Vikiana Petit-Homme, Co’19
On February 14th 2018, in a matter of six minutes, seventeen students at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, were killed. Their lives were stolen from them just as their futures began to take shape, and the national outrage that followed guarantees that their deaths will not be in vain. But guns have been stripping life from innocent people for much longer, whether it be seventeen students from an affluent, predominantly white school in Florida, or Trayvon Martin, whose only fault was wearing a hoodie.
Gun violence is epidemic that our country and government has failed to take action on. Guns are intertwined within American culture much like slavery and segregation, all of which aid in the massacre of black and brown lives. When people resist these epidemics of injustice, it takes a movement to create actual change.
We, the students, are that change, and like the movements before us, we will not stop. The young have always been the leader of movements, and our generation will continue to lift the voices of youth until we see the change our communities deserve. We will continue to engage and educate ourselves; we will refuse apathy. Because how can someone be apathetic to the average of 7 children and teenagers who die because of gun violence each day? How can someone be apathetic when four out of five youth in Roxbury, a community of color, will experience gun violence in their lifetime, while in Back Bay, a predominantly white neighborhood, the number drops to just one in ten?
In Massachusetts, and all over the nation, we cannot simply march against mass shootings and school shootings. We must also march against the gun violence that occurs daily in communities of color. Choosing to define gun violence as just mass shootings, and not recognizing that black and brown communities face this everyday, is oppression in itself. It simply further silences the voices in those communities that are desperately trying to be heard.
In Massachusetts the fight for gun reform is different than that in many other states because we have strong gun control laws. However, there is still work to be done. People are still being killed by guns in our streets.
March For Our Lives: Boston supports House Bill 3610, an Extreme Risk Protective Order (ERPO). This bill empowers family and household members to legally remove firearms from individuals who pose a threat to themselves or others, and also addresses the risk of school shootings and prevents suicide by firearms, which has accounted for over 1,000 deaths in Massachusetts in the last decade. In the case of Florida, the shooter’s family asked for his guns to be taken away because they believed that he was a risk to others, but Florida did not have legislation like the ERPO in place. Passing this bill is intuitive: it will only make Massachusetts a safer place to live in, and decrease guns deaths.
March For Our Lives Boston is also in support of Senate Bill 2325 to equitably fund education in Massachusetts. S.2325 acknowledges the inequities in the present funding for education, which shortchanges students in communities of color while other communities with high property values raise enough from property taxes to offer quality education. It also addresses the critical intersection of gun violence, economic injustice and education, and provides equitable funding for education in Massachusetts to address the complexity of gun violence in our state. This legislation will offer far-reaching solutions to the epidemic of gun violence that benefits all communities, and especially those who have been historically overlooked by education policy.
If you thought that after the march we would just disappear, you were wrong. If you think that just because we are young, we couldn’t make change… Well, we already have. Companies are already dropping the NRA, and places like DICK’s Sporting Goods are raising the gun-buying age to 21.
We will not stop. We are not going away, because gun violence is not going away.
My generation is fed up with school shooting after school shooting, dead classmates after dead classmates, corrupt politicians after corrupt politicians. The words of Martin Luther King remind us: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.” We, the youth, see the injustice. We see the social outrage when a white life is lost, and we see the apathy when a black life is lost. We plan to fight and stand up for ourselves, and for each other.
We will fight and vote out the politicians whose actions seem to value guns over the lives of the youth. We will fight the system that continues to ignore the voices of communities of color that are disproportionately affected by gun violence. We will fight until no innocent child is killed by a gun.
Are you scared? You should be.