Andrew Pollack will speak on the first night of Republican National Convention (RNC), attacking the Biden-Sanders “unity” platform for banning arrests in school — a provision that could allow potential mass shooters to purchase weapons legally.
Pollack is the father of Meadow Pollack, an 18-year-old student at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who was among the 17 victims of a mass shooting carried out there on February 14, 2018.
The 19-year-old shooter, a former student at the school, was able to buy guns legally despite past criminal behavior because the school district’s policies shielded him from arrest, thus protecting him from building a criminal record that would have kept guns out of this hands.
As Pollack has written in his book Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies that Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students and at Breitbart News:
The Democrat-run Broward school district blamed teachers and school resource officers for racial disparities in school discipline and arrests. So they formally decriminalized misdemeanors (three freebie misdemeanors a year, re-setting every year) and informally decriminalized felonies. They also tied school resource officers’ hands and told school administrators to refuse to cooperate with local law enforcement.
The Parkland shooter committed many crimes in school: he threatened to kill, committed hate-crime assault, trespassed on school grounds after he got kicked out. No arrests. By design. No criminal record.
The Obama-Biden administration supported the district’s “PROMISE” program, which aimed to reduce the arrests of minority students. Police were also called to the shooter’s home dozens of times, and he was never arrested.
As a result, he was able to purchase the firearms with which he carried out his mass shooting, passing a background check.
Former Vice President Joe Biden is running on the “Biden-Sanders Unity” platform, which incorporates many left-wing policies — including a ban on the arrest of students in school:
Democrats believe we must break the school-to-prison pipeline that sees children of color arrested in their classrooms for misbehavior that ought to be handled in the principal’s office, and build a school to opportunity pipeline instead. We support re-issuing federal guidance from the Department of Education and the Department of Justice to prevent the disparate disciplinary treatment of children of color in school and educational settings.
Pollack will argue that Democrats’ policy on school arrests makes future mass shootings at schools more likely.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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