Marshfield Students Call for Gun Legislation to be Passed
By Bailey Gabrielle – At 10 o’clock on Wednesday, March 14th, students quietly left their classrooms and gathered across Becker Road from Marshfield High School. For seventeen minutes, students lay on the ground in silence to commemorate the seventeen lives lost at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School during the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida. This peaceful “School Walk Out” demonstration was like many that have being taking place across the country in recent weeks.
Senior Samantha Peterson said, “After all of these school shootings, nothing has been done. Students are responding to the lack of legislative action through the ‘March For Our Lives’ movement.”
The March For Our Lives is a demonstration that will take place in Washington D.C. on March 24th with smaller demonstrations across the country, similar to the Women’s March that took place in January. Students have organized demonstrations of their own at schools throughout the month of March.
“Although most of those involved in the demonstration [at MHS] are not of legal voting age, these students are the ones being targeted and killed in mass shootings.” said Aria Rens, MHS junior. “Therefore, this walkout represents another way in which students can voice their discontent with the legal system which is currently failing to protect them.
The MHS School Walk Out was not authorized by school administration but students did communicate with administration about their intentions to hold a demonstration and complied with district guidelines.
To be excused from class, students needed a signed note from a parent to participate in the MHS School Walk Out. If a note was not given, students would be marked truant. If students shared different beliefs than their parents, the parents would decide if their son or daughter could share their voice or not.
Senior Roma Shah said, “The fact that students across the country are being restricted
from having the freedom to speak for themselves—due to threats of suspension or requirements such as parent permission—speaks to the disconnect between the generations in our country. We are different from the current mass voting population and what we want to say [and] what we want done is what is not currently being voted on…by those currently able to make their choices apparent.”
Overall, students that took part in the MHS School Walk Out felt safe at Marshfield High School with the current safety guidelines.
Peterson said, “I have never been given a reason to not feel safe at the high school, but I am almost certain that every school shooting victim felt the same way before their school was targeted.”
The focus of many students was not improving safety procedures but accessing other areas of student life including communication between administration and the student body.
Shah said, “For me, it’s not really a question of what MHS can do to improve student safety. Being acknowledged and heard by upper levels of the district as a whole would definitely improve the morale here. Feeling understood in general creates a better atmosphere for the feeling of safety.”
Many of the participants of the MHS School Walk Out focused issues of gun control.
Junior Carter Chojnacki said, “In my opinion, schools can only go so far to protect students because they have limited resources due to a shoestring budget…What can be done though is changing state and federal laws so that society as a whole can become safer, thus making schools safer.”
Students called for a ban on assault weapons, a universal background check prior to purchasing a gun, a raise on the age a person can buy a gun, and a larger focus on mental health in the United States.
In the shooting in Parkland, Florida, shooter Nikolas Cruz used an AR-15 assault rifle to take the lives of 17 people.
Peterson added, “The current system in place allowed that eighteen-year-old to buy an assault rifle. No one, especially an eighteen-year-old, should have their hands on a gun like that.”
It’s clear that students in Marshfield and across the nation are not waiting around to be the next victims of school violence. Wisconsin legislators should take the student demonstrations across the state as a spotlight on the issues that need to be addressed—now rather than later.
Peterson added, “Thoughts and prayers simply won’t cut it. It is time for change.”
