A Florida student has addressed gun violence in a heartbreaking speech just days after a shooter killed 17 people at her high school.
Emma Gonzalez is a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 19-year-old ex-student Nikolas Cruz opened fire on Thursday.
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"Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving," Emma said at a gun control rally on Saturday (local time).
"But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and [US President Donald Trump] can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it's time for victims to be the change that we need to see.
"This was not just a mental health issue. He would not have harmed that many students with a knife.
"And how about we stop blaming the victims for something that was the fault of the people who let him buy the guns in the first place, those at the gun shows, the people who encouraged him to buy accessories for his guns to make them fully automatic, the people who didn't take them away from him when they knew he expressed homicidal tendencies."
Emma also took a moment to address Mr Trump's reaction to the shooting.
"If the President wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I'm going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association [NRA].
"I already know. Thirty-million dollars. And divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States in the one and one-half months in 2018 alone, that comes out to being $5800. Is that how much these people are worth to you, Trump?
"If you don't do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur, that number of gunshot victims will go up and the number that they are worth will go down. And we will be worthless to you.
"To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you.
"They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS.
"They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don't know what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works. We call BS."
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