House Democrats are inviting Parkland, Florida, students who survived February's mass shooting there to work on Capitol Hill as interns, NBC News reported Thursday.
Four Democratic House members asked fellow Democrats to encourage invitations to work for them this summer to students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people died and another 17 were injured in one of the worst school mass shootings in U.S. history, the network said.
House Democratic Caucus chairman Joe Crowley, of New York, joined House Democratic Caucus vice chair Linda Sanchez, and Mike Thompson, of California, and Ted Deutch, of Florida, in a letter encouraging members to open their offices to the Parkland students.
"We think it would be a great experience for them to be on the Hill to see exactly how things operate — or doesn't, to some degree — but also to have time with these very special young people that have experienced something that none of us ever want to have experienced and I think we can learn from each other," Crowley told NBC News.
"They will have opportunities to interact with people who don't agree with them.... I think they will all learn from the experience, even folks who don't agree with them will hopefully learn from them being here and vice versa," Crowley continued.
Some of the students have been actively pushing for gun control legislation since the shooting, confronting Florida state legislators and organizing a march in Washington, D.C. that spread to other cities.
"I would be thrilled if a significant number of them came up here and spent the summer helping to learn the system better so they will be even more effective advocates going forward," Deutch, who represents the district the high school is located in, told NBC News.
David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez have been two of the more vocal students to emerge from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, including an appearance on the cover of Time magazine in March.
Some on social media, though, did not think the internships were a good idea.
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