Page 8 - Demo

Remembering Pa
The tragedy that started a movement
Story by Emma Roberts Photos by Johnnes Reijm
The class of 2019 has grown up in the post-Columbine world.
We are a generation who has become accustomed to news reports of gun violence in schools; video of students running with their hands up, weeping parents, body counts. Schools run drills practicing life or death situations. This is our reality.
More than 219,000 students at 224 schools have experienced gun violence at school since the tragedy at Columbine High School in LIttleton, Colorado in 1999, according to a study by The Washington Post. Today’s seniors were born just a year
- MSD students begin their activism on social media platforms (February 18th, 2018)
- MSDHS Public Safety Act (February 23rd, 2018)
- First March for Our Lives rally (March 24th, 2018)
- National School Walkout (April 20th, 2018)
7
after the mass shooting. I can remember six years ago creating paper snowflakes for the innocentliveslostatSandyHookElementary. Now in 2019, students attend school with fear of their own safety or their friends’ in the back of their mind.
Parkland marked the 208th school shooting since Columbine, and after a childhood of watching lives lost, Marjory Stoneman Douglas students decided enough was enough. They took social media by storm, Cameron Kasky creating the hashtag #NeverAgain while reportedly sitting on his toilet in his Ghostbuster pajamas. The hashtag led to televised interviews and a wildfire of marches across the country. For the past year Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg, Jaclyn Corin, and other students have set out to change the world by combating the gun violence epidemic. This past summer, they traveled around the country to help register voters and organize in pursuit of stricter gun legislation.
At such young ages, their lives have turned into dedicating their time to working towards change. A lesser known organizer, is Jaclyn Corin, whose phone is filled with over 600 contacts, most of them dedicated to organizing the marches she participates in. These students are just like us, Emma
Gonzalez’ enjoys binge watching the Office and drawing. Jaclyn Corin, most call her Jackie, was the freshmen, sophomore, junior, and now senior class president. She
never believed she would command a different type of audience, speaking to a fiery crowd of 200,000 people in Washington D.C. at the March for
Our Lives rally.
As an idealistic
teenager, some of
us tend to believe
we are invincible.
Stubborn and hopeful,
we also grow up with
the belief that we can
change the world some
day. These Parkland
students learned that their
lives can be taken at any time, and
that changing the world isn’t so easy.
Emma Gonzalez wears bracelets on
her left wrist memorializing the 17 lives that were lost, and on her right she wears friendship bracelets of those “who are still alive.”
The fight for change is still ongoing one year later. David Hogg, who graduated last year still posts multiple times a day on his Twitter
r