laws, and certainly not strengthen them. In the Florida House, they overwhelmingly passed a bill recently that would roll back the age to buy rifles and other long guns from 21 to 18.
That law moving the age from 18 to 21 had been passed in response to the shooting at Stoneman Douglas. You now have to wonder if they might shelve that bill in the name of decency, at least for a few weeks or months. Or maybe even years.
Interestingly, from a Colorado perspective, Jared Polis just signed a critical bill strengthening gun laws in the state by making it more difficult to purchase certain semiautomatic weapons. It’s an important bill, but one that wasn’t all it could have been because Polis, who says he doesn’t support gun bans, refused to sign it into law unless it was watered down.
As the bill was originally constructed, it would have outlawed the sale and transfer — although not ownership — of most guns that can use detachable magazines. One of the major reasons for the bill was that the size of gun magazines, set by law at 15 rounds following the Aurora theater shooting, was largely ignored.
Instead, the bill calls for those who want to buy such guns to be vetted by the county sheriff and then take a 12-hour course over two days — four hours if you already have a hunter’s license — that educates purchasers on gun safety and storage, particularly as related to semiautomatic weapons. It also teaches about red flag laws and other related issues.
It’s a strong bill, if not as strong as I’d prefer. And as he signed it, Polis, too, said we needed to respect our citizens’ Second Amendment rights. OK, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also protect our citizens from gun violence, as Colorado lawmakers have done many times since Columbine, which took place 26 years ago this Sunday.
As state Sen. Tom Sullivan, a co-sponsor of the bill who has dedicated his life to gun safety since his son Alex was killed in the Aurora shooting, said during a floor debate on the issue:
“I’m not a threat to the Second Amendment. It’s the 45,000 who are dying by gun violence.”
Ilana Badiner, who was an eighth grader at a middle school close to the Stoneman Douglas campus during the mass shooting there, might agree. She is now just two weeks from graduation at FSU, and the trauma she suffered has returned.
“It’s terrible that this keeps happening,” she told the New York Times. “This is crazy that it’s happened twice to me. Like, what are the odds?”
☀️ MORE FROM MIKE LITTWIN
The odds may not be as long as Badiner might guess.
According to a Washington Post survey, more than 31,000 K-12 students were affected in some fashion by gun violence during school hours in 2024 alone.
What you can safely bet is that Trump, the dizzily destructive change agent, will move on quickly past the FSU shooting, with nothing — once again — changing in Washington at all.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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