Editor’s Note: This op-ed was published today in over 50 student newspapers and signed by 144 campus leaders across the country. You can find the full list of signatures at emorywheel.com.Andrew Sun and Alexander Denza from March for Our Lives University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill organized this effort to redefine dialogues surrounding gun violence on college campuses and across the United States. Gun violence issues are also pertinent at Emory University. In May 2022, students on the University’s Atlanta campus experienced a shelter-in-place order due to concerns that an armed student at Druid Hills High School had fled to Emory’s campus. Additionally, Emory’s Oxford campus sheltered in place last April in response to an armed individual inside a residence hall. Both instances were resolved without casualties. Unfortunately, this was not the case at several college campuses over the past year.
We 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 asked ourselves: Are we 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. Our hearts bleed from this uniquely American brand of gun violence, and yet we 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. We will not wait for individual trauma to affect us all before we respond together — when we rediscover our empathy, we shape the moral arc of this country.
Students in the civil rights movement created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which 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. Their work, in demanding freedom from conscription and taxpayer-funded violence, is intertwined with the American story.
This fall, text exchanges from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students during the Aug. 28 shooting reached the hands of the president. In demanding freedom from gun violence, we became one of countless before. For 360,000 studentes since the Columbine High School massacre, the toll 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 this country. The country took note as Congress subsequently passed civil rights legislation, as they withdrew from the Vietnam war and as the White House created the federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
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. With our prose and protest, we protect not only our lives but also our way of life itself.
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 and with parents, educators and communities, our demands will become undeniable. Our movement is not just moving away from the unbearable pain of our yesterday — we 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.
