After Ryan Petty lost his 14-year-old daughter, Alaina, to a 19-year-old mass murderer in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 in Parkland, Fla., he wanted to know what happened. Most of all, he wanted to find the holes in the system to, as best we can, stop such horrors long before they occur.
In the years since, he has done a lot to change the system at the local, state and federal levels. In this video interview, he explains what happened, where the problems in the system are and what he has been helping to do to prevent such tragedies.
“[Alaina] was a freshman sitting in her English class when a gunman went through an unlocked gate through an unlocked door and began to shoot anyone that he could see. Parkland was the most difficult day of my life. It forced me to think about a lot of things.”
“My daughter … one of her favorite things was to go shooting with dad. And, you know, I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you: I sort of had to step back and say, ‘Am I right about this Second Amendment thing?’ … But, you know, I sat on the commission that was tasked with investigating [this] tragedy, so we learned details about what happened. This was a failure of government. This was not an issue of our liberties or Second Amendment or law-abiding gun owners … . Gun control is not the solution to Parkland and these other tragedies. What I learned is that … we had law enforcement with the wrong policy, inadequate training and, unfortunately, there was only one on the campus. And he chose not to intervene that day. He hid outside; he hid outside for 48 minutes. It was a failure at the educational system to deal with these disruptive and often violent students that should not be in our classrooms.”
Petty next explained the bad policies they uncovered and all he has helped to do to correct them. He now travels to other states to help them safeguard their schools. In January 2020, Petty was appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to the Florida State Board of Education.
For others seeking to protect our schools, he pointed to resources he helped to develop with the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Safe Schools.
