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Trump Says He Will Go to Florida Friday to Meet Parkland Victims

Trump Says He Will Go to Florida Friday to Meet Parkland Victims

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said he will leave for Florida Friday to meet with people involved with a mass shooting at Parkland high school left 17 dead and more than a dozen more wounded.

Trump said in a tweet that he would meet with "people whose lives have been totally shattered.” He had already planned to spend the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Trump said he would be “leaving for Florida today to meet with some of the bravest people on earth" and also said he was working with Congress "on many fronts." He didn’t otherwise describe the timing of the meeting or provide further details. White House spokesman Raj Shah said only that Trump would meet with victims “very soon.”

In a speech from the White House on Thursday, Trump said he planned to visit the victims of the mass shooting and called for lawmakers to "tackle the difficult issue of mental health."

Shah said on Friday that Trump wanted to take action to improve school safety. The administration believes more could be done at a local level to strengthen security in communities where schools were less safe than banks or sports venues, Shah added, without specifying what the administration would pursue.

The president has said he will raise the issue of school violence when he meets later this month with state governors and attorneys general in Washington.

But the White House spokesman dismissed "the notion that we can somehow ban weapons."

Authorities said the 19-year-old gunman, Nikolas Cruz, used a semiautomatic AR-15-style rifle that he bought legally. Similar guns have been used in many mass shootings, including in Las Vegas last year and Orlando in 2016. The Parkland massacre was the deadliest school shooting since 20 children and six adults were killed in the December 2012 rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

To contact the reporters on this story: Justin Sink in Washington at jsink1@bloomberg.net, Jennifer Epstein in Washington at jepstein32@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Mike Dorning, Joshua Gallu

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