Before his daughter was shot and killed in her high school, Andrew Pollack was living a simple life in Florida.  

He was semi-retired, worked real-estate on the side, coached lacrosse, ate right, went to the gym twice a day and spent part of the day training his dog and spent time with his kids. 

“I went from blessed to cursed,” he says about the tragic day that his daughter Meadow, a high school senior, was murdered by a psychotic former student who walked into her school with a rifle. Now his life has changed forever, and Pollack is on a mission to make schools safer, but not by marching to demand more gun control. 

Instead, Pollack went to work with Florida state legislatures, met with the Speaker of the House with simple messages, viz; Make our schools safer. Secure our children.

His efforts ended in landmark legislation passing in Florida. 

“I’m like a lion right now, I tell everyone, I’ve got the heart of a lion since my daughter was murdered, I’m been empowered to work 1,000 times harder on getting this done,” he said in an interview with Breitbart News in Washington, DC. 

Pollack traveled to Washington with his family to attend the March for Our Lives, spending the week meeting with Trump’s cabinet members, Members of Congress, and political allies with the same message.

He felt hope after his message was well received in meetings across town, but when his son Hunter was denied a chance to speak at the march, he was frustrated. 

“I guess he didn’t have the right agenda, I don’t know, I’m frustrated,” he said. “When my kid is frustrated, I get frustrated.” 

When it came time to march, he opted to coach his Lacrosse team instead after they also traveled to the nation’s capital to compete with area schools. 

“When I go out there, I escape from everything a little bit,” Pollack said.

After the game, he told Breitbart News that he felt that the left had hijacked the student movement into an emotional tirade against guns.  

“If somebody mentions the word gun control, the way I look is they are deflecting from keeping our schools safe, so it angers me,” he said. “Everyone has the right to march for whatever they want, but it takes away from our objective if you’ve got everybody shouting guns, and the schools are still wide open. You could walk in with a pistol, a rifle, a knife or an ax.” 

He blames the media for turning every mass shooting into a  gun control issue rather than focusing on the simple task of making the schools more secure. 

“That’s all you hear now … When they start with the gun control, I take it personal, it’s not going to fix the schools,” he said. 

He chooses not to disparage the kids from Parkland, after they rallied at the March for Our Lives, but admits that he feels that the movement got hijacked. 

“This whole march was politicized, you know, but they’re kids, so you can’t really blame them, they’re scared, they think they’re doing the right thing,” he said. 

Pollack was largely apolitical until the 2016 election where he voted for Trump together with his two sons. 

“It was the first time I ever voted,” the 52-year-old says about his vote for President Trump. “Can you imagine where we’d be if Hillary became president?”  

He credits the president for standing up and running for office to fix the country, despite universal opposition from the media. 

“The guy gets bashed every hour of the day,” he said. “I don’t know, I give him credit for doing it, he’s 20 years older than me and he works like a maniac.” 

Pollack said the president showed interest in his message of hardening the schools after he and his sons visited with him at the White House.  

“I am deeply grateful for your presence at the White House for discussions regarding school safety,” Trump wrote in a letter to the Pollack family after the meeting.

He’s also a gun owner and taught his children to shoot and handle firearms. 

“My daughter liked to shoot more than my sons,” he says, recalling his time with Meadow. 

But now his focus is entirely on school safety.

After watching legislative success in Florida, Pollack said he is founding a group called CLASS — Children’s Lives and School Safety. 

He described it as an organization to represent children and parents across the country, demanding solutions to keep the schools more secure. He plans to travel state to state to campaign for similar legislative actions that were passed in Florida. 

Despite the repeated shootings in schools, he noted, many of lawmakers and school administrators were still not making the practical changes to keep more kids safe.  

“There’s no accountability to anybody, no accountability to the FBI, no accountability at the Sheriff’s office, no accountability at the school board, so you know you see what this stuff keeps happening,” he said. 

That’s why he thinks parents need to have an organization to speak for them, just like unions represent the teachers and the police officers in political situations. 

“I’m getting a lot of people interested, I’m speaking for most Americans, that’s what they want, not what the media’s showing,” he concludes. 

To remember his daughter, he is raising money to build a magnificent playground at https://remembermeadow.com.

“This will not be any ordinary playground, this will be built for a princess,” he said on his website where he is raising money for the project. “Instead of visiting my princess at a graveyard, I will sit on a bench in her playground and watch other beautiful children play.”