This is a modal window.
Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.
End of dialog window.
Before the situation was even contained or the shooter apprehended, a Democratic senator blamed his Republican colleagues for a mass shooting at a school in Florida.
"As we speak, there is a horrific scene playing out at a high school in south Florida," Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon. "Turn on your television right now, you’re going to see scenes of children running for their lives. What looks to be the 19th school shooting in this country, and we have not even hit March."
Murphy said mass shootings only occur in America because of Washington's failure to crackdown on gun ownership.
"This happens nowhere else other than the United States of America," he said. "This epidemic of mass slaughter, this scourge of school shooting after school shooting. It only happens here not because of coincidence, not because of bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction."
"We are responsible for a level of mass atrocity that happens in this country with zero parallel anywhere else," he continued. "As a parent, it scares me to death that this body doesn’t take seriously the safety of my children, and it seems like a lot of parents in south Florida are going to be asking that same question later today."