Emma Gonzalez

Kudos, kudos, kudos to the teenagers from Florida and all over the country who have become fed up with "thoughts and prayers" lip service and no action on gun violence. We all owe them a debt of gratitude. Even the gun nuts. Their eloquence and focus has been astounding. Sort of reminds me of the Vietnam era, only moreso. Back then, we organized to stop killing dark-skinned Asians. Today's kids are trying to get us to stop killing each other.

Emma González on Why This Generation Needs Gun Control

Op-Ed in Teen Vogue

Emma Gonzalez

I was born in 1999, just a few months after 13 people were left dead after a shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. From 1966 to the Valentine’s Day that my school proved to be less than bulletproof, nearly 1,100 people have been killed in mass public shootings in the U.S.. From the deaths of 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, to the 2016 massacre of mostly Latinx people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, to the loss of 58 lives at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas last year, we’ve seen mass shootings play out again and again and again.

Gun violence has torn up many communities across the country, mainly due to negligence on behalf of local and national government to properly regulate access to guns, ignorance to their constituents’ varying situations, and willingness to take money from organizations that very clearly do not have the best intentions for the future of the United States.

The problem of gun violence goes beyond the countless demographic differences between people. Any way you cut it, one of the biggest threats to life as a teen in the U.S. today is being shot. People have been shot to death en masse in grocery stores, movie theaters, nightclubs, and libraries, on school campuses and front porches, and at concerts — anywhere and everywhere, regardless of socioeconomic background, skin color, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, geographical location.

Young people in this country have experienced gun violence for their entire lives, only to be faced with a number of representatives and officials who have been seduced by the gun lobby or have generally failed to make effective change. The pro-gun propaganda peddled by the National Rifle Association feeds myths about gun ownership, and these myths arguably perpetuate the suffering of thousands of Americans each year.

After all of this pain and all of this death caused by gun violence, it seems as if the kids are the only ones who still have the energy to make change.

Parkland youth are working to end gun violence through actions like the March for Our Lives event in Washington, D.C., on March 24 and the ongoing #NeverAgain movement. I’m one of them. Fed up with the apathy pervading this country, we realized that we don’t need to wait around to have our voices heard or for someone else to make change — we have to be the change we need to see.

The mass walkouts held around the country on March 14, which marked the one-month anniversary of the mass shooting at our school, weren’t even organized by March for Our Lives. They were efforts led by students around the world who were speaking in the most influential way they knew how: civil disobedience, marching in the streets with signs and chanting truth to power. Efforts to mobilize young voters are widespread, and many are being conducted by first-time organizers.

We need to digitize gun-sales records, mandate universal background checks, close gun-show loopholes and straw-man purchases, ban high-capacity magazines, and push for a comprehensive assault weapons ban with an extensive buyback system.

This is the reality we face as young people in America today: the constant fear of being gunned down in the places we should feel the most secure. We have grown up in this country and watched violence unfold to no resolution. We have watched people with the power and authority to make changes fail to do so.

At Stoneman Douglas, the entire shooting lasted roughly six minutes. In that time, the shooter — a former student who conducted this violence in a three-story building known as the freshman building — fired at least 100 shots, which hit walls, windows, classrooms, and 32 people. Seventeen people’s lives ended far, far too soon, and each of them had ties and connections to countless other individuals, and all of those people have to grapple with the fact that these students and faculty — our friends, our teachers, our coaches, our family — are gone.

We Stoneman Douglas students may have woken up only recently from our sheltered lives to fight this fight, but we stand in solidarity with those who have struggled before us, and we will fight alongside them moving forward to enact change and make life survivable for all young people. People who have been fighting for this for too long, others who were never comfortable enough to openly talk about their experiences with gun violence, or still others who were never listened to when opening up about their experiences with gun violence or were afraid to speak out — these are the people we are fighting with and for.

We the Wounded of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Future, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common People, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Generations to Come, do ordain and establish this March for the United States of America.

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