Opinion: The March for Our Lives is not over
Written and photographed by Grace Baines.
February 14, 2018. Valentine’s Day.
17 students, teachers and coaches at Stoneman Douglas High School lost their life to a former student wielding an AR-15. 14 additional victims were injured.
We all expected to grieve for a few days, maybe change our Facebook frame and then move on, as we always do. But something was different with this shooting. It wasn’t the public response–we shared our thoughts and prayers and politicians debated as usual–no, what made this tragedy unique was the survivors. They would not sit silently and grieve, they would not divert the blame. Instead, they got onto every public and news platform possible, raising their voices to create a rallying cry that has shaken this country to its core. They demanded change, they mourned through action, they did not back down and, when it mattered most, they led hundreds of thousands to raise their voices in the March for Our Lives.
March 24, 2018. The March for Our Lives.
Standing on the DC Crystal City metro platform, my boyfriend and I watched an army of people gather, checking their phones for train schedules and holding rolled up signs. More and more people piled onto the train at every stop, until it was packed, “as packed than (sic) a Thursday at 5 p.m.,” he said.
When we exited at the Smithsonian Archives stop, a sea of people poured out with us, going up the escalators and struggling through the metro’s exit fare turnstalls. As we re-entered the daylight, we were greeted by the largest crowd of people I have ever seen. The streets, sidewalks, even building ledges were packed with protestors, and well over half of them appeared to be under the age of 18.
It was a mind-boggling sight, to see the mass of humanity that had decided to spend their Saturday marching through our nation’s capital in a public outcry for change.
As a Britney Spears song pounded over the crowds, we walked down Pennsylvania Avenue with the march, stopping to snap photos of the more interesting signs, t shirts and public speakers. Juxtaposed with the gun control signage and young protesters, military vehicles and heavily armed police stood at intersections ready to handle any dangerous situations that may arise. My boyfriend and I snuck into the Newseum and joined a large crowd of people there who were looking down from the staircase and balconies for a better view of the action on the street.
We heard voices tinged with puberty projected over people cheering and chanting “Vote them out!” All around us were crews from Vice, Vox and other online news sources, typing furiously, trying to get their stories to print as fast as possible. This movement was no child’s play, though the organizers and speakers were young, and they were not willing to compromise.
May 18, 2018. Yesterday.
At least 10 students and faculty members were killed, and three additional injured by a student at the Sante Fe High School in Texas. Explosives were also found in and near the school. As of the time of writing this article, motive is unclear, but that does not stop the pain that has now surrounded a community nor does it help the parents, siblings, spouses, and friends who lost someone. We don’t yet know how the survivors will react; if they will ask for respect and privacy or make this a national debate like the Parkland students. But what we do know, is that they have joined a growing group of U.S. citizens: survivors of gun violence.
Going back.
So how did we get here? Well, for one thing, gun control is nothing new in this country, no matter what your favorite political pundit on Fox or CNN says. Our history with guns begins long before the Bill of Rights was ratified and the second amendment came into existence.
[timeline-express]
Currently.
With all of this information and history, where does the current push for gun control fall?
Gun control is one of the largest topics of debate in the country this year. Former supreme court justice John Paul Stevens has called for the repeal of the second amendment, saying in a New York Times opinion piece that, “a concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”
Many NRA lobbyists have hotly contested this, as have multiple senators.
The March for Our Lives organization is working for universal and comprehensive background checks, designing a searchable and digitized database for the ATF, funding the CDC to research gun violence, a high capacity magazine ban and a full assault weapons ban. (More information can be found on their petition page here.) Most of their mission has been done before, or at least started, in this country and was repealed, allowed to expire or simply not enforced. The only new request is their push for a digitized database and funds for the CDC’s research on gun violence.
It’s clear that gun control is nothing new to this country, and in times of historic violence (gang wars of the 20s–30s, in response to assassination attempts and the early school massacres) legislation was passed to prevent these tragedies from reoccurring.
I believe it is time for us to follow this path set by our past; our children are dying in their schools. We are asking teachers to lay down their lives. This isn’t what happens in developed countries. I know that I often wondered in high school if the girl who wore jack boots and low-key worshiped the Nazi party was ever going to walk into class with a gun and start firing.
We’ve all had a moment when we read about a shooting and had the feeling that it could have been us on the news, flowers and candles left around a framed picture while our loved ones cried on the evening news.
Moving forward.
I grew up in a hunting family; I grew up around guns. There is no need for an AR-15 with a high capacity magazine to hit a deer (and if you feel there is, maybe you shouldn’t be hunting). These high capacity and semi-automatic weapons are often used as adult toys; they’re fun to shoot, but do civilians really need these anywhere other than a recreational shooting range?
People will argue that the 2nd Amendment protects our right to any firearm we please, but I will point out that the actual text says “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” We are no longer a well regulated militia. We’re no longer close to that language.
In order to purchase a firearm in the state of Georgia I need no training, permit or license, unless I am applying for a concealed carry permit, which is not necessary and hardly enforced. And let’s be completely honest; with our current military power, technology, training and capital they could win almost any war they walked into. Even with an AR-15, you have no chance of winning a shootout against trained Marines, should we ever need to raise a militia.
Besides the argument of protecting the 2nd Amendment, gun advocates will say that the real issue is mental health problems. Many people claim that guns don’t kill people, mentally ill people with guns do. On some level, they’re correct. We have a problem in this country that we do not support and protect our citizens who fight mental illness. But as many people have pointed out, any other country with strict gun legislation also has mentally ill people. And they do not have the epidemic of gun violence that we currently have.
We have laws that are supposed to prevent mentally ill people from purchasing firearms, but there are loopholes. The Parkland shooter was described as having struggled with mental illness his entire life, yet he still legally purchased the firearms he used to kill 17 people. The Sante Fe shooter used two legally purchased firearms that belonged to his father.
Even more terrifying, we do not prevent people convicted of non-spousal domestic abuse (dating partners, siblings, parents, non-offspring family) from purchasing firearms. Not only is this dangerous for the victims of their abuse, as adding a gun to the equation makes them 12 times more likely to be killed, but domestic abusers with guns also fuel mass shootings (defined as a shooting with 4 or more victims) as they rarely just harm one person in a shooting. Federal laws have no language to protect from stalkers and other protection orders.
As a woman who has been in an abusive relationship, I cannot imagine how terrified I would have been if my abuser had access to a gun. We need laws, real working legislature, that protects vulnerable people from those wanting to cause harm. We need legislation that keeps denies access of firearms to those who are looking to end human life with the twitch of their finger.
At the end of the day, mass shootings are not new. But the number of victims, the locations, the shooters and, most importantly, how we react as a nation react are all changing.
Something needs to change. I am tired of living in fear while in public spaces, in fear that I will date a man with a firearm and a temper, or fearing that my little brother will not live to see his high school graduation.
I have no issue with people owning guns for sport or even security with proper training and licensing, but anything that can kill 45 people in a minute is a designed for neither. Our current background check system has allowed far too many people to buy a gun (or multiple guns) that they had no business owning. Those that do legally buy firearms are required to complete no training in far too many states. And I am so very tired of seeing the flag at half-mast every few weeks because people lost their lives in a mass shooting.
We grieve just as long as it stays in the news cycle and then move on to the next tragedy, storing the last one in the memory bank of horrible things we just can’t care about. We need to make a change, and I for one think that the survivors of the Marjory Stonemason Douglas High School shooting on February 14 of this year have the right ideas.
And in support of those that just survived the shooting at Santa Fe, we as a nation need to keep fighting, not forget and move on as we so easily do.
