columbine, virginia tech orlando las vegas now this high school in florida. and they also learn and they are learning if they don t know this already, something that jim himes, congressman himes from connecticut who s about to join us, knows in fact, that children lose their lives because a majority of members of congress are afraid to lose their seats. the lack of courage and character in this congress and past congresses is astounding. congressman himes, you represent newtown, connecticut. why, why, is this happening? well, i newtown is just over the line from my district but obviously those of us who were around newtown and saw the horror of at this point 20 younger children killed and of course you were talking about teachers, six teachers, mike the answer to your question about why is because the nra and the right wing in this country have decided that standing up on an
left the school and yet the teachers and the students were still there waiting to be notified that it was safe to leave. and so because of that we don t have an exact time line yet. that s one of the things that will come out in the coming days. nbc news correspondent tammy lightener. tammy, thank you. i know it s been a tough day of reporting. thank you for being with us. i want to bring into the conversation now somebody who has been through this in a terrible way. lori hawes is someone whose daughter was shot twice during the shooting at virginia tech in 2007. she survived. 32 people were killed in that virginia tech shooting. since then, ms. hawes, lori hawes has advocated for gun safety, for gun violence prevention. she is now the virginia state director at the coalition to stop gun violence. and days like this are forward for the country. they are certainly hard for the survivors. they re a particular kind of hard for family members who have been through this sort of thing so
there for the kids and to tell them it was going to be okay. it doesn t help if i m sitting there crying, too. so, you know, i just kept telling them it was going to be okay and they were okay and everything was going to be okay and, you know, that helped i guess for them to get through it. you guys had your phones with you, you and presumably the students as well. you described receiving text messages as part of how you knew that this wasn t a drill, that this was a real-life situation. what kind of information were you guys getting while you were locked in that closet together in those tight quarters? were you able to follow anything that seemed like real information to you in terms of what kind of risk you were at or how the situation might be unfolding? i have a colleague and a close friend who works in the building where the shooting occurred and her and a few of us have, you know, kind of a group chat that we talk in sometimes. she told us that there was a
our country. joining us now is melissa, a teacher at marjorie stone ham douglas high school in farquharson land, florida, whose party described. thank you very much for being here today. i m so sorry for what you went through today. thank you. can you just describe what happened? i know you were teaching class at the time of the shooting. i know it was tard toward the e the school day. can you walk me through what you went through with your students? the day was winding down. we had about ten minutes left. in the last period of the day i teach newspaper. i was working with the kids making a school newspaper and the fire alarm went off for a second time today and so we followed the protocol, which is to evacuate. and so, you know, i grabbed my emergency folder and we started to file out the door. and then, you know, we made it to the stairwell and one of the security one of the security people that s posted in my
do you want background checked? within a week or two of the election, kushner s name would have been on the list. this is an extraordinarily long period of time for someone to go through that level of clearance. usually it s four, six months. it might take a little longer. but the mitigation against that, those are the people closest to the president who needs to be cleared. the question is, we need to know what was in the july briefing that was given to the white house. they then asked additional questions the fbi came back in november. so, there s going to have been information in there that raised issues or concerns. all right, still ahead on morning joe, new video of the florida shooting suspect arriving at the broward county jail this morning. we ll have more on his troubling