As the Daily Trojan’s Editorial Board wrote last fall in the wake of the aforementioned Las Vegas shooting, gun violence has in many ways become a millennial issue. Of course, with the exception of the disproportionate effects of gun violence on female domestic abuse victims and people of color afflicted by police brutality, mass shootings can be indiscriminate in whom they target. But as students today, in our lifetimes we have witnessed and experienced increased mass shootings and widened accessibility to weapons that can kill hundreds in minutes. And we have gone through these tragedies, all while often watching and feeling helpless as none sparked necessary change, and each episode devastatingly seemed to pave the way for the next.

But the student survivors of the Parkland shooting have wholly flipped the script on this, in a way that affects all Americans and, in particular, American students. Young people may be known for low voter turnout rates and stereotyped as apathetic; it would be easy to assume repeated, senseless violence and repeated inaction from those with all the decision-making power would sow only further disillusionment.

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