View this post on the web at [link removed]

“You just want to take our guns.”
That’s a sentence we hear all the time, and it’s usually meant to end the conversation before it really begins.
March For Our Lives didn’t begin as a debate about the Second Amendment. It began with grief. With classrooms turned into crime scenes. With empty desks, unanswered texts, and the sickening realization that this could happen again, and again, and again. We didn’t come together because we wanted to control people or punish gun owners. We came together because too many lives had already been taken from us, and because the people in power seemed willing to accept that as normal. We wanted change.
The idea that gun violence prevention means confiscation has been repeated so often that it has hardened into a myth. It flattens a complex, deeply human crisis into something easier to dismiss. It allows powerful interests to avoid hard questions by turning fear into a shield, and it keeps the public conversation stuck on hypotheticals while real people keep getting hurt.
So we’ll say it plainly: we are not trying to take everyone’s guns.
That has never been our goal, and it’s not how change actually happens in this country. There are hundreds of millions of firearms already in circulation. Pretending otherwise isn’t serious, and it isn’t honest. But neither is pretending that nothing can be done. The space between those two extremes — between confiscation and surrender — is where real solutions live. That space is where our work has always been focused.
What we want is simpler, and harder, than the myth suggests. We want fewer funerals. We want fewer parents burying their children. We want fewer students learning how to barricade doors before they learn how to plan a future. We want to live in a country where surviving school, a night out, or an argument at home isn’t treated as luck.
That’s what gun violence prevention actually looks like in practice. It looks like safe storage laws that keep guns out of the hands of people in crisis. It looks like red flag laws that give families a way to act on warning signs instead of being told to wait until it’s too late. It looks like community violence intervention programs that interrupt harm before it escalates. It looks like mental health care, economic opportunity, and trauma-informed support that address the conditions violence feeds on.
None of that requires mass confiscation. It requires responsibility.
It also requires honesty about what this crisis really is. Gun violence isn’t random. It isn’t inevitable. It’s shaped by policy choices, cultural narratives, and whose lives we decide are worth protecting. Yet for years, fear has been used to shut down that conversation — fear of losing rights, fear of political backlash, fear deliberately cultivated by an industry that profits when nothing changes.
The gun industry and its allies have built a business model around tragedy. Every shooting becomes an opportunity to sell more weapons, more surveillance, more “security,” while opposing the very policies that would actually reduce harm. They don’t benefit from prevention. They benefit from paralysis and from keeping the public afraid and divided.
For many people, this reality remains abstract until gun violence touches their own lives. Until it happens in their school, their neighborhood, their family. Distance makes it easier to misunderstand the crisis and to believe it’s rare or unavoidable. But for our generation, there is no distance. We practiced lockdown drills before we learned how to multiply. Gun violence isn’t a theoretical debate for us. It’s a constant presence — a background hum of risk that adults keep telling us to accept as the price of living here.
We refuse to accept that.
That refusal is what defines March For Our Lives, and it’s what sets our work apart. We don’t push policy behind closed doors. We disrupt the systems and actors that enable violence. We confront apathy by centering the stories of people who live with this crisis every day. We mobilize young people into real, sustained action. We cultivate the next generation of leaders who will carry this fight forward long after the headlines fade. Our power comes from youth, from survivors, from culture, and from a willingness to make inaction uncomfortable.
We also refuse the lie that the only choices are total freedom or total control. Freedom without responsibility isn’t freedom. It’s neglect. And the people most harmed by that neglect are almost always the same: young people, communities of color, and families who never had the luxury of distance from this crisis in the first place.
Our work is about changing the conditions that make this level of violence possible. It’s about shifting culture so safety is valued more than gun industry profit. It’s about holding lawmakers, corporations, and cultural figures accountable when they choose fear and money over human life. And it’s about building a future where young people don’t have to organize around their own survival.
So if you’ve been told that we’re coming for your guns, pause. Look at what we’re actually fighting for. Look at the policies we support, the systems we challenge, the stories we elevate, and the communities we stand with. Look at the lives we’re trying to protect, including our own.
We don’t want to take your guns.
We just want a future.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe to stay connected to the young leaders, stories, and ideas shaping the future of this movement.

Unsubscribe [link removed]?