Editor’s Note: The following op-ed was signed by more than 140 student leaders and published simultaneously by more than 50 student newspapers at public and private universities across the country.
Students are taught to love a country that values guns over our lives.
Many of us hear the sound of gunfire when we watch fireworks on the Fourth of July. All of us have heard the siren of an active shooting scenario and asked ourselves: Again?
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. Our hearts bleed from this uniquely American brand of gun violence, and yet we 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.
We will not wait for individual trauma to affect us all before we respond together — when we rediscover our empathy, we shape the moral arc of this country.
Students in the Civil Rights Movement created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that organized Freedom Rides, sit-ins and marches. In demanding freedom from racial violence, this group’s activism was woven into American history.
Students across America organized teach-ins during the Vietnam War. Their work, in demanding freedom from conscription and taxpayer-funded violence, is intertwined with the American story.
