We will not wait for the next school shooting

Editor’s Note: The following is a student-written op-ed, signed by over 110 student leaders and meant to be published simultaneously across over 40 student newspapers. The breadth of this op-ed is national and includes public and private universities. The purpose of this op-ed is to create attention around gun violence and act as a demonstration of the shared concern about gun violence that exists across all college campus. 

Students are taught to love a country that values guns over our lives.

Some of us hear the sound of gunfire when we watch fireworks on the Fourth of July or when a drumline performs at halftime. But all of us have had our hearts drop when we hear about a mass shooting at another college campus, and fear that one day our campus will be next. It was just last May when a shooting hoax shocked our own campus.

By painful necessity, we have grown to become 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, we cry on each others’ shoulders and we mourn with each other at vigils. We convene in classrooms, congregate in churches and deliberate in dining halls. We’re staunch, 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 displays 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. 

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 (SNCC) 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 August 28 shooting reached the hands of the president. 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 MSU and UNLV.

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 student sit-ins at Greensboro and Congress subsequently passed civil rights legislation. The country witnessed as students exposed its lies about Vietnam, and Congress subsequently withdrew from the war. 

The country watched student survivors march against gun violence, and the White House subsequently created the National Office of Gun Violence Prevention on September 22, 2023. 

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: It is our way of life. 

We will not allow America to be painted in a new layer of blood. We will not allow politicians to gamble our lives for NRA money.

And most of all, 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. They will instead contend with the reality that by uniting with each other, 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 promise to not just move away from the unbearable pain of our yesterday, but to move 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.

Signed by 144 student leaders representing 90 groups across the nation.

Andrew Sun and Alexander Denza are student leaders from March for Our Lives UNC.