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school shootings
I'm Too Young to Vote, But Not Too Young to Die From Gun Violence
I’m using my voice to urge you and every other eligible voter, to please vote for gun violence prevention candidates in this upcoming election. Please vote for my life and future.
Nov 04, 2024
It’s official; the Republican Vice Presidential nominee declared school shootings “a fact of life.” That’s what JD Vance said at a rally in Arizona when asked about the recent shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, right after he told the crowd “We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in.”
As a high school student, I’m terrified to know that the fate of students like me might soon be left in the hands of candidates who have accepted that we will always have to live in fear and whose only plan is to bring more guns into our schools. These reactive approaches only put students at greater risk and fail to address the root causes of the gun violence epidemic. High schoolers like me deserve more than that, don’t we?
I was 14 years old when I realized that school was not safe. I was riding the bus to school the day after the Uvalde shooting, where an 18-year-old killed 19 children and two teachers with an assault rifle in a Texas elementary school. My friend turned to me with concern in his eyes and asked, “You know what to do if this happens here, right?” I did know. Like most other kids in America, I’d been preparing for a school shooting since I was in elementary school. Lock the door. Cover the window. Hide as far away as possible—in a closet, or under a desk. Don’t let yourself become a target. Locate the first aid kit in case one of us is shot. Stop the bleeding. Wait for help.
So no, gun violence does not have to be a fact of life, and we refuse to accept it. We won’t “just get over it,” as Trump said after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa.
I’ve been preparing for a school shooting since I was five. While kids in other countries were at recess, I was huddled with my classmates in a corner being told to stay quiet and not move as people banged on the classroom door. They used to tell us we were practicing in case a bear got into the school, and I thought that was the most terrifying thing in the world—a bear in our school hallways. But now I know that the truth is far scarier––and far more likely. That day as a 14-year-old riding the bus to school, I realized that the real danger wasn’t some distant threat, but the “fact of life” that anyone could easily access a firearm and kill us. From then on, I became cautious about who I opened the door for at school. And I began to fear for my life every time my principal went over the speakers to announce a lockdown.
And I’ve done more than change my mindset—I’ve taken action. Two days after the Uvalde shooting, I helped students at my school lead a walkout to remember the victims and call for gun safety legislation. Since that first protest, I’ve devoted my time in high school to gun violence prevention, working with March For Our Lives, a youth-led gun violence prevention movement. To JD Vance and anyone who thinks similarly, let me tell you from the young people of America: we do not accept being killed by guns in our classrooms and in our communities as a “fact of life.” Our “fact of life” is that the time we’re meant to spend on school and with friends is instead spent doing what politicians should be doing for us: fighting for a future free of gun violence.
So no, gun violence does not have to be a fact of life, and we refuse to accept it. We won’t “just get over it,” as Trump said after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa. Instead, we will change these so-called facts of life. We will fight for a country where a 14-year-old can’t access an assault rifle from his dad, as in the recent Apalachee High School shooting. We will fight for a country where students like those at Apalachee will never have to drag their teacher’s dying body across the floor and use their clothes to try to stop his bleeding. And we will fight for a country where teachers and students won’t lose their lives simply for attending school.
In 2025, when the next mass shooting happens––statistically about twice a day in America––we will either have a president who tells us to “get over it,” or a president who demands, “We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all.” I want the latter. I want lawmakers who are determined to do what it takes to help students like me feel safe at school. I want an administration that keeps military-grade assault rifles out of the hands of dangerous civilians and will pass safe storage laws so that no one can access someone else's gun to hurt themselves or others.
But right now, what I want doesn’t matter. I’m not old enough to vote yet, and neither is the majority of young people and students who bear the brunt of the gun violence epidemic. So instead, I’m using my voice to urge you and every other eligible voter, to please vote for gun violence prevention candidates in this upcoming election. Please vote for my life and future. As Vice-President Harris reminded us, “It doesn’t have to be this way."Keep ReadingShow Less
After Georgia Shooting, Students Walk Out Demanding 'Future Free From Gun Violence'
Organizer March for Our Lives said the statewide walkouts "speak to the urgency and frustration young people feel after yet another shooting has been met with only 'thoughts and prayers.'"
Sep 20, 2024
Joined by educators, parents, and gun control advocates, thousands of Georgia students on Friday staged a classroom walkout organized by the youth-led March for Our Lives "to demand a future free from gun violence" following the September 4 mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, the deadliest such event in the state's history.
March for Our Lives (MFOL)—which was founded in the wake of the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—said that Friday's walkouts "speak to the urgency and frustration young people feel after yet another shooting has been met with only 'thoughts and prayers.'"
Two Apalachee students—Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both age 14—and teachers Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie were shot dead by a 14-year-old armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle. Nine others were wounded in the attack.
The shooter was arrested and charged with four counts of murder. His father, Colin Gray, was also arrested and charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to children for purchasing the gun used in the shooting and giving it to his son.
"Across Georgia, Republican leaders—like those who control the majority on the Cobb Board of Education and both chambers of the Georgia General Assembly—refuse to take commonsense action to protect our communities and our lives from preventable gun violence," MFOL said.
The group continued:
We will never allow our elected officials to forget the senseless act of violence that could have been prevented at Apalachee High School. We will honor the lives of Cristina Irimie, Christian Angulo, Mason Schermerhorn, and Richard Aspinwall with action. Everyone has the fundamental right to feel safe in our schools and our communities, and we will continue to fight until that freedom is a reality for all.
