Students across Georgia are planning actions to demand what they say are stronger gun safety measures in response to this month’s fatal mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder.
The Morgan Oliver School, an independent school for students in kindergarten through eighth grade in East Atlanta, held a walkout Thursday morning to coincide with a state Senate committee meeting on safe firearm storage.
On Friday, a walkout is being planned by the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition and March For Our Lives, an organization founded in the wake of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people. A walkout occurred in Georgia after that mass shooting.
Students joining Friday’s walkout or supporting it are asked to wear black. Suggested slogans for Friday’s walkout include “Prayers aren’t enough,” “Our Blood is On Your Hands,” “Protect Kids Not Guns” and “Justice for Winder.” Two Apalachee High School students and two teachers were killed in the shooting. A 14-year-old student and his father have been charged in the case. In the criminal cases, prosecutors filed a notice Wednesday requesting that both defendants or their attorneys have no contact with an alleged victim of the school shooting at Apalachee.
“Every student & teacher at Apalachee High School should be alive today,” says one social media post promoting the walkout.
Some schools are preparing for the walkout by encouraging students not to leave their classes, describing the protest as a disruption. Decatur High School sent a message Wednesday urging students not to walk out of class, but to instead organize a vigil, contact elected officials, engage in community service or create an awareness campaign about gun violence and preventive measures. Students who participate in the walkout may receive punishment that includes a suspension, the message said.
In the days after the shooting at Apalachee High, students at the Morgan Oliver School told teachers they were upset and asked what they could do to help.
That led to 11-year-old Autumn Humphries imploring state senators to take steps to curb gun violence in Georgia.
”Why do guns exist if all we’re going to do with them is hurt people for no reason?” the sixth-grader said. “And all these kids that are shooting up schools should not be fully responsible. If these parents know their kid is not mentally well or mad, they need to do something about it. Don’t leave these guns accessible because who knows what they will do with it?”
Autumn was one of 24 students who traveled to the Georgia Capitol on Thursday to address the senate committee. The panel was created to look into ways the state can encourage gun owners to safely store their weapons, especially when children are in the home. Morgan Oliver is a school that focuses on social justice and encourages students to not discuss what’s going on in the world, but to have an impact in their community, founder Sanidia Oliver-Stone said. The school has about 50 students, according to federal data.
”They had a lot of big feelings, and I invited them to lead the proposal,” Oliver-Stone said. “I said, ‘If you want to do community action, you need to plan it. … They left proposal on my desk the very next day.”
The panel will continue to meet through the end of the year and put together a list of legislative recommendations for the best way to encourage Georgians to use safe storage devices for their weapons.
”Our job is to take this big (idea) that starts up here and to come down to something we can pass legislatively in both chambers of this body,” said committee Chairman Emanuel Jones, D-Ellenwood.
Staff writer Jozsef Papp contributed to this report.
