To end gun violence we must not throw away this shot.
It’s been 5 days since 14 students and 3 staff were killed in Parkland, Florida. Since then, people have debated whether it is the deadliest high school shooting, whether we can say there have been 18 school shootings this year, since some of them don’t fit the mass shooter style assaults we’ve become so accustomed to, and whether AR-15s are assault rifles or can just kill a lot of people really fast. But one thing everyone seems to agree on is that this time feels different. Many of us have shared the sentiment that all hope was lost when we did nothing after 6-year-olds were gunned down in their classrooms in Newtown, CT. But we didn’t count on one thing- the power of youth.
Just a few days after the shooting in Newtown, Harvard University published a series of essays in partnership with Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation on the power of youth organizing. In it, myself and Erin Allaman profiled a handful of powerful youth organizing campaigns. I believe we’re bearing witness to another. The students of Parkland, Florida are refusing to be anyone’s props. They have taken control of their own story, and they’re demanding we take action. Virginia Heffernan, for Wired, writes about the clarity and power of student voices, and their savvy to use the internet as a weapon in the battle for their lives. And they’re not stopping there. Already, talk of a National Walkout on the 20th anniversary of Columbine and buses of high school students headed to Washington, DC are making the rounds.
Students like Emma Gonzalez and Cameron Kasky are speaking out loudly, and inspiring their peers, locally and around the country, to act. US high school students that know all too well how to shelter in place, what they might text to their parents as a gunman roamed their halls. And with this moment, they’re being shaken to the fact that it doesn’t have to be that way.
With the rage coming out of Parkland, teenagers around the country are recognizing their power. And adults are taking notice. We need to do more than that though, we need to support them. In the spirit of Ella Baker, we must step up to this moment the youth have seized and support them in building a robust and lasting change. It is not that I don’t think youth can do it alone, it’s that, as a grandmother told me at a vigil yesterday, they shouldn’t have to. Right now the story is on our side. People want change. This is an opportunity we cannot waste. To stop more bullets, we cannot throw away this shot.
In the coming days I am going to share some thoughts about HOW we can support young people in this moment, and what kind of pitfalls we should be looking out to avoid. Additionally, here is a quick resource for discussing traumatic events with young people of different ages.
