When Columbine high school teacher Paula Reed does lockdown drills to prepare for an active shooter, she does them in the same classroom where she was during the 1999 Columbine shooting, which left 12 students and one teacher dead.
“There are some people who say I would feel a whole lot safer, and so would my students, if I were armed,” the teacher told a crowd of more than 500 people at a joint rally in Colorado on Thursday night for survivors of the Parkland, Florida and Columbine school shootings.
Sign up to receive the top US stories every morning
Reed lost one of her students, 17-year-old Rachel Joy Scott, in 1999. But she had also taught one of the perpetrators of the shooting, Dylan Klebold, when he was “a sweet, shy sophomore”.
“When we talk about arming teachers, you’re not just asking me to protect the Rachels of this world, you’re asking me to kill the Dylans,” she said.
“Do you understand what you’re asking of me? You’re asking me to kill one of my students,” she said, her voice trembling. “It’s too much to ask.”
Students at 2,500 schools across the United States will hold walkouts on Friday morning, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting, to protest against continued government inaction on preventing school shootings and everyday gun violence. The walkouts, organized by a 16-year-old high school student from Ridgefield, Connecticut, mark the third major set of national gun control protests since the 14 February shooting in Parkland, which left 17 students and teachers dead.
Friday’s walkout follows a 14 March national walkout at an estimated 3,000 schools across the country, including at Columbine, and worldwide rallies and protests on 24 March, including hundreds of thousands of protesters at the March for Our Lives in Washington.
There will be no walkout on Friday at Columbine, which is closed for an annual day of service and remembrance on the anniversary of the 1999 shooting. But Columbine students held a joint Vote for Our Lives Rally with 60 student survivors from Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, on Thursday, calling on students to use their votes to pressure politicians to take action on preventing gun violence. The rally also featured youth activists working to prevent everyday gun violence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the mother of Claire Davis, the 17-year-old killed in a 2013 school shooting at Arapahoe high school in Colorado, one of the many American school shootings that faded quickly from the headlines because comparatively few students were killed.
Congress has not passed any substantial federal gun control legislation since the Columbine shooting in 1999, and while some states have tightened gun control laws in the last two decades, other states have passed sweeping gun rights laws.
“I’m asking our elected leaders to pass meaningful legislation to keep guns out of the hands of children and teenagers,” Reed, the teacher who has taught at Columbine for 31 years, told the crowd on Thursday, at a park behind the school, not far from the memorial to the 13 people killed.
“A politician only fears one thing, and that’s your vote,” Parkland high school student Carlos Rodriguez told the crowd, dozens of his classmates massed on the stage behind him.
Before the rally, Columbine students gave the visiting Parkland students an emotional tour of the empty Columbine school building and introduced them to survivors of the 1999 shooting, who talked about their experiences.
Gabriel Motta, 16, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, said that visiting Columbine “was pretty hard” and reminded him of how hard it was coming back to his high school this spring for the first time since the shooting.
He had read about what happened during the Columbine shooting, and when he toured the library, where 10 Columbine students were murdered, he cried, he said.
At the same time, seeing Columbine and Parkland students and other survivors come together was inspiring, he said. Current Columbine students are hosting Parkland students at their homes during the visit.
Columbine’s current students were not even born when the shooting took place. But like students across the country, they have lived their whole lives with lockdown drills and the fear of school shootings, making them part of what they called “Generation Columbine”.
Quick GuideMass school shootings in the US
Show
How many have there been so far this year?
There have been eight shootings at US schools this year that resulted in injury or death, including 17 dead on Wednesday. In December, the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting, in which 20 children and six teachers died, was marked by congressional Republicans seeking to weaken restrictions and make it easier to carry a concealed weapon across state lines. Donald Trump promised to support the National Rifle Association (NRA) and oppose limits to gun ownership.
Key statistics
97 children have been killed and 126 injured in mass shootings in schools since 1989. These are the three worst incidents:
14 February 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School, Florida
14 December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary, Connecticut
20 April 1999 Columbine High School, Colorado
Why is the NRA so powerful?
In 2017, the NRA spent at least $4.1m on lobbying. In the 2016 US elections, it spent $14.4m supporting 44 candidates who won, and $34.4m opposing 19 who lost, according to CRP. But “the real source of its power comes from voters”, said Adam Winkler, a UCLA professor of constitutional law. The 145-year-old organisation claims 5 million active members and Prof Robert Spitzer of the State University of New York at Cortland said it has “a very powerful ability to mobilise a grassroots support ”.
The public view
79%: Proportion of Americans who favour banning assault-style weapons, according to a recent poll
84%: Democratic voters who said that gun laws should be ‘a lot’ or ‘somewhat’ stricter than at present
72%: Republican
voters who
agreed that
‘the benefits of
gun ownership
outweigh the
risks’
Thursday night’s rally and vigil was organized by Vote for Our Lives, a group founded by local Colorado high school students to encourage students to register to vote in November to pressure politicians to take action on gun violence. Vote for Our Lives has scheduled student events across the country to keep up the momentum for gun violence prevention, the crucial challenge now for student activists who have already kept gun control on the political agenda for months, far longer than after most previous mass shootings in America.
Nineteen years after the Columbine shooting, “Have we learned anything?” Sam Craig, a Vote for Our Lives organizer, asked the crowd on Thursday.
It is still not clear to what extent the intense public debate and protests by hundreds of thousands of students across the country will translate into votes for candidates who support gun control in the midterm elections in November.
At the Columbine rally on Thursday, Mi Familia Vota held a voter registration drive, and Organizing for Action, a nonprofit founded to support community organizing around former president Barack Obama’s agenda, asked people to commit to vote in November. At least 500 people came to the rally, but Mi Familia Vota only processed 16 new voter registrations, staffers said.