we will not wait for the next school shooting
one massive media project, many more actions to come
Throughout the day on Jan 24th, around 50 student newspapers published some version of an op-ed entitled “We will not wait for the next school shooting,” from the Daily Tar Heel to the Yale Daily News to Miami Hurricane. Search this title phrase on Google and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
A few hours after the massive release, the piece was platformed on Twitter by Vice President Kamala Harris:
This was a labor of love 4 months in the making. Back in October, I was spending class lecture time obsessed with brainstorming, outlining, and drafting the piece. Part of it was inspired by the piece I wrote back in August in response to Chapel Hill’s shooting (if you read both you’ll see some similarities), and part of it was inspired by feedback from student organizers (hi Luke!), especially within UNC, who all foresaw the power of the student identity through their various engagements.
Xander (guest author on this Substack post!) and I spent so much editing over winter break that we could both point out 3 reasons that we framed each sentence the way we did. Some of these lines are inspired by speeches delivered over two decades ago, by Republicans and Democrats alike.
More than 140 student leaders from 90 student groups nationwide signed onto this piece, whose original form I’m sharing below. The feedback we solicited from engagement with student newspapers and student leaders alike comes through in the spirit of the title, and the spirit of the piece. Too many student leaders are tired of their activism resting on chaotic and scattered response to trauma, as I argue here. And too many journalists are tired of the same formulaic reporting that is implicated whenever another mass shooter draws their weapon.
This piece is addressed to students — most of my audience here. Please give it a read, regardless!
Students are taught to love a country that values guns over our lives.
Some of us hear the sound of gunfire when we watch fireworks on the fourth of July, or when we watch a drumline performance at halftime. But all of us have heard the siren of an active shooter drill and fear that one day our campus will be next.
By painful necessity, we have grown to become much more than students learning in a classroom — we have shed every last remnant of our childhood innocence. The steady silence of Congress is as deafening as gunfire.
We will not wait for individual trauma to affect us all before we respond together — our empathy is not that brittle. Our generation responds to shootings by bearing witness and sharing solidarity like none other. We text each other our last thoughts and we cry on each others’ shoulders and we mourn with each other at vigils. We convene in classrooms and we congregate in churches and we deliberate in dining halls. We’re staunch and we’re stubborn and we’re steadfast.
Our hearts bleed from this uniquely American brand of gun violence. Yet, we still summon the courage to witness firework shows and remind ourselves that we love our country so much that we expect better from it.
We believe that our country has the capacity to love us back. There are bullet shaped holes in our hearts, but our spirits are unbreakable.
History has taught us that when injustice calls students to act, we shape the moral arc of this country.
Students in the Civil Rights Movement shared their stories through protest, creating the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that organized Freedom Rides, sit-ins, and marches. In demanding freedom from racial violence, this group’s activism became woven into American history.
Students across America organized teach-ins during the Vietnam War to expose its calculated cruelties — in doing so, rediscovering this country’s empathy. Their work, in demanding freedom from conscription and taxpayer-funded violence, is intertwined with the American story.
This fall, UNC Chapel Hill students’ text exchanges during the August 28th shooting reached the hands of the President. The nation read the desperate words of our wounded community, as we organized support, rallied and got thrown out of the North Carolina General Assembly. We demanded freedom from gun violence, just as we have in Parkland and Sandy Hook and MSU and UNLV.
For 360,000 of us since Columbine, the toll of bearing witness, of losing our classmates and friends, of succumbing to the cursed emotional vocabulary of survivorship, has become our American story.
Yes, it is not fair that we must rise up against problems that we did not create, but the organizers of past student movements know from lived experience that we decide the future of the country.
The country watched student sit-ins at Greensboro, and Congress subsequently passed civil rights legislation. The country witnessed as students exposed its lies on Vietnam, and Congress subsequently withdrew from the war.
In recent years, the country watched student survivors march against gun violence, and the White House subsequently created the National Office of Gun Violence Prevention on September 22nd, 2023.
So as students and young people alike, we should know our words don’t end on this page — we will channel them into change.
We invite you to join this generation’s community of organizers, all of us united in demanding a future free of gun violence. We understand the gravity of this commitment, because it's not simply our lives we protect with prose and protest. It is our way of life itself.
We will not allow America to be painted in a new layer of blood. We will not allow politicians to gamble our lives for NRA money.
And most of all, politicians will not have the shallow privilege of reading another front-cover op-ed by students on their knees, begging them to do their jobs — we do not need a permission slip to defend our freedoms. They will instead contend with the reality that by uniting with each other and among parents, educators, and communities, our demands become undeniable.
We feel intense anger and frustration and sadness, and in its wake we search for reaffirmations of our empathy — the remarkable human capacity to take on a tiny part of someone else’s suffering. We rediscover this fulfillment in our organizing, in our community, in not just moving away from the unbearable pain of our yesterday but in moving toward an unrelenting hope for our tomorrow.
Our generation dares politicians to look us in the eye and tell us they’re too afraid to try.
As Xander gets his own Substack underway (titled “Experiments in Methodology — check it out!!), I knew it would be fitting to house this piece on Substack because Substack is the reason that this work became possible for me. Traveling last summer while sharing my writing with peers and friends is the reason I was able to become involved with UNC March for Our Lives.
We’re very aware that a piece of writing by itself isn’t going to save any lives. But changing minds and building power is a good start.
 | A guest post by
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