A Florida county commissioner defended comments he made earlier in March calling the Parkland shooting students “miscreants” and “little monsters.”

Escambia County Commissioner Doug Underhill refused to apologize for his characterization of the students who survived the Valentine’s Day mass shooting, insisting that the student posed a threat to the “constitutional rights of Americans.”

“I know that people would maybe prefer that you’re supposed to use softer words and things like that,” Underhill told the Pensacola New Journal Wednesday. “If you’re coming after the constitutional rights of Americans, it’s probably not going to be soft words.”

Underhill previously insulted the students coming out for the March for Our Lives event over the weekend in a Facebook comment to a radio host wondering if Underhill felt that the students should not be allowed to march in general.

“Keep in mind Andrew, it was the socialist experiment of this radically leftist south Florida town that created the monster that did this AND the little monsters who are parading around pointing the finger at people like me,” Underhill wrote. “These miscreants are not reacting to the event: They are prostituting the deaths of their classmates to drive an agenda that was formed in them long before the first shot was fired.”

Underhill also defended his comments to another local outlet Monday, saying while the shooting was tragic, the reaction to the event was more tragic.

“If you don’t figure out a way to stop creating hate and propagating hate, then it doesn’t matter what the tools of hate are, the end result will be the same and that will be dead people, dead children and rending the fabric of our society” Underhill said.

Follow Amber on Twitter

Send tips to amber@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.