A sign commemorating the 10 victims of the King Soopers mass shooting. March 27, 2021. (Casey Paul/CU Independent)
Editor’s Note: The following is a student-written opinion piece intended to be published simultaneously at over 50 student newspapers across the nation and signed by over 140 student leaders.
March for Our Lives representatives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Andrew Sun and Alexander Denza, wrote the piece and organized its dissemination. According to the writers, the purpose is to advocate against gun violence in the wake of the UNC Chapel Hill shooting on Aug. 28, 2023.
A word from our editors…
In March 2021, a gunman entered the Boulder Table Mesa King Soopers, killing 10. Colorado at large has also experienced several other notable shootings such as the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School and the 2022 shooting at Club Q, a gay club in Colorado Springs.
Though Boulder is often referred to as the “Boulder Bubble,” due to its reputation for public safety, the community is no stranger to gun violence. Boulder has taken strides to protect members of the community from gun violence through legislative measures, such as the approval of an ordinance prohibiting the sale and purchase of assault weapons, large capacity magazines and trigger activators in unincorporated Boulder County on Aug. 2, 2022.
Closer to home, our own student government called on the Board of Regents to ban concealed carry on campus in October 2022. Since then, the regents have quietly dropped the issue. The topic of concealed carry, while initially sparking anger from both sides, has returned to obscurity.
With 346 school shootings throughout the nation in 2023, and four since the beginning of 2024, there is much work left to be done to protect students across the country.
Over 50 student newspaper across the nation have pledged to publish this on Jan. 24, 2024.
“We will not wait for the next school shooting”
Students are taught to love a country that values guns over our lives.
Many of us hear the sound of gunfire when we watch fireworks on the fourth of July. All of us have heard the siren of an active shooter drill and fear that one day our campus will be next.
By painful necessity, we have grown to become much more than students learning in a classroom — we have shed every last remnant of our childhood innocence. The steady silence of Congress is as deafening as gunfire.
We will not wait for individual trauma to affect us all before we respond together — our empathy is not that brittle. Our generation responds to shootings by bearing witness and sharing solidarity like none other. We text each other our last thoughts and we cry on each others’ shoulders and we mourn with each other at vigils. We convene in classrooms and we congregate in churches and we deliberate in dining halls. We’re staunch and we’re stubborn and we’re steadfast.
Our hearts bleed from this uniquely American brand of gun violence. Yet, we still summon the courage to witness firework shows and remind ourselves that we love our country so much that we expect better from it.
We believe that our country has the capacity to love us back. There are bullet-shaped holes in our hearts, but our spirits are unbreakable.
History has taught us that when injustice calls students to act, we shape the moral arc of this country.
Students in the Civil Rights Movement shared their stories through protest, creating the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that organized Freedom Rides, sit-ins and marches. In demanding freedom from racial violence, this group’s activism became woven into American history.
Students across America organized teach-ins during the Vietnam War to expose its calculated cruelties — in doing so, rediscovering this country’s empathy. Their work in demanding freedom from conscription and taxpayer-funded violence, is intertwined with the American story.
This fall, UNC Chapel Hill students’ text exchanges during the Aug. 28 shooting reached the hands of President Joe Biden. The nation read the desperate words of our wounded community as we organized support, rallied and got thrown out of the North Carolina General Assembly. We demanded freedom from gun violence, just as we have in Parkland and Sandy Hook and Michigan State University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
For 360,000 of us since Columbine, the toll of bearing witness, of losing our classmates and friends, of succumbing to the cursed emotional vocabulary of survivorship, has become our American story.
Yes, it is not fair that we must rise up against problems that we did not create, but the organizers of past student movements know from lived experience that we decide the future of the country.
The country watched Congress pass civil rights legislation, withdraw from the Vietnam War and, this year, create the federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention. Students learned that through the power of our voices put together, we could decide what we wanted our future to be.
So as students and young people alike, we should know our words don’t end on this page — we will channel them into change.
We invite you to join this generation’s community of organizers, all of us united in demanding a future free of gun violence. We understand the gravity of this commitment because it’s not simply our lives we protect with prose and protest.
We will not allow America to be painted in a new layer of blood.
Politicians will not have the shallow privilege of reading another front-cover op-ed by students on their knees, begging them to do their jobs — we do not need a permission slip to defend our freedoms. They will instead contend with the reality that by uniting with each other and among parents, educators and communities, our demands become undeniable.
We feel intense anger and frustration and sadness, and in its wake, we search for reaffirmations of our empathy — the remarkable human capacity to take on a tiny part of someone else’s suffering. We rediscover this fulfillment in our organizing, in our community, in not just moving away from the unbearable pain of our yesterday, but in moving toward an unrelenting hope for our tomorrow.
Our generation dares politicians to look us in the eye and tell us they’re too afraid to try.
Andrew Sun and Alexander Denza, UNC Chapel Hill March for Our Lives
Signatures from student leaders nationwide