Guns are the No. 1 killer of children and teens in our country, and far too many educators and students go to school with the daily fear that their community could be next. This failure is a choice that our leaders are making for us. Today, we join organizers and students from over 30 high schools all across Georgia in calling on Gov. Brian Kemp, Lieutenant Gov. Burt Jones, and the Georgia General Assembly to commit their support for the passage of the Pediatric Health Safe Storage Act at the start of the 2025 legislative session.
"The Georgia General Assembly and Gov. Brian Kemp, the sad truth is that they have made us feel less safe," said Saif Hasan, a senior at Lambert High School and county organizing deputy director at the Georgia Youth Justice Coalitionwholed hundreds of students in a walkout on Friday.
"This weekend, we're going to be out knocking doors in Suwanee, Roswell, and East Cobb to help elect new leaders who will build the future we deserve," Hasan added. "We're going to be out talking to Georgians about safe storage to make sure kids my age are never scared to go to school."
Apalachee High School junior Sasha Contreras said during a Friday walkout rally in Gwinnett that "I wasn't going to speak today but seeing and hearing everyone's courage in showing up today and taking action made me realize that my voice was important."
"There is nothing being done to prevent such a tragedy from occurring again. As a student that has [Advanced Placement] exams at the end of the school year as well as leadership positions, I understand the importance of going back to school," Contreras added. "However, many of my peers including myself feel anxious about returning with no preventative measures in place."
March for Our Lives director of organizing Gaby Salazar said that "we are so proud to support this student-led action, but heartbroken that we keep having to walk out of our classes again and again to get our leaders to listen to us."
"Guns kill more kids than any other cause in the state of Georgia," Salazar added. "More than cancer, more than car accidents. Even though a sweeping majority of Americans support commonsense gun laws, we know it's an uphill battle to convince state lawmakers to value our lives over the gun lobby's money. But young people in Georgia will not stop fighting until gun violence is a relic of the past."
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To Save Children’s Lives, Harris Should Campaign on an Assault Weapons Ban
The shooter in Apalachee High School had an “AR-platform-style weapon,” the popular semi-automatic gun all-too-widely available in the U.S., with hundreds of variations flooding the multi-billion dollar gun market.
Sep 07, 2024
School shootings are recurring markers of a societal sickness, an unshakeable acceptance of violence and senseless death. The murder of two 14-year-old students and two teachers on Wednesday, and the wounding of nine others, at a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, is the latest in this seemingly permanent contagion.
Ninth-grader Colt Gray, 14, had an “AR-platform-style weapon,” the popular semi-automatic gun all-too-widely available in the U.S., with hundreds of variations and modular accessories flooding the multi-billion dollar gun market.
We know that the accused lived in a home with guns, thanks to a statement from the FBI issued on Wednesday, that read in part:
In May 2023, the FBI… received several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time. The online threats contained photographs of guns.
Within 24 hours, the FBI determined the online post originated in Georgia and the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office referred the information to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office for action. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office located a possible subject, a 13-year-old male, and interviewed him and his father. The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. The subject denied making the threats online. Jackson County alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject… there was no probable cause to take any additional law enforcement action.
Authorities had advance warning over a year earlier. Apalachee High School then reportedly received a telephoned threat on the morning of the shooting, warning five schools would be targeted, starting with Apalachee.
The so-called “AR platform” has become the weapon of choice for mass shooters. At the Uvalde mass school shooting in Texas on May 24, 2022, the teenaged shooter killed 21 people, injured 21 more, and held 400 law enforcement personnel at bay, while he killed children one by one for over an hour. It was the lethality of the AR rifle that kept those hundreds of heavily armed agents too frightened to intervene.
As a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2019, Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator from California, made a renewal of the assault weapons ban a central part of her campaign. She called for the same as recently as December, 2023, while still just the running mate for President Joe Biden.
But now, amid a tight general election race against former President Donald Trump, Harris is being more measured. As news broke of the Apalachee shooting, Harris was taking the stage at a rally in New Hampshire.
“Our hearts are with all the students, the teachers and their families, of course, and we are grateful to the first responders and the law enforcement that were on the scene. But this is just a senseless tragedy on top of so many senseless tragedies,” she said. “We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country, once and for all… it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Kris Brown is the president of Brady, a gun violence prevention organization named after James Brady, the former press secretary for former President Ronald Reagan. Brady was shot in the head during the attempted assassination of Reagan. Brady survived, and went on with his wife Sarah to campaign for gun control.
“Jim and Sarah Brady are responsible for the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that was put into effect the year after the Brady Law passed in 1993. During the 10-year time period that that assault weapons ban was in effect, you saw a marked decrease in the kinds of mass shootings involving those firearms than in the previous period,” Kris Brown said on the Democracy Now! news hour, the day after the Apalachee shooting.
Brown is optimistic that positive change is possible, despite the entrenched power of the gun lobby.
“There is a growing desire for an assault weapons ban in this country,” she said, “including among Republicans and including among gun owners. So we will certainly push the Harris administration, if we have one, to make that a priority.”
These weapons of war, marketed to U.S. consumers as benign “modern sporting rifles,” need to be banned.
Assault weapons bans can work. A 1996 mass shooting in Australia left 35 dead and 23 injured. Almost immediately, that nation of gun lovers passed an assault weapons ban and mandatory buyback law. There hasn’t been a shooting anywhere near that scale there since.
Success won’t be so swift here in the U.S., a nation awash with hundreds of millions of guns. Still, the Harris-Walz campaign should make an assault weapons ban a central demand and take it to the voters in November. The lives of our nation’s children depend on it.
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