On Thursday, in his statement on the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, President Trump assured America’s children that we “are never alone.” As a 17-year-old and a senior at West High School in Salt Lake City, I found this strained attempt at consolation empty and infuriating.

I was born in April 2000, a week shy of the Columbine massacre’s one-year anniversary, the event that marked the beginning of the modern school shooting epidemic. By the time I started kindergarten, there had been five more fatal school shootings in elementary, middle, or high schools.

As I near the end of my senior year, the number has swelled to 32 since 1998, not including suicides or gang-related violence. School shootings are etched into the timeline of my education as clearly as talent shows and picture days.

President Trump’s statement is meaningless. We have been alone for 20 years.

When Congress failed to pass gun reform after Sandy Hook, it was baffling. If 20 dead first-graders were not a call to action, then a call to action would never come. But that does not mean we’re stuck.

In 2016, the Associated Press found that only 15 percent of Americans believed gun policy should be a top-five political priority of that year. Though 92 percent of Americans support universal background checks, gun reform was a less significant issue to voters than terrorism and the economy.

But I can feel this changing. For older voters, gun violence may not feel so dire, so personal. But for those of us in school, there is nothing more personal. I was in seventh grade when Sandy Hook happened. I saw a school that looked like mine, with kids that looked like me, suddenly turned into a war zone. I spent the weekend after Sandy Hook terrified to return to school. When I did return, I was anxious whenever I was on my school’s first floor, reasoning that the second was safer.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the layout of my sister’s elementary school, worrying that her classroom was too close to the school’s entrance. I eyed closets and windows in my own classrooms, imagining where I would hide were a shooting to happen.

The teachers led drills, telling us to crouch beneath our desks. One sketched a diagram on the whiteboard to show us how to turn our desks into a barricade if the day came. “Lockdown” drills were routine.

My experiences are not unique. In American schools, the fear of gun violence always looms. Last week, even before Parkland, a car backfired outside my school, interrupting class with a sharp pop-pop-pop; adrenaline shot through my veins as I grabbed a friend in panic. All 32 pairs of eyes in the class widened as our teacher rushed to the window to confirm it was only a car.

For the students in Parkland, the ever-present fear turned into reality — and heightened worries in other schools. My friends whisper about who they fear would attempt something similar. They discuss how hard it would be to escape were an attack to happen on the lawn where we eat lunch.

But the terror felt by the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has been matched by their outrage and their desire to tell their stories. A student journalist interviewed his classmates as they crowded into the dark closet of their culinary classroom — one interviewee expressed as much disbelief over our country’s resignation to school shootings as she did over the shooting happening outside the door. With remarkable poise, she said: “This shouldn’t be happening anymore … no amount of money should make guns more easily accessible.”

Many of her classmates seem to feel the same way. In the same video, another student says she had wanted to be a junior member of the National Rifle Association and was planning to celebrate her 18th birthday at the shooting range, until this experience. Now, she “couldn’t even fathom the idea of a gun in her house or on her body.” On Twitter, Marjory Stoneman Douglas student Carly Novell rebuked conservative pundit Tomi Lahren’s charge that the left’s calls for reform were insensitive, writing, “I was hiding in a closet for 2 hours. You weren’t there, you don’t know how it felt. ... This IS about guns and it’s about all the people who have had their lives abruptly ended because of guns.”

At a candlelight vigil Thursday night, the entire crowd chanted, “No more guns.” At a Fort Lauderdale anti-gun rally, Parkland survivor Emma Gonzalez called “BS” on common objections to gun control — and video of her, too, went viral. Now, across the country, students are planning to stage walkouts in protest of gun violence on March 14 and April 20. On March 24, the survivors of the Florida shooting are holding a “March for Our Lives” in Washington, while others march across the nation.

Maybe the NRA and its supporters will dismiss our outrage as the “emotional” reaction of people too young to recognize the complexity of the gun debate. But young students feel a kinship with those at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. In one of the gruesome videos circulating on Twitter, I see a pair of Hunter rain boots on a gunned-down body, the same boots I see my little sister wear to school. I see a classroom that looks like one where I go each day, and I see students grieving friends who just as well could have been mine.

Before, students did not see this. The nightly news did not show the gore now splashed across Twitter. The newspapers did not provide the students’ unfiltered accounts of their trauma or their cries for change. But now we see each other, and we hear each other.

In two months I will turn 18, and in November I will vote in my first election. So will many of the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and those watching across the country. I will make sure that every candidate I support is fighting for commonsense gun regulations. I will do my best to make sure that my vote prevents my children needing to learn how to use their desks to stop bullets. And as the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas have courageously shown, I will not be alone in this fight.

The NRA and its supporters in Washington pushed away every commonsense regulation that would protect our schools, but they pushed too far. Now an entire generation is pushing back.

Elizabeth Love is a senior at West High School in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her writing has been featured in the Huffington Post and the Salt Lake Tribune. Find her on Twitter @lizlove000.

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