York County students join national movement calling for stricter gun laws
On April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, Colorado, entered their school and began shooting. When it ended, 15 were dead, including the shooters, who took their own lives, and more than 20 were wounded.
On Feb. 14 this year, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, shot and killed 17 students, touching off national protests among students to push for gun control.
On Friday, the anniversary of the Columbine shootings, students from a reported 2,600 schools around the country walked out of class in a demonstration to call for more restrictions on gun ownership, a protest called the National School Walkout. It's part of the movement among students that arose from the protests that followed the shootings in Parkland.
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Among them were students at York Suburban Senior High School and Hanover Public High School.
Elijah Tapp, a junior at York Suburban and one of the organizers of the local protest, said the students have had enough and were calling for moderate, common sense restrictions on gun ownership to prevent those who intend to commit mass murder from being able to acquire firearms.
"We're not advocating taking people's guns away," Tapp said. "We just would like our legislators to make it more difficult for people like the Parkland school shooter to get guns."
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At Suburban, the students did not walk out of class. Rather, they spent their lunch breaks gathering behind the stands at the football field to hold up signs and give speeches.
School Principal Brian Ellis said students and the administration worked it out so students could participate in the protests at lunch to prevent disruption to the school day.
They gathered in the chilly sunshine, about 20 during one of the school's three lunch breaks, to join with others from around the country to call for what they deemed "common sense" gun laws.
"It's not a conservative or liberal issue," Tapp said. "A lot of people feel their right to own assault weapons is more important than to prevent school shootings. It doesn't make sense. It's important to have our voices heard."
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The students had not compiled a specific list of measures. Instead, they were calling for a more moderate approach to restricting gun ownership as a means of keeping guns out of the hands of people who should not have them.
"I'm mad," junior Isabelle Pemberton told her classmates. "If one child dies in school, that's one too many. We're here today to say, 'We'll be the change.'"
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