I come to the floor today to take a moment and remember the tragedy that occurred four years ago at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
On that day, we lost seventeen innocent souls from this Earth at the hands of a troubled, and evil young man who entered the school and opened fire.
This tragedy can’t be forgotten. Not by the survivors of this attack, not by the families who lost loved ones and not by us in Congress.
We must continue finding solutions to prevent these attacks.
In this spirit, today, I am pushing for the passage of my bipartisan and bicameral EAGLES Act.
My bill is supported by over 40 state attorneys general, along with several groups, including Stand with Parkland, the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Association of Secondary School Principals and Major County Sheriffs of America.
Passing the EAGLES Act is vital in our fight to protect our schools and to promote safe and healthy learning environments for our children.
Just this month, the National Institute of Justice published an article discussing common traits of persons who engaged in mass shootings between 1966 and 2019.
Their analysis showed that the people who commit these acts were commonly troubled by personal trauma before the shooting, nearly always in a state of crisis at the time and, in most cases, engaged in leaking their plans before opening fire.
Every single one of those findings applies to the shooter in Parkland.
It’s clear we need to ramp up prevention efforts.
The EAGLES Act would achieve these aims by reauthorizing and expanding the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) to proactively identify and manage threats before they result in more tragedies.
NTAC studies targeted violence and proactively identifies how to manage threats before they result in more tragedies.
The EAGLES Act also establishes a Safe School Initiative to look at school violence prevention and expands research on school violence.
My bill also provides funding to hire social scientists with expertise in child psychological development to support NTAC’s work. This is important to make sure that proven and evidence-based policies will continue to support everyone in the school environment positively.
Students need more support from Congress for a safe, positive and inclusive learning environment. The EAGLES Act delivers just that by providing resources and training to school personnel, which will enable them to identify troubled youth and give them the intervention and treatment they need, hopefully long before an intervention is needed by law enforcement.
While we cannot undo the tragedies of the past, we must continue working on ways to prevent future tragedies.
I’d like to encourage all of my Senate colleagues to support this bill.
The Parkland shooter was identified by all metrics identified long before the incident yet allowed to carry on. More illegal laws and money won’t fix the root problem. God was removed from the public square.