Students ostracized in Kentucky gun country
Activism clashes with bedrock support for Second Amendment in rural, conservative community
The teenagers in rural Kentucky decided they were fed up after a 15-year-old with a handgun turned their high school into another killing ground, slaying two classmates. Like so many other students, they wrote speeches and op-ed essays calling for gun control, they painted posters and they marched on their state Capitol. The blush of activism made them feel empowered, even a little invincible. Then came the backlash. It started with sideways looks and laughter from other students in the hallways, they said. Friends deleted them from group chats and stopped inviting them over. On social media, people called the teenage activists “retards” and “spoiled brats,” and said they should have been the ones to die during a shooting in Marshall County High School’s student commons four months ago.
In a more liberal city like Parkland, Fla., these students might have been celebrated as young leaders. But in rural, conservative parts of the country where farm fields crackle with target practice and children grow up hunting with their parents, the new wave of student activism clashes with bedrock support for gun rights.
Speaking out in a place like Marshall County, Ky., carries a price — measured in frayed friendships, arguments with parents and animosity within the same walls where classmates were gunned down.
Most of the debate, both here in Benton, the hamlet that is home to the county high school, and at the state Capitol in Frankfort, has been focused on how to make schools more secure and how to detect potentially dangerous students. The school district in Marshall County has hired more armed officers and locked many of the high school’s 86 doors. Every morning, teachers and staff members search backpacks and wand students with metal detectors.
The question of guns stayed largely on the sidelines. “I don’t think the Second Amendment is the issue,” said Kevin Neal, Marshall County’s judge/executive. “If somebody gets it in their head they’re going to kill, they’re going to do it.”
The Marshall County students who decided to speak out for gun control said they understood the consequences of bucking the views of many of their parents, friends and neighbors on an issue as personal and emotional as guns.
“We knew we were going to get backlash,” said Cloi Henke, 15, who was in a small group of students who participated in a local March for Our Lives rally one rainy day this spring.
“I just didn’t think it would be so forward,” said her 15-year-old friend Lily Dunn. “When people started talking about me, it knocked me down a few pegs.” It was just after school one afternoon, and Cloi, Lily and their friends — all freshmen — were squeezed into a booth at the Benton Dairy Queen. Since the shooting at Marshall, they cocoon together often, in their spot in the student commons or on a friend’s willowshaded back porch, to support ome another and strategize about their tiny slice of the gun control movement.
“Almost no one agrees with us,” said Hailey Case, 16. That includes her father, who argued with Hailey after listening to her practice a speech she delivered at the local March for Our Lives rally.
One girl threatened to fight them after they held a gun control rally, they said. Letters and commenters in local media said the students were too young to know anything.
Lily, sitting next to her, said a teacher had confronted her when she came to class wearing a T-shirt in the school’s orange and blue colors, showing a constellation of dots for every school in Kentucky that had been affected by a shooting.
Their own dot came on Jan. 23. According to police and prosecutors, Gabriel Parker, a 15-year-old student at Marshall County High, opened fire on a group of students with his stepfather’s handgun as a kind of twisted social experiment, to see how people would react.
Across the country, about 60 percent of rural households own a gun — double the rate of city households — and many Marshall County students said that before the shooting they had barely thought about the gun debate. They hunted and shot air rifles at camp on Kentucky Lake, and their fathers kept handguns for protection.
Afterward, though, the gulf between their views and their parents’ became impossible to ignore.
Mary Cox, 18, a senior who is captain of her speech team, got into arguments with her father when he tried to buy her a compact handgun to take with her to college. One day, she said, when her father was driving her home from a rehearsal, he pressed her on her support for banning AR-15s. If she was being attacked, wouldn’t she want someone with an AR-15 to come help?
“We couldn’t be more opposite in what we believe,” her father, Ezra, said in an interview. Still, he said, he and his wife had encouraged Mary to stay true to her beliefs.