Fred Guttenberg — whose daughter Jaime Guttenberg was killed during the 2018 massacre in Parkland, Florida — said he heard from “dozens of people” on Thursday who experienced both that shooting and one that left two people dead and injured at least six others at Florida State University.
“To say I’ve spent the afternoon kind of shaking would be an understatement,” Guttenberg said in an interview with MSNBC’s José Díaz-Balart.
A number of former students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — the site of the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history in 2018 — experienced yet another school shooting Thursday when a gunman opened fire around lunchtime outside the FSU student union.
Parkland is roughly a 6.5-hour drive from the university in Tallahassee.
Students elsewhere have been two-time survivors of school shootings. Several students at Michigan State University, the site of a 2023 shooting, also were at Oxford High School outside Detroit when a gunman killed four people and wounded seven in 2021.
Guttenberg told MSNBC that his daughter would be graduating college this year were she alive today and, in a post on social media, noted that “many” of his daughter’s friends attend FSU, including some who were at the student union on Thursday.
“As a father, all I ever wanted after the Parkland shooting was to help our children be safe,” wrote Guttenberg, an anti-gun-violence activist since his daughter’s killing. “Sadly, because of the many people who refuse to do the right things about reducing gun violence, I am not surprised by what happened today.”
Guttenberg used his MSNBC appearance to slam Donald Trump, who was also president at the time of the Parkland shooting.
The situation “angers me beyond measure because of what he failed to do back then,” Guttenberg said of Trump, who claimed that “the gun doesn’t do the shooting” in response to the FSU massacre.
He added that Trump has been “systemically undoing everything good” that he and other anti-gun-violence activists supported during President Joe Biden’s tenure.
He specifically pointed to Trump shuttering the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which Biden established in 2023, and other ways the president has rolled back his predecessor’s actions on gun control.
“And so if anyone is surprised that he will do nothing after today, you shouldn’t be,” Guttenberg said.
