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Three days after trauma, Parkland students kick off national movement, march for stronger gun control

By Izzie Ramirez
GSS U.S. East Coast Editor

NEW YORK — It takes teenagers to raise an issue.

After 17 of their classmates were killed last Wednesday in a school shooting, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, spent the next four days grieving and then taking action, kicking off a website, hitting the Sunday talk shows, agreeing to appear in a national town hall on CNN and organizing a march to pressure lawmakers to pass stricter controls on gun use.

Teens in other cities picked up the message, staging a “lie-in” in front of the White House Monday to demand action on gun control laws:

The March For Our Lives is expected to take place on Saturday, March 24 in Washington, D.C. Already, satellite marches are being planned in Athens, Georgia, Chicago, Owensboro, Kentucky, New York and St. Louis, among other cities, according to the March For Our Lives Facebook page and the website rallylist.com:

Prior to the Parkland massacre, a National School Walkout had been planned for April 20, the 19th anniversary of another shooting at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.

Parkland students are scheduled to appear on a CNN town hall on Wednesday, Feb. 21 at 9 p.m. ET.

In an opinion piece for CNN entitled “My Generation Won’t Stand for This,” 17-year-old junior Cameron Kasky demanded that politicians take action to protect students from guns instead of focusing on social agenda issues such as abortion.

“(O)ur politicians abandoned us by failing to keep guns out of schools,” Kasky wrote. “But this time, my classmates and I are going to hold them to account.

“This time we are going to pressure them to take action. This time we are going to force them to spend more energy protecting human lives than unborn fetuses.”

Sunday’s announcement of a march on the nation’s capital received swift support from both politicians on the left and celebrities like Lady Gaga, Morgan Freeman and Josh Gad. But conservatives complained that the shooting was being used to push an anti-gun agenda.

“Can the Left let families grieve for even 24 hours before they push their anti-gun and anti-gunowner agenda?” Tomi Lahren, a conservative political commentator, said in a tweet:

But Marjory Stoneman Douglas students were quick to respond:

While there has been controversy over claims that the Parkland massacre was the worst in U.S. history, an ongoing Washington Post analysis has found that more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. 

Christine Yared, a 15-year-old freshman at Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School whose family emigrated from Lebanon in search of a more peaceful life, wrote an opinion piece for the The New York Times entitled “Don’t Let My Classmates Deaths Be In Vain.”

“If you have any heart, or care about anyone or anything, you need to be an advocate for change,” Yared wrote.

“Don’t let any more children suffer like we have. Don’t continue this cycle. This may not seem relevant to you. But next time it could be your family, your friends, your neighbors. Next time, it could be you.”

A pop-up notice on the school’s website late Monday announced that classes at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School will resume at 8 a.m. Friday.

—Featured photo: Students at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, California, staged a vigil on Feb. 15 in memory of students killed during a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Photo by Fabrice Florin on Flickr.com/CC BY SA 2.0.

Beatrice

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