March 23, 2018

Sandy Hook Rocked Their Town. Now These High Schoolers Are Eloquent, Angry, and Heading to DC

Banner signed? Check. Sign-up sheets filled? Check. These Connecticut kids are ready to take on gun violence.

Garrett Marino was in sixth grade when a gunman attacked a nearby school—Sandy Hook Elementary. “It was a Friday, I remember it, and we had a lockdown,” he said. “And we were all just scared for our lives because we didn’t know what was happening. They told us it was a drill, but we were there for hours and hours, and it seemed like it would never end.”

That was December 2012, when 27 people were killed in a shooting spree at the elementary school. Twenty victims were young children. In the years since, Sandy Hook has become a symbol of national anguish, and a reminder of the nation’s failure to stop mass shootings.

Now 16 years old, Marino and a cadre of classmates from Newtown High School are about to pull off an impressive logistical feat: organizing eight coaches to ferry hundreds of local students and supporters to Washington D.C., where they will join an anticipated 500,000 demonstrators at the March For Our Lives, the historic student-led gun reform rally organized in the wake of the Parkland school shooting last month.

“We’re full-up,” Marino tells Mother Jones, in a hot basement room in the Edmond Town Hall on Newtown’s historic main street. “We have a long waitlist because a lot of people want to go.”

Along with Mother Jones filmmaker Mark Helenowski, I was invited to document a planing event on Thursday night with students and their families: sign-up sheets were filled, thorny questions (“Will we catch the same bus home?”) answered, and t-shirts of all sizes handed out.

Dozens of colorful Sharpies were laid out on a big banner emblazoned with the logo of the Newtown Action Alliance, a local gun reform advocacy group. On it, students wrote “We stand with you,” and other messages of love and solidarity, addressed to their peers at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. They hope to give the banner to the Parkland students at the march. “It really caused the nation to spring into action,” Marino says of the Parkland shooting. “For so long, tragedy after tragedy, nothing happened. Now, our generation is coming to the age where we’ll be able to vote.”

“Our voice will actually matter. Our voice does matter now,” he added. “I just don’t want my friends and my family to be scared in school.”

Danielle Johnson, a 15-year-old sophomore at Newtown High School, was helping out last night handing out t-shirts as people streamed past the sign-up table. She’s part of her school debate club, and has a big gift, like the Parkland activists, for landing eloquent, passionate quotes. “I want people to realize that kids have voices,” she told us during our Facebook Live broadcast. “Everyone in the class of 2020 and above will be voting in the next presidential election, so we do have voices and they do matter.”

“The fact we’re getting killed in our own schools is an issue,” she said. “And if America isn’t paying attention to us, we have to make them pay attention.”

Next up? The Newtown students will board buses at 5 a.m. on Saturday. Mother Jones will be on hand throughout to document their trip to D.C. and their participation in the march. Stay tuned.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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