Published in the March 28 – April 10, 2018 issue of Morgan Hill Life

Maya Changaran

It’s easy to feel powerless after events such as the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. After all, it’s the world I grew up in. It’s easy to become numb to the emotions of shock, horror, and sadness. We’ve felt them so many times.

There have been 18 school shootings so far this year. There have been more than 188 since I was born. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard “those poor families,” “how heartbreaking,” and “my thoughts and prayers.” As a senior at Sobrato High School, I have never known a world without school shootings.

I’ve watched people argue that we can’t take away gun rights because it violates the Second Amendment. I wonder if they know that the Constitution is amenable. I listen to the politicians debate about giving teachers guns because they believe it would lessen casualties, and I ask myself why that’s seen as a solution. Is the solution to a gun problem more guns? No. And yes, fewer casualties is great but no casualties is preferable. Eventually, I got sick of watching and listening. People were and are dying.

A Sobrato High School student holds a sign March 14 during a 17-minute walkout to support school safety after a gunman shot and killed 17 people at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School. 
Photo by Sruchi Patel

Living in California, I know that there are stricter gun laws set up to protect me and other students. But I also know that I shouldn’t have such a narrow focus. It’s not about what benefits me, it’s about what will help others. If joining with others helps to change the way this country looks at gun control, then that’s what I’ll do.

Students throughout America have united to show our government that enough is enough. We can’t live like this. If it takes stronger gun laws to ensure that I don’t have to continue living in a world where going to school each day is a gamble, good. If it takes time to write and rewrite laws so that I don’t have to live with the knowledge that my sisters might not come home from school one day, great. If it takes a gun ban to make sure that I could safely send my future kids off to school and know that I will pick them up at the end of the day so be it.

Some might call me un-American for my thinking. I love my country, and I take pride in it. But right now, I can’t love or take pride in what it’s doing.

How can I love the actions of its leaders, who have chosen a paycheck over their people? How can I take pride in watching students continue to die and knowing that little to no action has been taken?

I marched out of the classroom at Sobrato High School on March 14 in remembrance of the 17 victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine shooting, I’m marching again. I’m marching in hope the government will notice and finally demand the change that is so desperately needed, that never again will students have to learn their lives have a price that can be beat, that never again can the NRA pay their way through a school shooting tragedy.

Maya Changaran is a senior at Ann Sobrato High School. She wrote this guest column for Morgan Hill Life.