Florida shooting survivors bring message west
Oakland event blends community barbecue with voter registration drive
OAKLAND >> Every day when he’s in class, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Alfonso Calderon sits 20 feet from rooms where his schoolmates were shot and killed.
The rising senior, 16, knew right away following the Valentine’s Day massacre in Parkland, Florida, that he couldn’t sit idly by without turning the anger and fear he felt that day into action.
He was one of several students from the school who stopped by Oakland on Sunday as part of a national bus tour, called “March for Our Lives: Road to Change,” to speak out against gun violence and advocate for stricter gun-control laws nationally. The tour, which began on June 15 in Chicago, offers a chance to meet with other organizers and register people to vote.
Along the way, Calderon has spoken with members of Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota; spent Father’s Day with the dad of Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri; sat with immigrant rights’ organizations; and spoke with people fighting gang violence in their communities. While their experiences with gun violence might be different, they
all share a common theme, he said.
“It’s all gun violence,” Calderon said. “Even though these are people I never met, we all experienced something that should never have happened because of gun violence and because the laws that could have prevented it weren’t in place.”
Calderon joined the nascent #NeverAgain movement, an ad hoc group that formed among Parkland students in the immediate wake of the shooting, on “day one,” he said. The group has gone on to spread their message nationally and organized the March for Our Lives demonstration in Washington, D.C, in March, which drew thousands of supporters from across the country.
The group advocates for what it calls “common-sense” reforms in gun laws, including implementing universal background checks, creating a searchable database for gun owners, funding the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence so that reform policies are backed by data, and banning high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic assault rifles.
The bus tour has allowed disparate groups to come together to fight for a common cause, one that touches every socioeconomic class, every religious group and every part of the country, said Ariel Hobbs, 20, of Houston, Texas. She co-founded the Houston March for Our Lives chapter after learning about the Parkland shooting and joined the bus tour when it rolled through her state.
She sees parallels between mass shootings and domestic violence, with perpetrators of mass shootings often having a history of violence their partners, children and loved ones often experience first. Even Gene Evin Atkins, who was identified as the gunman in the Trader Joe’s shooting in Los Angeles Saturday, had a history of violence toward his girlfriend, she said.
“Domestic violence was always my issue,” Hobbs said. “Then, when Parkland happened, I was like, ‘I can’t not do anything.’ This is my chance to get women’s voices out there and provide a platform for women who don’t get invited to the table.”
For Milwaukee, Wisconsin, resident Bria Smith, 17, the issue is race and class disparities that lead to gun violence in disadvantaged communities. It’s an issue that’s been overlooked for too long, she said, and one that the March for Our Lives bus tour allowed her a platform to address publicly.
“Growing up, I heard gun shots all the time, and it kind of morphed itself into my reality,” she said.
The tour has allowed her the opportunity to meet with other people from diverse backgrounds and experiences who all share one thing in common: Their lives were radically altered by gun violence, and they’re looking for a change.
“You start to understand, I come from my own background of pain and hurt and suffering due to gun violence, and then you get to meet and connect with other individuals who have gone through the same thing, even if it’s slightly different,” Smith said. “It’s so refreshing to have that human connection and fight for the same goal.”
Berkeley resident Joanne Yeaton came out to the event Sunday because she sees many similarities between the type of mass shootings that have gripped schools and public places across the country over the past several decades and the gun violence which youth in parts of Oakland and the East Bay experience on a weekly basis. Yea ton volunteers with Vision Quilt, a gun-violence awareness movement out of Ashland, Oregon.
A former social worker at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, Yeaton has seen the toll gun violence takes on families and the way it impacts the psyche of those who experience it. In her volunteer work in Oakland schools, Yeaton said the ripple effects of gun violence are evident in the way children who experience shootings no longer feel safe, whether that’s in their neighborhoods, or their schools.
“It really destroys kids’ sense of safety,” she said. “Until the mass shootings at schools started escalating, for the most part, kids felt safe at school. … (The shootings) expand the sense that there is no safe space.”