Hold National Rifle Association Accountable

Just two nights ago, in Thousand Oaks just north of Los Angeles, a group of young people was having a fun-filled evening of line dancing at the Borderline Bar. Security was posted at the door, and the surrounding community has long been considered one of the safest in America.

On February 14, 2018, yet another terrible mass shooting involving a semi-automatic weapon occurred in America. At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, 17 people, including students and teachers were murdered in their own school. School is a place where students are meant to feel safe. It is unimaginable to think that any American student could have been one of the victims of a mass shooting in their own school that was thought to be a place of safe learning. No teacher, child, or individual should ever be put in a situation like this horrid shooting.

As long as people in America are allowed to have semi-automatic weapons, these deadly mass shootings will continue. We can no longer sit around and watch innocent people lose their lives to gun violence. If one child is shot in a classroom, we all feel it. We all carry the burden. We are all vulnerable. How many lives must we see go in order to make change in the world? Parents send their kids to school daily expecting they will come home alive. It is beyond comprehension that some parents at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High will never see their children again after sending them to school in the morning.

During President Donald J. Trump's speech on February 14th, he expressed his condolences to everyone who was affected by the shooting. He discussed his "[commitment] to working with state and local leaders to help secure [American] schools and tackle the difficult issue of mental health" (CNN). President Trump did however fail to mention the most pressing issue right now: common-sense gun control. There are too many military-style weapons that are currently in the hands of unfit individuals. There is no reason that these weapons are in the hands of anyone other than our military and police. Our Congress and President need to act to outlaw these guns for civilian use. It is our government's responsibility to protect us, and they have chosen to take money from the Gun Lobby over doing what is right for this country. This is not a political issue. It is a matter of safety. A matter of life and death. And we cannot stand for it any more.

We are three freshmen high school students who refuse to accept the epidemic of gun violence in this country. We plan to mobilize with others and make a difference, so that guns no longer make their way into our communities and schools and so that no student, educator or parent ever must experience the inhumanity that has become a tragic regular occurrence. We believe that with your help, we can write the next page in the history textbook that you had homework in last night. No matter your political point of view, your age, or ethnic background, it is important that we have your support in putting an end to the gun violence that has killed too many.

On March 24th, we plan to join students from all over the country, including some from Marjory Stoneman Douglas Highschol and unite students from New York City high schools, and  beyond, to march in Washington, DC. We will protest the lack of action by our government. We will demand common-sense gun legislation… Legislation that will outlaw military-style weapons designed for mass killing. The Second Amendment gives the right to the people of the United States to "keep and bear arms, " but it also mentions "well-regulated." We have failed in the "well-regulated" category.   

We are in high school. We are too young to vote for politicians who can help with better gun control laws. But what we can do is symbolically refuse to go to school, make noise and protest and march to Congress in Washington and let them know that the young people in this country will not tolerate this any longer! We want safe schools, safe malls, safe movie theaters, safe music concerts and a safe country with safe environments for teens. Join us and stand up against the NRA (National Rifle Association) and those in congress who continue to allow for the purchase of weapons of mass murder. We want our voices to be heard and we want our politicians to know that we will not stop until there is change, so spread this message to everyone you know so we can gain voices and make the loudest noise we possibly can.

If you are interested in participating in this fight for humanity and joining the march in Washington DC on March 24th, please 

A man entered, armed with a single Glock .45 handgun, equipped with an extended magazine. Moments later, 12 people were dead or dying, and 18 were injured. One man, armed with one gun.


One of the dead was a heroic police officer, Sgt. Ron Helus, who courageously followed his training to disrupt the shooter at all costs though he knew the possible price, but only after calling to say "I love you" to his wife one last time. Another was a man, 27 year old Telemachus Orfanos, who survived the still-unexplained mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas, but did not survive becoming the victim of a second mass shooting in as many years. The murderer took his own life like a coward, but not before destroying dozens of others without explanation.

We do know a number of interesting things about the shooter. He had a history of mental disturbance and violence against women. His mother reportedly lived in fear of him, and authorities were called to his home after one incident, but they declined to take any action. He had allegedly sexually assaulted his high school track coach as a teenager, but she had declined to press charges.

This massacre was an easily preventable tragedy. It should haunt us for a long, long time. But now, with the same community and many others in California being devastated by relentless wildfire only hours afterward, and with Trump and his allies continuing to gaslight the entire country with baseless accusations against journalists and elections officials in the wake an historic election, the shooting has already receded from the headlines and our collective consciousness.

It must not.

Reasonable countries do not allow people to randomly possess weapons of mass death. Reasonable countries do not allow men who terrorize women to possess weapons of mass death. Reasonable countries do not allow people to modify common weapons of mass death to become even more deadly to large groups, carrying even more rounds of ammunition than originally designed.

The Putin-funded National Rifle Association is in part directly responsible for the deaths. In 2016, California voters passed Proposition 63 to ban the possession of high-capacity magazines. This was, in large part, a response to the deadly San Bernardino shootings enabled by them. But the California chapter of the NRA sued to block implementation of the law, and the case won't be resolved until at least the middle of 2019. So Californians are still legally entitled to own high-capacity magazine attachments to handguns, instruments of death that have no purpose in any realistic self-defense situation but are extremely effective for those looking to aggressively murder as many people as possible.

Some may argue that the shooter would have kept his high-capacity magazine, anyway. But that's impossible to say for certain. Arguing that criminals will always evade laws is a staple of gun fetishist rhetoric that they somehow refuse to apply to any other aspect of their strict "law-and-order" code. This massacre contradicted every NRA talking point. The shooter was a white male ex-Marine, the NRA's perfect racially and socially coded embodiment of a "responsible gun owner." There was security on site, but security was the first to be killed. A good guy with a gun came to try to stop him, but was killed by the even more prepared shooter. In the confusion created by the smoke grenade the shooter used, it's extremely unlikely that more armed people in the crowd would have led to anything except more blind shooting and more death.

We can and should, in any case, hold accountable all those who fought make and keep owning such needless tools of fatal mass violence easy and legal. We must take up all legal means at our disposal to sue them in the courts, disrupt their efforts to buy our politicians, and shame their lackeys and representatives. The least we can do over the terror and suffering they are inflicting on all of us, is to make their lives modestly more inconvenient and disrupt their institutions in exchange.

We owe it to the dead. We owe to the families of the dead, some of whom are crying out for gun control even as they grieve the loved ones they will never see again. We owe it to the terrorized families of the owners and users of these implements of barbarity. We owe it to all of society, to all of us who will never be safe in any community so long as we fail to act.

Last year was the third consecutive year that the rate of firearm deaths rose in the United States. While public mass shootings like the one in Las Vegas make up a small percentage of firearm deaths, they have changed the national conversation.

More people died from firearm injuries in the United States last year than in any other year since at least 1968, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There were 39,773 gun deaths in 2017, up by more than 1,000 from the year before. Nearly two-thirds were suicides. It was the largest yearly total on record in the C.D.C.'s electronic database, which goes back 50 years, and reflects the sheer number of lives lost.

When adjusted for population size, the rate of gun deaths in 2017 also increased slightly to 12 deaths for every 100,000 people, up from 11.8 per 100,000 in 2016. By this measure, last year had the highest rate of firearm deaths since the mid-1990s, the data showed.

It was the third consecutive year that the rate of firearm deaths rose in the United States, after remaining relatively steady throughout the 2000s and the first part of this decade.

Demand Commonsense Gun Control Now