WASHINGTON – After listening to students, parents and teachers talk about how to prevent school shootings, President Donald Trump made promises Wednesday.
The conversation in the White House State Dining Room focused on the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, and the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Littleton, Colorado.
Recommended Videos
Trump held handwritten notes with questions and a message.
"I hear you," someone wrote with a black marker in one of the note cards Trump was holding.
Trump didn't commit to a specific policy solution, but he promised to be "very strong" on background checks, and go "very strongly into age, age of purchase." He also said he supported arming trained teachers and school employees.
"I don’t understand why I can still go in a store and buy a weapon of war, an AR," Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Samuel Zeif, 18, said. "How is it that easy to buy this type of weapon? How do we not stop this after Columbine? After Sandy Hook?"
Andrew Pollack, a Trump supporter whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow was killed, said gun laws weren't the solution.
"It should have been one school shooting and we should have fixed it," Pollack said. "And I’m pissed, because my daughter, I’m not going to see again."
Darrell and Sandra Scott, whose daughter was killed in the Columbine shooting, and Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden, who lost children at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut were among the 40 guests.
"I am confident you will do the right thing," Marjory Stoneman Douglas' student body president, Julia Cordover, told Trump.