Parkland, Florida, school shooting survivor and activist David Hogg speaks to gun control advocates during the "March for Our Lives" rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, June 11, 2022. - Protesters are demonstrating across the US for tighter firearms laws to curb devastating gun violence plaguing the country. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Parkland, Florida, school shooting survivor and activist David Hogg speaks to gun control advocates during the "March for Our Lives" rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, June 11, 2022. - Protesters are demonstrating across the US for tighter firearms laws to curb devastating gun violence plaguing the country. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
aired; October 25th, 2023.
On February 14, 2018, a gunman opened fire inside Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida – killing 17 and injuring another 17. It was one of the deadliest school shootings in American history.
Tragically, there have been other deadly mass shootings at schools and places in the U.S. since.
David Hogg was a senior at the school at the time. When he heard the gunshots in another school building, he and other students hid and he started interviewing his classmates about guns and the National Rifle Association, while the incident was going on.
What students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas did after the shooting was different than previous mass shootings. They fought back – not with violence, but with their voices and activism to try to stop gun violence.
Hogg and other students created March for Our Lives to try to eliminate gun violence. It started as a small group of students reaching out to Florida legislators but grew. On The Spark Wednesday, Hogg described how big the movement got,”We started talking about, okay, what can we do now? And the thing that we thought of was doing a march. So we decided to have a march on Washington, and we thought that we’d only get about a dozen people there, or maybe 90 people there. And we ended up having over 800,000 people there. And we had the largest youth protest in modern American history with tens of thousands of young people registered to vote and tens of millions of them turning out and voting at the highest rate ever for a non-presidential midterm in 2018.”
Hogg was asked what that turnout said to him,”The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Americans support stronger gun laws. The NRA doesn’t want you to believe that. They want you to believe that they represent all gun owners. They don’t. And the reason why I know that is because my father is a gun owner. I was part of the shooting club in college. I know the power and responsibility that comes with these weapons. And I know the vast majority of gun owners do not agree with the NRA. They do not think that people who threaten to shoot up a high school should be able to continue owning an AR-15 like the shooter in my high school did. And Americans are incredibly fed up and they’re showing up.”
Hogg said there are ways to reduce gun violence,”One of the solutions that I advocate for that many states have adopted since Parkland is called a red flag law. It’s a law that enables police to temporarily remove some of these firearms if they’re believed to be a danger to themselves or others, for example, in Parkland or anywhere else. If this law is in place and there’s somebody who’s threatening to shoot up their local high school or elementary school or kill themselves, they can have their guns temporarily taken away by the police and be given a court date with a right to due process and counsel to prove that they’re not going to go and harm themselves or somebody else.”
Hogg also supports stronger background checks and more robust mental health screenings, although he added that mental health is not the main reason for gun violence.
