There has been an average of one school shooting per week in the U.S. so far in 2018. This week was no exception. A student was shot in the ankle at a Florida high school this morning. The shooter, a 19-year-old former student at the school in Ocala, was arrested.
That’s the environment high school kids today have grown up in — the only one they know. The Columbine High School massacre 19 years ago today took place before they were born. It was the first of 85 mass school shootings that have claimed 122 lives, most of them children.
Kids go to school worried. A Pew Research Center survey taken after the Parkland, Florida shooting found 57 percent of teenagers worry about the possibility of a shooting at their school.
“It’s something we think about every day,” said Reese Manghan, an 11th grader at Shoreham-Wading River High School, where about 20 students walked out this morning to protest gun violence and remember the Columbine victims.
They joined thousands of students at high schools across the country who walked out of school at 10 a.m. The group walked from their school to Route 25A, where they gathered in a grassy area next to the campus entrance that had been marked with yellow tape by school security. They stood there and marked 13 minutes of silence in memory of the 13 people who died in what was then the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. Then they began sharing thoughts on what led them to walk out.
“We shouldn’t have to have assemblies about what to do if there’s a shooter in school,” Reese said. “But that’s our reality.”
“It’s been two decades since Columbine,” said Tyler Wynkoop, a senior. “What did we learn from it? How long are we going to keep selling ARs? How long are we going to continue to allow people with mental health issues to buy guns?”
SWR junior Mahdi Rashidzada urged his friends and classmates to “fight apathy to make a change.” He said they all had a duty to make sure people who are eligible to vote register and vote for candidates who support common sense gun control reforms.
“We need change,” Mahdi said. “We are the generation of change.”
The students talked about the push-back they got from some of their peers about their plan to participate in the walkout. They were taunted by other students, attacked for “being liberals.”
Reese said the issue is not about being liberal or conservative. “I don’t want to get shot in school,” she said. “We just want to be safe.”
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