Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat Congressman from Parkland, Florida, is amping up his call for common-sense gun reform in the aftermath of Nashville’s fatal school shooting on Monday, publicly locking horns with Republican representative of Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene and interviewing with “CNN This Morning,” exclaiming, “We have allowed schools in this country to be turned into slaughterhouses.”
Moskowitz made headlines Wednesday for getting ensnared in debate with Greene during a House Oversight Committee hearing in which he argued against her stance of arming school officials to protect against active shooters: “You guys are worried about banning books,” he said. “Dead kids can’t read.”
Sitting with “CNN This Morning” Thursday, co-host Kaitlan Collins asked Moskowitz about the viral moment. He shared that it’s “a very serious issue for me,” as he is a graduate of Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of Parkland’s horrific shooting in 2018.
“What was going through my mind is I still remember that there are members on the Oversight Committee that called Parkland a ‘false flag’ event, and so I know what I’m dealing with there,” he said. “This is a very serious issue for me because I’ve seen what it’s like when you go to your school that you graduated from and there are bullet holes through the windows, where backpacks are piled up outside, where homework is scattered through the hallway, where there’s bloodstains in front of the door because there’s someone you went to high school with passed away.”
“She has never seen that,” he continued of Greene. “A lot of these Republicans that I have served with have never seen that. They’ve never seen what it’s like to watch parents put their kid in a box, testify at their funeral, and say the only thing they did wrong was send their kid to school … We have allowed schools in this country to be turned into slaughterhouses. I knew what I was getting myself into.”
He also shared that more gun reform than just President Joe Biden’s call to ban assault weapons is possible.
“I think we need to institute the assault weapons ban, but we also can’t be afraid to do smaller things,” he said. “Everything we do is about mitigating this event and mitigating this crisis in this country. And so look, if we can go out and pass a bill that saves 100 lives, I’ll take that. If we can pass a bill that saves five lives, I’ll take it. That’s five more children that are alive, that’s five more families that are not broken. And so I’m here to work with my colleagues across the aisle. I want to ban assault weapons, but if we can’t get that done and we can talk about mental health and we can talk about hardening schools and we can talk about SROs and we can talk about single point of entry and we can talk about threat assessments, I’m willing to do all of the above because there is not one thing that’s gonna solve this problem. We have to do multiple things.”
Watch the full “CNN This Morning” interview in the video above.