ITHACA, N.Y. — “I remember for a very long time that I was a bystander. I was uneducated, I was uninterested, and more than anything, I was numb. And that’s not an attitude to have because, worst-case scenario, you get shot. And that’s the truth, is that if you don’t do something, no one else is going to, and if you don’t stand up for yourself, you’re going to get stood on,” Samantha Fuentes, a gun control advocate and survivor of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, said at Cornell University this weekend.
On Saturday, Sept. 28, gun control advocates David Hogg and Samantha Fuentes gave an hour-long talk at Cornell, hosted by the Cornell Public Service Center and the Kaplan Family. They encouraged youth to become more engaged and empowered in fighting gun violence in the United States. Hogg and Fuentes were among the survivors of the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 people dead and 17 more injured.
Fuentes was one of the students injured during the shooting when a bullet pierced her thigh and shrapnel lodged in her face and legs. Surviving a school shooting made her an “accidental activist,” she said.
“February 14th, 2018, was a day that changed my life forever. I was traumatized to the point where I relive this moment, this account every single day. There isn’t a day that I don’t think about that moment. The moment when a gunman opened fire into my classroom, shooting me in the legs, riddling me with shrapnel, having to watch people that I’ve known for years pass away in front of me. Having to wait the agonizing amount of pain and time to heal to better understand myself and who I would be again. That’s unfortunately how I became a gun violence prevention activist,” Fuentes said.
Hogg said he first heard a “pop” sound outside his AP Environmental Science classroom moments before the fire alarm went off. Then, Hogg said he heard a “stampede of footsteps” and some students shouting warnings of an active shooter on campus. After finding a classroom to hide in, Hogg said he received a call from his younger sister who he said was crying after she saw videos students had posted of the shooting on Snapchat.
“My sister saw that and knew that many of her friends were in that building, and I didn’t know how to respond to that. How do you respond to that?” Hogg said.
After talking with his sister, Hogg said he took out the camera on his phone to interview his classmates. He said he wanted to gauge their opinions on the NRA and the current state of gun violence in the U.S. so that their pleas for change would still be heard even if they were shot.
“If the classroom that we were in did end up getting shot up, we would have it on video so that if we did die, even though our bodies may have been left behind in that classroom, hopefully our voices would echo on and create some kind of change in a country that clearly needs it. And in a way where people wouldn’t be able to say that you’re politicizing tragedy if the people that died in that shooting said you need to do something about this.”
Afterward, Hogg said he returned home and reunited with his sister a few hours after leaving school. “I will never forget the unconscionable cries that I heard coming from my sister. The cries of not knowing at such a young age, being 14 years old, knowing that some of your friends are likely no longer here, but not knowing which because their names have not been released by the police yet. My sister crying made me so uncomfortable that it really made me feel an absolute urge and necessity to go out there and speak,” he said.
Following the shooting, Hogg and Fuentes said they both shared their stories with the media. However, Fuentes said some reporters manipulated her story to fit their own narrative instead of honestly reporting on gun violence.
“I hoped and I prayed that if I told just the right person, that would create just the right amount of change,” Fuentes said. “And what I learned was that the media, our society and the audience that I attracted was much more interested in manipulating my story and using it for their own agenda and their own narrative.”
Fuentes noted that mass shootings make up a small percentage of gun deaths in the United States, yet they usually receive greater news coverage than other types of gun deaths. According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, of all the U.S. gun deaths in 2017, about 60% were suicides and 37% were homicides.
Fuentes said survivors of gun violence should spearhead the education and leadership around the issue to help promote a more accurate depiction of gun violence.
“It’s about representation. It’s about accurately telling the stories of the people who are most impacted by gun violence as opposed to the small percentage that we like to talk about … My story of survival will not represent the stories of America. It will only represent my story and my story alone… And not that my story isn’t important, but many times these mass shootings undermine the other forms of gun violence in our country,” Fuentes said.
Since Feb. 14, 2018, youth have been at the forefront advocating for stricter gun control legislation. Hogg discussed several initiatives taken by him and other students from Stoneman Douglas that have encouraged youth action on gun control. Most notably, the March 2018 demonstration March for Our Lives, which Hogg said was organized on his friend’s living room floor. Hogg said they were hoping to get about 90 people protesting in Washington, D.C., and instead the demonstration saw between 200,000 and 800,000 protesters in Washington, along with 800 marches around the country.
• Related: ‘March for Our Lives’ brings Ithaca students, community together to rally for gun control
Along with March for Our Lives, the Parkland students went on a national Road To Change tour, registering young people to vote. According to MFOL’s website, they visited over 80 communities in 24 states over the course of two months, and have registered more than 50,000 people to vote. Their website also notes that the 2018 midterm elections saw a historic youth turnout, with a 47% increase from the last midterm election and the highest percentage youth turnout in American history.
“We focused as well on having a youth vote because we knew it wasn’t Democrats or Republicans that could solve this issue, it would have to be Americans. Because we knew that the people that are affected by gun violence are not Democrats, they are not Republicans, they are Americans, because we do not live in the Democratic States of America or the Republican States of America — we live in the United States of America,” Hogg said.
Hogg and Fuentes answered several questions submitted by audience members. One person asked how they stay physically and mentally healthy while “fighting the good fight.” Fuentes said she personally had to learn when to take a break from her activism to focus on her health.
On the subject of mental health, Hogg added that people have associated white nationalism with mental illness, which he said worsens the major stigmatization of mental illness in the United States.
“The shooter at our school literally had anti-semitic, KKK propaganda on their phone, but they only regard them as mentally ill,” Hogg said. “That’s not mentally ill to me, because hate is not a mental illness. Racism is not a mental illness. Patriarchy and toxic masculinity are not mental illnesses. They are things we have to address as a society as systemic problems that we face, that cannot just be written off as pure mental health issues.”
Going forward, Fuentes and Hogg are optimistic about their goal in empowering youth to take action against gun violence.
“Realize that what already makes us powerful and what should define us as Americans is not how much we fear things. It shouldn’t be how much we fear immigrants coming in and it shouldn’t be how much we fear living through instances of gun violence. It should be the amount of courage that we have to address the problems that we don’t know and that we do fear. Because that is the only time in American history that we do learn to progress. When we looked up at the moon in the 1960s, we didn’t say, ‘Oh well, it’s too bad politics is too corrupt and we can’t do anything about it.’ We f*cking went to the moon … I think if we can get to the moon in the 1960s, we can probably get people to stop shooting each other, too.”
Featured image: From left, Samantha Fuentes and David Hogg speak at Cornell University on Saturday. (Photo courtesy of Dave Burbank Photography)