Students, teachers demand tougher gun control after Uvalde school shooting

Student and teacher advocates demanded immediate action from lawmakers to stop the country’s gun violence epidemic that included this week’s deadly school shooting in Uvalde.

They joined school shooting survivors in calling for tougher gun laws during a roundtable forum Friday morning in Houston, just as the National Rifle Association’s conference was starting.

“We know we have the country behind us,” said George Tataris, a high school student who is the executive director at March For Our Lives Houston. “We know, the vast majority of Americans know that something needs to be done about this, and that’s what makes me happy.”

The collective message of educators, parents, activists and community leaders — expressed through hope, anger and sadness — was that the death of 19 students and two teachers at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary should be the final straw in shaking the country into action.

“We can’t keep saying thoughts and prayers,” said National PTA president Anna King. “We can pray all day long. It’s time for action, policy and change. That is the only way that we’re going to make sure that our children are safe.”

The group later met with various members of Houston’s clergy, with some joining a larger protest against the NRA outside Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center.

While much of the discussion at the forum focused on using the Uvalde shooting as a catalyst for change, several Texas-based speakers railed against recommendations from some state leaders, most notably Attorney General Ken Paxton, to arm teachers as the last line of defense.

“I should not have to go to my child’s teacher next year and say ‘Hey, how good of a shot are you?’” said Christina Quintero, a parent and member of Houston’s Community Voices for Public Education.

Friday’s forum, organized by the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, included several teachers and students who were present at some of the country’s worst mass school shootings.

Abbey Clements, 30-year teaching veteran who taught at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., said that the impact of what happened in Uvalde will long reverberate in that community.

“Newtown is Uvalde,” Clements said. “It’s Chicago, It’s Philly. It’s Houston. Schools are unsafe working conditions, for students and teachers. And teachers are walking in every day, these days, crying, having to field questions from students. We come in, and they lock eyes with us because they don’t know what to say. And we don’t know what to say.”

Sarah Lerner, teacher at Parkland, Florida’s Stoneman Douglas High School and a founder of non-profit group Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence, said she has seen the toll for the generation of students raised under the threat of school shootings and gun violence.

“There’s so much that enters that classroom with those children, that goes unsaid outside of the classroom,” Lerner said. “But we’re the ones who hear it, and help them and absorb all of that.”

David Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor who co-founded gun control advocacy group March Of Our Lives after the 2018 attack, said he genuinely feels that the response to Uvalde’s shooting “can be different.”

That optimism was born in part, he said, from the combination of decades worth of work from parents and shooting survivors dating back to the 1999 Columbine shooting.

“I need gun owners to stand up and agree that we need action and speak out now — so that our politicians know that the NRA does not represent them,” Hogg said.