High School students across Pasadena rallied on campus this week to pay homage to the victims of recent mass shootings and press legislators to introduce new laws that will protect students from such attacks.
Freshman, sophomores and juniors from all high schools in the Pasadena Unified School District united for a walk-out on the final day of school Thursday, June 2.
The peaceful protests, organized by a student-led coalition called the PUSD Student Think Tank, sought to bring awareness to the continued state of fear and outrage felt by students, sparked by those who seek to commit violence using automatic weapons, according to Pasadena High School Freshman Paulina McConnell.
“When other student Think Tank members received word, it only made sense to hold a districtwide rally,” McConnell said during an interview, marching down Sierra Madre Boulevard with dozens of peers who chanted as passers-by honked in support. “This affects all of us.”
Holding handmade signs crafted of paper and cardboard, participants said they were prompted to disrupt the final day of school because their lives depend on it.
“This is no laughing matter,” McConnell said, laying on the hot pavement with a pair of peers who displayed signs denouncing the 233 mass shootings that have killed 260 people this year alone.
After noticing a post on social media, students presented the idea to district leaders and campus officials who helped them plan ways to broadcast their message on a larger scale.
“It felt good that we have this much support, but it’s never enough until you actually have people in Congress, your representatives and the legislators who are actually going to make the change,” McConnel said. “And right now, they’re completely failing every child in school, they’re failing families of those lost ones, and they’re failing us because they refuse to even try.”
The students were responding assaults such as last week’s shootings by an 18-year-old gunman, who killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and another attack on Wednesday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during which a gunman shot and killed four people and himself at a medical office.
Those shootings were just the latest incidents in the recent wave of bloodshed. During a May 14 assault in Buffalo, New York, a white 18-year-old wearing military gear and livestreaming with a helmet camera opened fire with a rifle at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood, killing 10 people and wounding three others. And the next day, on May 15, in the lunch hall of a Laguna Woods Presbyterian church favored by older Taiwanese Americans, a gunman killed one person and wounded five others.
Meanwhile, not far from the students’ protest on Thursday, police investigated what, if any charges, could be presented to the District Attorney’s Office after a student threatened a shooting at Sierra Madre Middle School.
There was no plausible threat to students or staff, according to police, who said the student had no access to a gun. But the presence of patrols was increased in the area and around other schools in the city.
The Associated Press contributed to this report