WASHINGTON — Parkland father and activist Manuel Oliver wore the shoes his son Joaquin Oliver had planned to wear to prom to the White House on Monday as he attended President Joe Biden’s speech about new steps to curb gun violence.
Oliver, an artist, was detained by police in February after staging a dramatic protest near the White House on the anniversary of the Parkland shooting. He scaled a construction crane and hung a banner with a picture of his son, one of the 17 people killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.
The banner offered a critical message to Biden that “45k people died from gun violence on your watch.” In a video posted to Twitter, Oliver said he had requested a meeting with Biden a month earlier.
Weeks later, Oliver was one of Biden’s invited guests in the White House Rose Garden as the president announced new federal regulations cracking down on ghost guns, untraceable weapons that can be assembled from a kit. A new Justice Department rule classifies kits as guns under the Gun Control Act.
“Let me say the loss in this crowd is incalculable, but so is the strength — so is the strength. I believe our nation will be safer for your bravery and I really mean that,” Biden told the crowd, which was made up of survivors of gun violence and relatives of victims.
Oliver posted an image of the invitation to Twitter on Sunday evening. The following morning, he posted an image of his son’s shoes.
“My son Joaquin was planning to wear these shoes for prom in 2018. He couldn’t do it because he was killed with an assault weapon inside his school. Today I’m wearing his shoes to attend the @WhiteHouse & hear how @POTUS plans to solve a national crisis that is only getting worse,” Oliver said in a tweet.
Oliver’s tweets did not indicate whether he would have a personal meeting with Biden as he previously requested.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that she was not aware of any scheduled meeting between Biden and Oliver, but she emphasized the president’s respect for the Parkland parents.
“Obviously, inviting these incredibly courageous parents who have experienced the worst thing that can happen to a parent in their lives is a reflection of his respect and all of our respect for the work they’ve done, their advocacy and certainly an acknowledgment of that,” Psaki said.
The event featured a speech from Mia Tretta, a survivor of the 2019 school shooting in Santa Clarita, California. During his speech, Biden invited the parents of two students killed in the Santa Clarita shooting, Dominic Blackwell and Gracie Anne Muehlberger, who were 14 and 15 at the time of their murders, to meet with him in the Oval Office.
He told the Santa Clarita parents that they had “joined a fellowship of loss.”
Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime Guttenberg was murdered in Parkland, attended and posted an image of himself on the White House grounds Monday.
“Since the start of the pandemic, about 100 million additional weapons, plus the unknown number of ghost guns have been added to American streets,” he said on Twitter.
He noted the Senate’s failure to pass legislation in response to the issue in a follow-up tweet and applauded Biden for “using every tool he has through executive actions to save lives.”
David Hogg, a survivor of the shooting and a founder of March For Our Lives, contrasted Biden’s approach to the issue to former President Donald Trump and connected the expected executive actions to electoral victories.
He said four years ago he hung up on the White House when invited to a listening session with Trump. “I told them I’m not coming because Trump doesn’t need to listen, he needs to act. Then we took the WH, Senate & House,” he said on Twitter. “Today I’m going to the White House none of this happens without voting.”
Following the event, however, Hogg called on Biden to do more. He said Biden’s plan was partial rather than comprehensive.
“The reality is what’s politically possible is not what’s gonna stop the next Parkland from happening necessarily,” Hogg told McClatchy.
“I want to stop all people from getting shot in the first place, whether that’s in their schools, or their communities. And I think the president can do a better job of using the bully pulpit to push Congress to say, look, we need a holistic solution to this problem,” he said.
In addition to announcing steps to combat ghost guns, Biden nominated Steve Dettelbach, a former U.S. attorney from Ohio, to serve as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Biden’s previous nominee, David Chipman, a former ATF agent and adviser to the gun control organization Giffords, withdrew from consideration.
He also called on Congress to pass universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines. However, both Dettelbach’s confirmation and additional gun regulations could be uphill battles in the Senate, where both parties hold 50 seats.
The White House event follows last week’s mass shooting in Sacramento, California, which killed six people and injured 12. Its timing also coincides with the ongoing sentencing trial for Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people and injured 17 others.
Rep. Charlie Crist, D-Fla., a candidate for governor, and retiring Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., who represents Parkland, introduced legislation Monday that would enact a national requirement for local school districts to enact timely parental notifications of threats and emergencies on school grounds.
Crist and Deutch’s Parents Need to Know Act is modeled on a law Florida adopted after the Parkland shooting.
Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the 2016 mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, which killed 49 people and wounded 53, also attended the event.
“I’m headed back to the White House today for an announcement from @POTUS on additional actions to curb gun violence,” Wolf said on Twitter Monday morning. “I’m grateful to all who have mobilized, organized, and kept up accountability in an effort to make this country safer. Our work continues.”
