Survivor of Florida School Shooting Calls out NRA: ‘Wake Up’

Two students who survived Wednesday’s shooting at Marjorly Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida harshly criticized the National Rifle Association (NRA) and President Donald Trump on Friday.

“I think, because as powerful as the office of the president is, you all yield to someone,” Lewis Mizen told CNN. “We’re in AP Government and we’re learning about interest groups. The NRA is the most powerful interest group in the United States, and they’re the ones that have to kind of wake up. Because until the leaders of the NRA have their kids shot up in a school, and the way we’re heading if this keeps up, as terrible as that might sound, if this keeps happening, eventually it’s going to hit one of them. Until that happens and hundreds of thousands of millions of people have lost their kids, nothing is going to change.”

President Trump traveled to Florida on Friday to meet with the survivors, and the teachers and faculty that helped save them during the shooting. Prior to his arrival, student Emma Gonzales had a request for what the president should do about preventing more school shootings going forward.

“Anything,” Gonzales said. “Do anything.”

On Wednesday, the 19-year-old confessed gunman, Nikolas Cruz entered the school 10 minutes before dismissal and opened fire with an AR-15 rifle he had legally purchased the year prior. Fourteen students were killed along with three teachers, marking the fifth deadly school shooting just seven weeks into 2018.

A report came out on Thursday that the police had been called to the home of Cruz’s adoptive parents 39 times since 2010, along with video of Cruz firing a BB gun in his backyard.

ABC News interviewed one of Cruz’s neighbors, who said they were not surprised he would do something like the shooting.

“He was in our backyard one time, and our back neighbors have chickens, and he was, like, shooting at them with, like, a pellet gun or something weird,” neighbor Brody Speno said. “And another incident is, I was next door with my neighbors, when I was younger…playing with them, and he came over uninvited, and we were nice about it because we felt bad for him, because he’s a little weird and we wanted to be friendly with him. And he, like, cornered a squirrel and was pegging rocks at it, like, trying to kill it. It was just weird that a kid that young was, like, murdering an animal. (I’m) not surprised that it was him.”