WASHINGTON — The father of a student killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School interrupted President Joe Biden on Monday during a White House ceremony touting a new gun-violence law, vocally urging the president to take further action on firearm access.
The incident was — depending on the perspective — either a righteous denunciation of an ill-conceived celebration or a frustrating distraction from a landmark achievement.
Manuel Oliver, whose son Joaquin was one of 17 people killed in the 2018 Parkland shooting, began speaking over Biden near the start of the president’s remarks hailing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a law passed last month that supporters hailed as the most significant federal effort to curb gun-related violence in nearly 30 years.
But Oliver, who afterward told the Miami Herald that he was trying to tell the president to take further federal action on guns before being escorted off the White House lawn, said he thought the event’s celebratory tone was misplaced, given what he considers to be the law’s shortcomings and the ongoing spate of shootings across the country.
“There’s nothing to celebrate,” he said in an interview with the Miami Herald. “It’s a big lie. We lie between ourselves thinking we have a solution to this when we actually don’t.
“There was no need for this event,” he added. “At all.”
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Oliver’s interruption underscored the broader way in which some advocates and Democrats are wrestling with the new law, happy that a serious effort to reduce access to firearms made it through Congress but concerned that it’s not nearly comprehensive enough to drastically lower the number of people who die from guns every year.
The theme was evident in Biden’s own remarks on Monday, in which he reiterated time and time again that although he considered the new law a significant achievement, the federal government still needed to do more, including re-instituting a ban on assault weapons that lapsed nearly 20 years ago.
Some advocates on hand at the White House, including other parents of the Parkland victims, said they thought the ceremony was perfectly appropriate — and expressed a frustration at Oliver for not recognizing good developments when they happen.
“Everybody knows this bill is not perfect,” said Tony Montalto, whose daughter, Gina Montalto, was killed at Stoneman Douglas. “But if we don’t acknowledge the things that are done, we’re left with the same thing that we’ve had after most of the mass shootings, which is nothing.”
Montalto, president of Stand With Parkland — The National Association of Families for Safe Schools, said there was a “wide variety of feelings” among people he spoke with about Oliver’s protest.
”Personally, yes, I am frustrated with it,” he said. “Because I want to support all the efforts that are being done, all of the groups that have worked so hard to get to this.”
GUN LAW PROVISIONS
Montalto described Monday’s ceremony as the culmination of years of exhaustive, delicate work from his group, trying to bring Republican and Democratic officials together to pass laws that make schools safer. It’s the first time, he added, that their work had achieved a breakthrough at the federal level.
Congress approved the gun-safety law in June in the aftermath of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, that left more than 30 dead and reignited a national debate about access to firearms. The shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, in which 19 students and two teachers died, was the worst mass shooting at a school sincea former studentattacked Stoneman Douglas four years earlier.
The legislation, which received the support of 15 Republican senators, is the first major federal legislation focused on gun safety since the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994.
Included in the law are provisions that would strengthen background checks on firearm buyers aged 18 to 21, broaden the ban on firearm purchases for people convicted of domestic abuse, send money to states to run crisis intervention programs, and increase funding for school security, among other provisions.
“What we’re doing here today is real,” Biden said during the ceremony. “It’s vivid. It’s relevant. The action we take today is a step designed to make our nation the kind of nation we should be.”
But the president himself also acknowledged that although he was proud of the law, he still wanted Congress to take additional action, including re-instituting a ban on assault weapons.
“Yes, there’s the right to bear arms,” Biden said. “But we also have a right to live freely without fear for our lives in a grocery store, in a classroom, and a playground, and a house of worship, and a store, at a workplace, and a nightclub, a festival in our neighborhoods and our streets. The right to bear arms is not an absolute right that dominates all others.”
During Monday’s briefing with reporters, held after the event, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president and White House didn’t have a problem with Oliver’s protest, saying they understood the need for more action.
“The president agrees with him,” Jean-Pierre said. “He agrees that we need to do more.”
HOGG RESPONDS
Oliver’s protest was applauded by some Parkland activists, including David Hogg, a student at Stoneman Douglas in 2018 who is now one of the country’s highest-profile gun-safety advocates.
“Not challenging the status quo is deadly,” Hogg tweeted. “The father of Parkland victim Joaquin Oliver @manueloliver00 knows the cost of not doing all we can. Thank you Manny, we deserve SO much more and while this bill is a good step there is more President Biden can do” without Congress.
Other Democrats said they thought it was important to acknowledge progress when it’s being made. Florida state Rep. Dan Daley, a graduate of Stoneman Douglas High who attended Monday’s ceremony at the White House, said he can never imagine the anguish Oliver feels about gun violence and the prolonged struggle to pass legislation about it.
“But at the end of the day, you need to recognize as well that this is a significant step, and one that hasn’t happened, like I said before, in 30 years,” Daley, a Democrat, said in an interview.
The law does appear to have bipartisan support, even if many supporters are unsure if it will do much to reduce gun-related violence. A new poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center found that 64% of adults approve of it, compared to 21% who don’t.
People are less sure, however, if it will make a significant reduction in the number of gun-related deaths. Among all adults, 42% say it will do “a little” to reduce gun violence, compared with 7% who say it’ll do a lot. Thirty-five percent, meanwhile, say it won’t do anything at all.
Even before Monday’s protest, Oliver had become a highly visible critic of the Biden administration’s approach on guns, publicly demanding through most of 2021 to meet with the president before climbing a crane in Washington, D.C., in February to call for additional federal action to reduce gun-related violence. (Oliver confirmed in an interview that he met with President Biden in the Oval Office earlier this year.)
He said that when he tried to speak to Biden in the middle of the speech, he was urging the president to establish a White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, a long-held policy goal of some advocates that administration officials have thus far resisted.
He doesn’t oppose the new gun law, he added, saying that anything that saves even one life is worthwhile. He just thinks more action is necessary before praise is warranted.
“It was my chance to say something to the president, and that’s a chance we don’t have every single day,” Oliver said. “That’s pretty much what this is about.”
