He disrupted a congressional hearing on gun control — now, this Parkland dad tells Brut America why he's disrupting the gun apparatus he says is responsible for the violence that took his son's life.
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00:00I don't regret what I did. Don't waste our time, sir. We don't have time here.
00:05Five minutes probably will be like three lives that are going to be shut down.
00:18These powerful groups that pretend that making money and selling guns should be a priority
00:28in a nation where 100 people die per day, which makes 40,000 people losing their lives
00:35per year. In addition to that, you will have a mother that lost her son or daughter or
00:41a daughter that lost her mother or dad. It's only increasing. We decided to stop it, and
00:49we will.
00:51We were together, Patricia and myself, and we were trying to get over the terrible feeling
01:02of losing our most precious person. When Joaquin was born, I understood what the feeling of
01:10needing to protect someone like never before, and I still feel that. Patricia is still a
01:17mother. I'm still a father. How do we turn this reality into something that could at
01:23least make us feel that we still have that role to play? So we decided that Joaquin should
01:30become and deserves to become an activist. We decided to raise his voice. We decided
01:35to show his face. We decided to make him use everything that he had, and he left.
01:47Politicians cannot solve this by themselves, so changing the person is not enough. You
01:54will see a very powerful social movement that will be the one that will decide who is going
02:02to be in Congress, in Senate, and also in the White House.
02:08School shootings are just part of this. Actually, they are a small percentage of gun violence.
02:15It's very sad that you drop off your kid in its school, and then he or she loses their
02:22life inside a school. That makes no sense at all. Let the whole world listen to your
02:28loved one instead of listening to you. It's very sad.
02:35That helps a lot because it impacts people, and I think it's what they deserve as victims.
02:42They didn't have the chance to fight for this. It was an unfair situation, so we need
02:49to bring that moment back. Generate that magical life that is actually not physically next
03:01to us, but is totally in our hearts, and we can make these victims become part of an
03:08amazing movement that will prevent anyone else to be part of that group.