Sunday, April 22, 2018
“Your rights to a gun does not supersede my rights to graduate high school” exclaimed National School Walkout D.C. organizer 17 year-old Ian Berlin, overlooking perhaps a thousand high school and middle school students gathered on the U.S. Capitol West Lawn in Washington D.C. on Friday, April 20. It was the 2nd such national student walkout to protest gun violence since the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Students from the District assembled near the White House, before marching to the Capitol with chants of “enough is enough” and “vote them out”. At over 2,000 schools across the country, students walked out of class on the 19th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., the deadliest school shooting to date. Sadly, that record has been surpassed several times over. At 10 a.m., the students sat for 19 minutes of silence, in remembrance of Columbine’s 13 victims.
According to the Washington Post, there have been 212 school shootings and over 208,000 students exposed to gun violence since the Columbine massacre.
Friday’s demonstration was organized entirely by the students, and the motivation was fear. The only adult to address the crowd from the podium on the Capitol West Lawn was Sally Garrigan, a survivor of the Columbine High School shooting.
Similar rallies have also turned into voter registration drives as demonstrators direct their attention to electing politicians who will enact tougher gun laws. Jay Falk, a senior at T.C. Williams High School (Alexandria Va.), who was born in 1999 just a few months after Columbine, directed students on how to use their cell phones to apply to register to vote, and to sign up to encourage others to do the same.
The protest signs were of the homemade variety, and poignant. A 13 year old boy from the 7th grade carried one that read “I thought I had to be 18 to be brought into a war zone.” An older student wrote “I should be writing essays… not a will.” “The only thing we should be scared of at school are tests,” said another.
They all ask “Am I Next?”
View Jeff Malet’s photos from Friday’s School Walkout D.C. by clicking on the photo icons below.