19 Years After Columbine, Students Again Say ‘Enough’ on Gun Violence

At a walkout and rally in Washington Square Park on Friday, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting, students called for an end to gun violence. Credit Holly Pickett for The New York Times

nytimes.com - by Sarah Maslin Nir - April 20, 2018

Most of them were not yet born when students shot a dozen people to death inside Columbine High School in Colorado, an atrocity that sparked a national debate over guns exactly 19 years ago.

But on Friday, on the anniversary of the April 20, 1999, shooting, the several thousand high school students who walked out of schools across the city and beyond to rally against guns in Manhattan said they felt they lived in a world of near-constant Columbines.

The teenagers spoke angrily of active shooter drills since kindergarten, of backpack and locker searches, of mock lockdowns sitting in silence in classrooms with the lights turned out, as they gathered in protest in Washington Square Park. And they spoke of the numbing barrage of school shootings in America — by some counts more than 200 in the past two decades.

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