The father of a teenager killed in the Parkland high school shooting challenged Donald Trump to return to Florida and “spend five minutes of [his] time in Joaquin’s empty room”.

Manuel Oliver, whose 17-year-old son was shot dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school less than three months ago, was speaking near the NRA convention in Dallas.

“I’m impressed with the support that the NRA got from our president yesterday,” he said. “I haven’t heard from President Trump the name of my son, not even once.”

Trump and Mike Pence, the vice-president, addressed NRA members on Friday, pledging their support for gun rights and asking for help in electing Republicans to Congress. The president said he had been advised that “going to the NRA convention and speaking today, that will be very controversial. It might not be popular.”

“You know what I said?” he added. “‘Bye-bye, gotta get on the plane.’”

Oliver and his family have founded a nonprofit, Change the Ref, to protest against the influence of gun lobby money in the gun law debate. On Saturday, about a block away from the convention hall, Oliver addressed more than 200 protesters who had gathered to push for stricter gun laws and highlight the toll of gun violence, from school shootings to gun suicides.

“I don’t know who advises our president,’” Oliver said.

The protest was organized by StudentsMarch.org, a Dallas-based group, and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a national gun control group founded after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2012.

With his wife Patricia watching alongside youth activists and gun violence survivors from Texas and across the country, Oliver created a fifth protest mural. He has created similar images in Miami, Los Angeles, New York and Springfield, Massachusetts, near the headquarters of Smith & Wesson, the company that made the weapon used to kill Joaquin.

The Dallas mural depicted a student wearing a backpack in the crosshairs of a gun, flanked by Trump, shown as a “circus festival host”, and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, dressed as a clown holding an AR-15 rifle.

“We demand a fair game,” Oliver painted across the large canvas, which he festooned with dangling tickets to America’s “carnival of violence” and a chain of red-white-and-blue balloons in the shapes of guns.

Using art as a form of protest has proved to be a kind of therapy, Oliver said. The first time he made a mural to honor Joaquin, he said, on the wall of a Miami art gallery, he impulsively hit the wall with a hammer. He then hit it again and again, 17 times in all. Some of his son’s classmates were watching, he said, and he saw how the sound affected them – how it reminded them of gunshots.

On Saturday, he told his audience: “Let’s feel how it feels.” Then he slammed a hammer into the mural 17 times, hitting each of the 17 tiny figures he had painted. He hit the boy in the center of the mural twice. Then he put down the hammer and picked up a bunch of flowers, placing a sunflower in each of the gaping holes.

Oliver said his most emotional moment had come as he painted the mural earlier, when a song came on: Moon River, which he listened to many times with Joaquin. He paused, suddenly breathing hard. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he said.



