The Parkland school shooting was 6 years ago this week – Here’s what Mark Robinson said about the teenage survivors
Wednesday marked six years since 17 students and faculty were murdered at a Parkland, Florida, high school. As we remember the lives lost and those forever changed, we must also remember what Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson said about those children in the aftermath of the shooting.
Following the nation’s deadliest high school mass shooting, several of the survivors joined together to turn their tragedy into action as they formed March for Our Lives, an anti-gun violence organization dedicated to pushing for stronger gun laws in America.
Seeing a group of students who survived a massacre in the hallways of their high school join together and call for tougher gun laws sparked something awful in Robinson. As English writer Charles Caleb Colton said, “If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.” It’s advice that Robinson should have taken.
Instead of being quiet, Robinson decided to bully the students online repeatedly, cruelly and gleefully. Less than two weeks after the shooting, he called survivor David Hogg and other students “spoiled, angry, know it all CHILDREN,” “stupid kids,” “spoiled little bastards,” and “silly little immature ‘media prosti-tots’” who need to “shut up.”
He posted a picture on Facebook labeling teen survivor David Hogg as a “Media Hogg” and agreed with commenters that Hogg was a “paid actor” and wasn’t a survivor. He even mocked the appearance of the teen survivors, referring to X Gonzalez as “that bald chick.”
Robinson has said “school shootings should be no surprise” because public education has become “the domain of the cunning and wicked” and he has blamed school shootings not on guns, but because we have “purged prayer from the hallways of those schools.” If those comments weren’t bad enough, he also said that mass shootings in America are “karma” for allowing abortions.
Unsurprisingly, Robinson opposes universal background checks and is an NRA Board Member and frequent headliner of NRA events. The NRA Political Victory Fund spent more than $82,000 to get Robinson elected in 2020 and, almost six years to the day of the Parkland massacre, the NRA fully endorsed Robinson, giving him the NRA’s highest accolades, an “A+” rating, and their “unwavering support.”
North Carolinians deserve a leader who is empathetic enough to at least express sadness over the murder of 14 children and three adults – or one who is at least mature enough to not mock and belittle the teenage survivors of a school shooting. Mark Robinson is not that leader.
