500 attend Parkland students' town hall in Milwaukee on Road to Change tour
One day her friends would be outside playing with her near her home on North King Drive. The next day, they'd never show up. They'd been shot.
Gunshots were constantly in the background of growing up in Milwaukee.
In response to these stories from fellow Milwaukee students Saturday, Tatiana Washington, a student at Rufus King High School, nodded as they spoke, all too aware of these narratives.
"All of us here, we're speaking from our trauma," Washington said, staring out into the audience solemnly. "We're speaking from our own fear."
Washington and other Milwaukee high school and college students spoke along with other panelists and activists from Parkland, Fla., Waukesha and Chicago at the Road to Change Tour's stop at the Wisconsin Center.
The Road to Change Tour is part of the March For Our Lives movement, which was ignited by the student survivors of the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Seventeen were killed and 14 injured in the mass shooting.
Before their Milwaukee event, the Stoneman Douglas students stopped at House Speaker Paul Ryan's Janesville office to drop off a copy of HR 4240, a bill that lays out legislation for universal background checks to purchase firearms. The students also stopped in Madison earlier Saturday for a rally and voter registration event.
RELATED:Parkland students rally in Wisconsin for gun laws as part of Road to Change tour
The town hall drew about 500, some of them donning shirts and buttons reading "Not one more MKE" and stickers promising they will vote.
Before they began accepting questions and comments from the audience, panelists first addressed common questions and misconceptions.
Parkland survivor Ryan Deitsch said the biggest misunderstanding people have regarding March For Our Lives is that anyone part of it is anti-gun.
"That's simply not true," he said. "We do support gun rights and we do support the Second Amendment as stated in our Constitution. But we do have to realize when safety comes into play, and that this is an epidemic in our country."
Kyrah Simon, another Stoneman Douglas student survivor, said the national tour is meant to bring others' voices into the movement, which many believe is just made up of their voices.
"We're trying to bridge the gap," she said. "As a country we need to be united to make change."
Sachin Chheda of Milwaukee said he and his daughter Amaya attended because they're both passionate about the issue and have been from the start. Amaya was a speaker at the March For Our Lives rally in Milwaukee in March.
"As and adult and an organizer, I am learning more watching these kids in the last four months than I've learned in 20 years of doing this work," Chheda said. "They're not only affecting policy and getting the media's attention, but they're changing hearts and minds in a way that I've just never seen."