I survived Sandy Hook — I want a president who will tackle gun violence

The Junior Newtown Action Alliance aims to raise awareness about gun violence prevention

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“I’ve been campaigning for gun control for years, but there’s only so much change you can affect without a vote,” said Fischer, who lost 26 of her friends and teachers. “We’ve worked so hard only to see what happened to us happen to others. We need those in power to know enough is enough.”

A record number of young people have registered to vote in this election — up 53 per cent on four years ago. A recent poll from Tufts University in Massachusetts found that about 26 per cent of them said gun violence prevention was a top issue. Among young black voters, that number is 36 per cent.

Their daily reality changed after the attack on December 14, 2012, one so brutal and senseless it remains seared in the American collective consciousness. Lockdowns, active shooter drills and bulletproof classrooms became a normal part of life.

Activists had hoped the tragedy would become a watershed moment, but President Obama, who called the shooting the “single darkest day of my presidency”, was hamstrung by Republicans in Congress who fought proposed legislation they felt impinged on the constitutional right to bear arms.

In the time it took for the Sandy Hook survivors to graduate, there have been 1,600 more mass shootings in the US. In one of the latest, a 14-year-old suspect with an AR-style rifle murdered four during the first week of term at Apalachee High School in Georgia. Firearms have overtaken car crashes as the most common cause of death among under-16s.

Today, some of the country’s leading gun safety advocates are those who lived through school shootings, having channelled their outrage into organising. Last year the Biden administration formed the first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which on Thursday announced a series of sweeping executive orders.

Fischer was a member of the Junior Newtown Action Alliance, a group in Connecticut that aims to raise awareness about gun violence prevention. Now an undergraduate at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, she has joined its Democratic club, helping to register new voters.

“The country used to have a ban on assault weapons that expired [in 2004]. We have an older generation of politicians who have no idea what it is like to live with the fear that we have,” Fischer told The Times. “We don’t know anything else, but we know it’s not, and should not, just be accepted.”

She met Kamala Harris, the vice-president, this year with fellow survivors at the White House. Harris gave her word to “make it a big issue”.

David Hogg organised the biggest youth-led protests since the Vietnam War with his group March For Our Lives

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David Hogg founded March For Our Lives after the 2018 shooting at his school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida.

The shooting, which killed 17 students and staff members, prompted nationwide student walkouts and a massive voter registration campaign to demand gun control. March For Our Lives organised the biggest youth-led protests since the Vietnam War. Hogg describes it as a “movement driven by trauma”.

Hogg, 24, endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time this summer, pointing to the Biden-Harris administration’s passing of the most significant safety legislation in decades, which included enhanced background checks for gun buyers.

He has been mobilising voters to cast ballots for Harris, spending millions of dollars in Arizona, Michigan and Florida — all states where he believes the youth vote could tip the scales.

The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killed 17 students and staff members

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Hogg said he hoped to see a repeat of the 2022 midterm elections, where a large share of Gen Z’s 40 million voters rewarded Democrats and helped stave off the “red wave” in Congress that many pollsters were predicting.

“They weren’t voting 50-50 for Democrats and Republicans, they were voting very clearly in one direction for candidates who strongly support gun laws,” he said, also crediting the backlash against the Republican push to restrict reproductive rights.

Polling conducted by Hogg’s organisation before the election found that 60 per cent of younger voters wanted to see political leaders be bolder when addressing gun violence.

It was a sign of how far the paradigm had shifted — gun control barely registered as a campaign issue in the midterms held the year after Sandy Hook.

Harris has promised tighter firearm controls, while reassuring supporters of the Second Amendment that she would not “confiscate everybody’s gun” as Trump had claimed. Last week she reminded voters that she was a gun owner herself, and suggested in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that she would defend herself against a home intruder.

Kamala Harris met Sandy Hook survivors at the White House this year

“It was astounding that she said it, but it makes sense to reach out to the majority who have — and use — guns sensibly,” said Liam Card, 19, a classmate of Fischer and co-president of Hamilton College’s Democratic club. Fischer also said she saw it as pragmatic, but wished to hear more from the Democratic nominee on a previous proposal to reinstate a federal assault weapons ban.

Harris’s campaign said they were framing the conversation around gun violence in a similar way they are approaching other issues like reproductive rights and education, by putting it in the context of freedom and civil rights.

“That is what young people want, to be able to have that freedom and to be able to have a government that’s supporting them and not constraining them,” said Eve Levenson, Harris’s 24-year-old director of youth engagement.

Card said the Democrats’ “rhetoric that we will not go back is incredibly resonant with our demographic”.

At a National Rifle Association event in May, Trump, who has since had two attempts on his life from armed attackers, said he would roll back Biden’s executive orders.

Neil Heslin, whose six-year-old son Jesse Lewis was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, testified during a hearing on the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 — a bill that failed to pass

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JD Vance, Trump’s running-mate, described the shooting at Apalachee High School as a “fact of life”. “We’ve got to bolster security so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to,” the Ohio senator said.

Joseph “JT” Lewis, who was 12 when his six-year-old brother Jesse was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, finds himself agreeing with Vance, which puts him at odds with many of the victims’ families.

But he has found allies in people like Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed at Stoneman Douglas, in advocating for “hardening schools” with armed guards, and mental health reform.

Lewis, who ran as a Republican for Connecticut’s state senate aged 19, visited the White House to discuss school security in 2018 when Trump was in office. They talked about Jesse’s final act of bravery — shouting to classmates to run while the shooter, Adam Lanza, was reloading — and what more could be done to prevent other children from facing the same fate.

JT Lewis, the brother of the Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis, spoke to Donald Trump about school security in 2018

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“I think my generation is hyper-sensitive to the issue. Sometimes an issue is much more complex than it seems, and I believe mass shootings is one of those issues,” Lewis told The Times.

“After Parkland I saw the high schoolers stand up and fight for gun control using the same language activists have used for the last quarter of a century — since Columbine. It made me realise that the gun control angle of solving school shootings was the wrong one, or at least one that would never be accomplished,” he said.

What is clear is that anger and anxiety over school shootings has shaped an entire cohort of new and future voters. If they come out in November in the numbers predicted, Hogg suggested it is the Republicans who should be worried. “There’s no putting this back in the box,” he said.