In honor of Gun Violence Awareness Month, Jackie Corin — Executive Director of March For Our Lives and Parkland shooting survivor — shares an op-ed with Her Campus about why she’s committed to fighting gun violence.
When people talk about mass shootings, they focus on the noise: the sirens, the chaos, the names scrolling across the screen in news coverage. But they rarely talk about the stillness that comes after. The ringing that won’t stop. The way time splits. How your body moves through one version of reality while your mind stays stuck in another.
After February 14th, 2018 — the day that 17 of my classmates and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida were gunned down on campus — I went back to school. I sat in classrooms where others used to sit. Tried to write essays while flinching at the sound of slamming doors. Felt my heart race walking the halls, passing armed officers stationed outside our classrooms. Studied for exams while wondering if the grief would ever let my brain work again. I wasn’t physically injured, but my nervous system was completely rewired. More than the fear, what I remember is the confusion of trying to move forward in a world that had just stolen 17 futures. That’s the part people don’t see. Survivors carry the weight of what didn’t happen: lives not lived, causes not championed, futures cut short.
I kept thinking: My peers should be here too.
In the months after the shooting, I co-founded March For Our Lives with my classmates. We were grieving, but we were also determined to act. In the years that followed, I carried that purpose with me as I pursued my education — first at Harvard for my undergraduate degree, then at Oxford for my master’s — always thinking about the people who never got the chance to do the same. Although I moved forward, I couldn’t just move on. I met classmates who had fled war zones, grown up under authoritarian rule, or spent their lives fighting for the right to exist. People who had seen the worst of the world. And still, nearly all of them asked me the same question: How does a country like the U.S. let this happen to its children? The idea that school shootings were a normal part of life in America left them stunned.
Their questions stayed with me. In every room I entered, the focus was on the future — policy students debating what comes next, classmates imagining the change they’d help create. And I kept thinking: My peers should be here too. I couldn’t just study injustice from a distance. I had to return and fight the one that shaped me. That’s what brought me back — to not just organize, but help lead March For Our Lives into its next chapter as Executive Director.
Today, March For Our Lives is fighting for something that should be simple: a world where students worry about midterms, not mass shootings. Where classrooms are for learning, not lockdowns. We’re demanding what should have existed long ago: universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons, and a higher minimum age to buy a gun. And we’re calling out every part of the system that enables this crisis — from the gun industry and the lawmakers who shield it to the corporations that quietly profit while claiming neutrality.
But policy alone won’t save us. What we’re building is power: a generation of young people organizing not just to vote, but to lead. To rewrite the rules. To say, clearly and collectively, that we are not expendable. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S. Not cancer, not car accidents. Guns. And too many lawmakers respond by making it easier to carry a weapon than to cast a ballot. But we refuse to accept that this is normal. We shouldn’t have to choose between getting an education and staying alive.
We still have a say in what kind of future we live in — a future where safety is a right, not a privilege.
The gun lobby has money, lobbyists, and political influence. But it doesn’t have us. We’ve grown up with bloodstained headlines and bulletproof whiteboards, and we’ve had enough. You don’t need a title or a perfect plan to be part of this fight. You just have to choose not to look away.
Every day, I fight so that one less student has to text “I love you” from under a desk. So that walking into school doesn’t feel like walking into a trap. So that grief doesn’t become a language we all know by heart. We still have a say in what kind of future we live in — a future where safety is a right, not a privilege. Where children grow up instead of being buried. Where my story doesn’t have to be so familiar.
If you refuse to accept the status quo, here’s how you can fight back: Vote like your life depends on it, because for millions of us, it does — know where your candidates stand. Speak up in classrooms, at dinner tables, on social media, in student government. Make the people in power feel the weight of our voices. Hold your representatives accountable. Ask them, in public or in private, why they won’t protect kids over campaign contributions.
I’ll never know who my 17 peers and teachers would have become. I think about that all the time — what books they would’ve written, who they would’ve loved, what kind of change they might have made. That ache doesn’t go away. But I do know this: Somewhere, a student is alive because we didn’t give up. Because we turned grief into movement. Because we kept going. Those 17 futures were stolen. But ours is still here — and it’s still worth fighting for.