No child should learn an active shooter drill before learning how to read.

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Hi John,

As a Gen-Zer, I can say most of us learned how to protect ourselves during an active shooter training while we were still in Kindergarten learning to write our name. Some of us were exposed to gun violence in our homes or neighborhoods even earlier. Those of us who survive childhood will grow up in a country with more guns than people, making us, literally, outnumbered.

Gun control by itself will not stop this crisis. Gun safety alone cannot disrupt this cycle of death. We can’t keep pulling people out of the river without looking upstream to see why they fell in. We must work toward combating gun violence by preventing it from happening in the first place; by addressing the larger, systemic issues in our society that exacerbate it; by liberating ourselves from its root causes and eradicating it completely. As young people, we shouldn’t have to do this work, but we have no choice. So our purpose as an organization is to become obsolete.

Today, we’re introducing you to our theory of change, so we can do this necessary liberation work together. This strategy is the result of intense dialogue, across generations and geographies within our movement, centered on a basic question: What distinguishes a gun violence prevention approach from a gun control approach? Our answer:
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Over the next few months, I want to explore this with you, and in conversation with the young leaders of our nationwide movement who have experienced the intersection of gun violence -- so that we can understand the forces that fuel it. Five of our student leaders have each taken on one of these five forces. They’ll be sending you their stories and their learnings as we research, explore, and develop strategies to address these forces.

As we’ve grown -- both as an organization and as young people broadening our vision of what is possible -- we’re choosing to take a more intersectional approach to our advocacy, and we hope this framework will allow us to do that more effectively and concretely. As students, we’re used to learning as we go, and we’re actively working to gain a better understanding of the layers to this epidemic.

Over the next several months, we will explore each of these forces through the eyes of my fellow organizers at March For Our Lives.

I invite you to learn and grow with us.

Let’s get to work.

Onward,
Matthew Hogenmiller
Digital Manager
March For Our Lives

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