Anthony Rizzo had to hold back tears as he stepped up to the microphone on Thursday evening. His alma mater, Marjorly Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was the scene of a school shooting on Wednesday where 14 students and three teachers were killed.
“I come home to Parkland to what should be everybody’s first concern, and that’s showing our kids out there — the students at Stoneman Douglas and of Broward County and from all over the country — that we care about their lives and about their future,” Rizzo said. “I’ve been very impressed with talking to the students and how they’re taking care of each other and how they’re coming together. I’m so grateful to the teachers, the coaches, the administration and all the first responders that tried to protect them.”
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Rizzo graduated from the high school in 2007, going on to win a World Series with the Chicago Cubs in 2016. He was one of about two dozen people to give a speech at the candlelight vigil.
“I am only who I am because of this community,” Rizzo said. “And I just want all of you to know how proud I am to be a part of this community. I want you to know that you’re not alone in your grief. We’re all grieving with you. The entire country is grieving with you. So whatever comfort I can give, I will give. Whatever support I can offer to our students, teachers, coaches and families and first responders, you’ll have it.
“:I went to Stoneman Douglas. I grew up in Stoneman Douglas. I played on those fields, I went to those classes. I studied in those classrooms, the same rooms we saw yesterday in those videos for all the wrong reasons.”
Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old who had been kicked out of the school a year prior, opened fire inside the school 10 minutes before dismissal on Wednesday, drawing students out by pulling the fire alarm.
Whether Cruz should have been able to legally buy the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle has been widely discussed since the shooting, given that he was already on the law enforcement’s radar given the police had visited his adoptive mother’s house 39 times in the past seven years along with his threatening posts on social media.
Rizzo said that something must be done about the laws that gave Cruz the ability to purchase that weapon as an 18-year-old.
“We see this on TV too often,” Rizzo said. “I feel like all the time it is. I feel like there’s a cycle to it. We get horrified that this violence is inflicted in our kids. We get angry that there’s nothing we can do and nothing is done about it. And we ultimately get immune and move on to something else. But then it happens in your own town. In a movie theater or a school or a night club or a church. And we realize it could happen to us.
“Look, I’m a baseball player, but I’m also an American. I’m a Floridian and I’m a Parklander for life. And while I know I don’t have all the answers, I know that something has to change before this is visited in another community, and another community and another community.”
