ORLANDO, Fla. — Growing up, Joaquin “Guac” Oliver was “always worried about community issues,” recalled his mother, Patricia Oliver.
“(He worried) about his friends, about immigration, about social issues,” she said. “... When Joaquin was 12 years old, he was able to write a project about (firearm purchase) background checks, when he just was 12 years old. He was posting on Twitter, he was tweeting about all that happened in Sandy Hook.”
In February 2018, Joaquin was one of the 17 people killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland. His parents, Patricia and her husband Manuel Oliver, have spent the years since the shooting raising awareness for gun violence prevention in honor of their son, following in his footsteps as an activist.
On Monday, they joined the families of other mass shooting victims and mass shooting survivors for a gun violence prevention rally at the Pulse Memorial.
The rally was part of Guac’s Magical Tour-Guacathon 2023, a cross-country road trip in a school bus to 25 cities affected by gun violence, including Columbine, Colorado; Newtown, Connecticut, the site of the Sandy Hook shooting; Las Vegas; and El Paso and Uvalde, Texas. The tour is named in honor of the nickname given to Joaquin by his friends.
“He was very determined, very demanding, and that’s why today Manuel and I just do our best to represent him in his best possible way,” Patricia Oliver said of her son. “Because we’re sure that if he were here with us, he would be doing what we’re doing today. So instead of that we are the ones who are in charge of that.”
Guacathon began at the memorial garden at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School in Parkland earlier on Monday. The Olivers then traveled to Orlando to visit the Pulse Memorial, located at the site of the Pulse nightclub where 49 people lost their lives in a mass shooting in 2016.
The tour is supposed to end Aug. 20 in Charleston, South Carolina, two weeks after Joaquin’s 23rd birthday on Aug. 4. The tour was originally planned to make 23 stops in honor of Joaquin’s birthday before two more stops were added.
Patricia Oliver says the tour is about bringing hope, awareness and unity to those affected by gun violence, especially in light of Florida’s new law allowing permitless concealed carry, which went into effect Saturday.
“Since July 1, we’re gonna be in more trouble, and that’s why we decided to call it all together against gun violence,” she said. “So how can we be able to bring some kind of hope or some kind of, you know, determination to be able to stay united and bring more people into the cause to fight against this craziness that we’re doing every day.”
Democratic Congressman Maxwell Frost, who represents Florida’s 10th Congressional District, spoke at the event, singling out the new law.
“People will call it ‘constitutional carry’, it’s actually permitless carry, which essentially means any gun, any place, any person,” Frost said. “Most gun owners, most Republicans, most Democrats, most humans who live in the United States are against dangerous laws like this, passed by a governor who’s more interested in running for president than running the state of Florida. People will die because of this legislation.”
Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the Pulse shooting, spoke about the rally’s ‘ironic” timing just before July 4, when the nation celebrates the core American value of freedom.
“There are a lot of people in this country who have had freedom stolen from them because of our obsession with easy access to weapons of war,” Wolf said. “There’s no freedom for the 18-year-old girl who died in a bathroom in that building (Pulse) ... There’s no freedom for my best friends Drew and Juan who took 19 rounds from a SIG Sauer MCX (rifle) and never made it home to say goodbye to their parents.”
Mayra Alvear, mother of Pulse victim Amanda Alvear, said she sympathized with the Olivers and understands what they do.
“You keep fighting for change,” Alvear said. “It is because of the love we have for our children, because their life means so much to us. As parents, we do everything for our children, and we don’t stop because they were taken from us. ... We don’t want this nightmare to happen to other families. We know how these tragedies affect our lives. We live it daily. We think of our children from the time we wake up until they go to bed, everyday.”
The push to reform gun laws, she said, “is not about the Second Amendment.”
“This is about everyone’s right to live and go to work, to dance, to school, to church, to a park and theater, going shopping, walking down their neighborhood freely without worries of being mowed down by high-capacity rifles,” Alvear said.
Some GOP lawmakers in Florida also recently attempted to lower the age at which a person can buy certain types of firearms, such as rifles, from 21 to 18. The age was previously raised to 21 under then-Gov. Rick Scott in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting.
“That was a really, was very disrespectful, let’s put it that way, to us as families of kids that we lost in the Parkland shooting,” Patricia Oliver said.
The next stop on the tour is Atlanta on Wednesday.
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