Cry for Change After Yet Another Shooting
me, it’s way too late.”
His argument reflects the words of other students who want action: The issue is not an abstraction to them. These are their murdered friends, their bloodstained schools, their upended lives.
Students said they did not want to cede the discussion over their lives to politicians and adult activists.
“We need to take it into our hands,” Mr. Kasky said.
David Hogg, a 17-year- old student journalist who interviewed his classmates during the rampage in Parkland, said he had thought about the possibility of a school shooting long before shots from an AR-15 started to blast through the hallways. As he huddled with fellow students, he stayed calm and decided to try to create a record of their thoughts and views that would live on, even if the worst happened to them.
“I recorded those videos because I didn’t know if I was going to survive,” Mr. Hogg said in an interview. “But I knew that if those videos survived, they would echo on and tell the story. And that story would be one that would change things, I hoped. And that would be my legacy.”
It is a stark change from the moments that followed the Columbine shooting in April 1999, said Austin Eubanks, who survived the shooting that left 12 students and one teacher dead. Mr. Eubanks and a friend hid under a table when two teenage gunmen walked into the library and started shooting. Mr. Eubanks was wounded. His friend, Corey DePooter, was killed.
“There was nobody who took an activism stance,” Mr. Eubanks said of Columbine’s immediate aftermath. He said he began abusing opiates shortly after as a coping mechanism. “I just wanted to be left alone.”
Soon after Amy Campbell- Oates, 16, heard about the Parkland shooting, she knew she wanted to try, in some small way, to influence the national discussion on gun violence. She and two friends organized a protest, made posters, and rallied with dozens of fellow students from nearby South Broward High School. They carried signs that read “It Could’ve Been Us” and “Your Silence is Killing Us.”
“We agreed that our politicians have to do more than say thoughts and prayers,” Ms. Campbell- Oates said. “Some of us can’t vote yet but we want to get to the people that can to vote in common sense laws, ban assault rifles and require mental health checks before gun purchases.”
On February 16, Tyra Hemans, a senior at Stoneman Douglas High, attended the funeral for Meadow Pollack, one of the 17 people killed. She spoke about her desire to see President Donald J. Trump, who that day visited a nearby hospital that was treating victims of the shooting.
“I want our politicians to stop thinking about money and start thinking about all these lives we have lost,” Ms. Hemans said. “I want to talk with him about changing these laws. Seventeen people are dead, killed in minutes.”