A spokesperson for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s former school said that the Georgia Republican was not one of the hostage victims in an ordeal Greene has used to explain her strong Second Amendment stance in recent days.
Greene has been referring to a 1990 incident at her Forsyth County, Georgia school, to explain why it was OK that she harassed and name-called David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting, who’s a prominent gun control activist.
‘To our knowledge, she was not in either classroom,’ school spokeswoman Jennifer Caracciolo told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution after speaking with a retired teacher who was among the hostages.
A spokesman for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s former school said the Georgia Republican was not among the hostages in a 1990 gun incident that the lawmaker has used to explain her strong support for the Second Amendment
Greene has brought up the gun incident at her school to explain why it was OK for her to attack David Hogg (pictured), a Parkland school shooting survivor and a gun control activist
Last week a video went viral that showed now Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (back left and right) following Parkland survivor and gun control activist David Hogg (left) around Capitol Hill’s campus, chiding him for his support of gun control measures
Greene spoke of the incident on both Thursday and Friday, saying at a press conference Friday that she was ‘not sorry for telling [Hogg] he shouldn’t push for gun control.’
A video went viral last week that showed Greene, before becoming a member of Congress, tailing Hogg when he was on Capitol Hill for meetings with senators. The footage prompted an outcry as Greene looked to be bullying a teenager who had survived a massacre where 17 people had died.
She previously said she believed massacres like Parkland and Sandy Hook were ‘staged.’
‘I’m very opposed to those policies and so being in the same situation as David Hogg, my voice matters too,’ she said Friday, alluding to what happened at her school – in which a student brought in guns, but nobody was shot.
At the same press conference, she ridiculed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for saying she feared for her life during the Capitol insurrection.
On Monday AOC had gone on Instagram Live and explained how she was in her office and hid in the bathroom believing that someone pounding on the door was there to kill her.
The Congressional offices are in separate buildings from the Capitol, but the entire complex is connected by tunnels and subway systems.
‘I just hear these yells of “Where is she? Where is she?” Ocasio-Cortez said. ‘This was the moment where I thought everything was over. I thought I was going to die.’
The congresswoman then revealed it was a Capitol Police officer who was there to secure her office and ‘was looking at me with a tremendous amount of anger and hostility.’
At her Friday press conference, Greene called Ocasio-Cortez’s reaction a ‘hoax.’
‘I was in the chamber, unlike AOC, Representative Ocasio-Cortez, that faked her outrage with another hoax, another hoax that gets shared everywhere,’ Greene said.
But the Atlanta Constitution-Journal’s reporting and Greene’s own recollections of the 1990 incident at her school, show the lawmaker wasn’t directly threatened with violence either.
Greene said Thursday on the House floor, ‘I understand how terrible it is because when I was 16 years old in 11th grade my school was a gun-free school zone and one of my schoolmates brought guns to school and took our entire school hostage.’
‘And that happened right down the hall from my classroom,’ she noted.
On Friday, she talked about how one of her schoolmates ‘brought three guns to school on a schoolbus in a duffel bag, brought them into the school in the first period class because he was very upset at two of his classmates.’
‘He pulled out his weapon … the coach in the classroom knocked him to the floor. He was able to reach in and get another one of his guns, fired his weapon, took control of our school and we were held hostage for five hours,’ Greene continued.
News reports from the time basically line up with her account.
Then 17-year-old Randy Addis brought three firearms into the school and took hostage 40 students, which were quickly released. Just six students were in the room when he surrendered after five hours.
Addis told police he wanted candy, soda, cigarettes, hamburgers and a school bus with blacked out windows that he would transport the remaining hostages in to Savannah, where then he wanted to escape via boat.
His schoolmates eventually disarmed him and police flooded in.
While his gun shot off at least once, there were no injuries or fatalities.
The school’s campus, according to the AJC account, felt like a ‘war zone,’ though most students were able to flee the building, with just some stuck in darkened classrooms throughout the ordeal.
That formative experience colors Greene’s thinking on the Second Amendment today.
‘I want you to know, I know that fear David Hogg felt. It’s terrifying,’ Greene said Friday. ‘It’s terrifying when the only person in the building with a gun is very upset and is there to do evil.’
‘And there’s no good guy with any guns to protect us,’ she added.