accepting,” she said.
Emma stepped up to the podium in a black spaghetti-strap top, black bra, half-a-dozen wristbands of assorted shapes and textures, and no hair. A paper flyer stating the time is NOW! was taped to the podium, and three microphones were clamped on top, one securing an American flag. A woman stood beside Emma holding a fourth, watching her intently throughout the speech, biting her lip as it began.
Emma tapped a stack of papers, and then held them up with a big smile: “I know this looks like a lot, but these are my AP gov notes.” Everyone there should be home grieving, she said. “But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and president can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see.” She raised her hands to mark air quotes around “thoughts and prayers.” And with that line, Emma drew the first wild cheers of her young activist career.
Since the Second Amendment had been written, she argued, “our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed but our laws have not.” Then she quoted a teacher: “When adults tell me I have the right to own a gun, all I can hear is, ‘My right to own a gun outweighs your student’s right to live.’ All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.”
Every country had troubled teens, and mental health issues, yet mass shootings were such a uniquely American problem. As she pointed out, Australia had one mass shooting, in Port Arthur in 1999, then passed sweeping gun laws and had not had one since. She went on to say, “Japan has never had a mass shooting. Canada has had three and the UK had one and they both introduced gun control and yet here we are.”
Emma described a chilling interview she had watched that morning, in which a survivor was asked whether their child would go through lockdown drills. Adults seemed resigned to that fate, but her generation said no way. They were sick of studying inaction—they’d been studying it their entire lives. Her AP government class had conducted three debates on it already that year, and it raged on in closets on Wednesday, while students hid from the gunman killing their friends. If students learned anything, “it’s that if you don’t study, you will fail,” she said. “If you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead.”
She castigated Republican senator Chuck Grassley for sponsoring a bill preventing the FBI from performing background checks on people adjudicated as mentally ill. She decried the NRA’s influence on politicians. “To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you!” She was eight minutes into the speech, still wiping away tears with the backs of her hand, but her sadness was dwarfed with a rising and fierce resilience. The crowd was behind her now, chanting back repeatedly, “Shame on you!” Emma waited them out, rubbed the back of her head, and smiled for the first time since she had begun.
“The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us,” she said. “And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS.” She raised her fist and pumped it to each syllable, to wild screams: “WE! CALL! B! S!” As she repeated the chant, the audience yelled it with her: “They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.” She waved her notes in defiance at that last one, still wiping away the tears. Then she called on the audience to register to vote, to call their congresspeople, and to “give them a piece of your mind!”
It had been eleven minutes and forty seconds. Emma knew she had struck a chord with the hundreds assembled there, but