In 2018, young people refused the status quo. On February 14, a mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida left 17 people dead. Rather than allowing this cycle of violence to continue, the student survivors launched a massive youth-led movement for common sense gun safety reform. The “March for Our Lives” in Washington, D.C., helped to galvanize gun-control supporters. States across the country, including 14 with Republican governors, enacted 50 new laws restricting access to guns in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida.
“Legislators are starting to realize that mass shootings can happen in their state anytime,” said Allison Anderman, the managing attorney at the Giffords Law Center, a gun-control organization founded by former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, the Arizona Democrat who survived a shooting in 2011. “And they don’t want to be in a position that this kind of thing can happen in their state at all.” State lawmakers still managed to expand gun access with at least 10 new laws in seven states. These measures — from allowing guns in K-12 schools to bolstering “stand your ground” laws — continued to carry weight in certain parts of the country, even as the gun-control movement steadily gained steam elsewhere.
Mass shootings are common in this country. According to the Gun Violence Archive, an oft-cited nonprofit that tracks shootings. Mass shootings are defined as attacks where there are four or more fatal and nonfatal injuries, not including the shooter. Appalling shootings involving students aren’t new either. There have been more than 260 school shootings since the national consciousness was shaken in 2012 when 20 first-graders and six school staff were slaughtered in Newtown, Connecticut, Gun Violence Archive data show, but when the words “enough is enough” rang out from the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, all of them members of the mass shooting generation — the millions born after Columbine in 1999, who practiced “code red” drills at school their entire lives — lawmakers started listening.
– hello I’tanisha, thank you for sharing and nice image you picked. March for our lives was a protest that I was more familiar with because by that time I was in high school and hearing about gun violence and mass shootings in schools is very scary and very sad. Having to hear the number of people who have died in theses mas shootings is very sad. Gun violence is a big issue in society today it’s like you don’t know if your even safe to be outside anymore because people are being shot in the streets randomly. It has to stop, how many more innocent people are we going keep losing.