Survivors of latest US school shooting ‘call BS’ on NRA, Trump

Last Wednesday, a gunman killed 17 at a high school in Parkland, Florida. On Saturday, the students who survived the shooting marched to show enough is enough.

Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School protested in front of a courthouse last weekend after an ex-student opened fire on students and teachers with a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle. The death toll is now 17 (14 students and three staff members) and could rise, The New York Times reported.

At the Not One More rally for gun legislation on Saturday, they vowed to be the last school a mass shooting ever happens at in the United States.

Speaking publicly at a rally, Emma González, a senior, pledged that her school would be the site of the nation’s last mass shooting. How could she know? Because, she said, she and her peers would take it upon themselves to “change the law.” https://t.co/jPbdjHmVPQ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 19, 2018

“The people in the government who are voted into power are lying to us,” senior Emily González said. “And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call BS”

“They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence — we call BS!”

The crowd echoed her.

“They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun — we call BS! They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars — we call BS! They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred — we call BS! That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works — we call BS!”

A video of her speech by CNN has since gone viral, with nearly one million views.

The 18-year-old called on the crowd to give “a piece of their mind” to their elected officials and to register to vote.

Another student, David Hogg, the student news director at Parkland was one of the hundreds of students that scrambled for safety once when the first shot rang out.

He found himself unsurprised that a shooting had happened in his school, but sad.

“The fact that a student is not surprised that there was another mass shooting — but this time it was at his school — says so much about the current state that our country is in, and how much has to be done,” Hogg said, as quoted by The New York Times.

He urged lawmakers for action.

Speaking to CNN, Hogg said: “We’re children. You guys are the adults.”

“We need to do something,” he said. “We need to get out there and be politically active. Congress needs to get over their political bias with each other and work toward saving children’s lives.”

Since 1966, the US has seen more than 100 events in which four or more people have been killed by a lone shooter – an “unparalleled epidemic of gun violence”.

The Guardian reported eight shootings, that have resulted in injuries or death, have taken place at US schools since the year began. Attempts to tighten gun ownership laws have failed, since the 2012 massacre in Sandy Hook elementary school, which left 28 dead and 1 injured.

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