Johnson: And what was her story?

Clements: She was a second-grade teacher. When she first heard the shots from the hallway, she thought it was folding chairs falling. She walked into the hallway to check it out, and the janitor actually was sprinting by. That’s when she knew, when it clicked with her. She immediately closed the door, and told her students to hide up against the walls where their coats were hanging.

Somehow the PA system in Sandy Hook was flipped on in the main office. Everybody in the school heard every single shot. So my mom tried to read her class picture books, and sing songs to try and block out the sound. Eventually it stopped, and there was knock on her door, and they said, “It’s the police, it’s the police!” They slid their badge under the doorway, and that’s when she opened it.

Johnson: You mentioned how your feelings that day eventually turned into activism. How long did that process take?

Clements: I didn’t start doing activism until about a month later. I saw a Facebook event for a march on Washington for gun control. I had never done something like that. My dad and I went down to D.C. with a group of maybe 100 people from Newtown, and there were about 6,000 people there. That was also the first time that I met other survivors from other instances of gun violence, and saw that this issue was far, far bigger than just Newtown.

Johnson: And you focused specifically on youth activism.

Clements: A lot of people had different ideas of what healing looked like, and for me, it was taking action. But I felt this urgency: I was getting involved in these gun-violence-prevention groups, and [thinking], why weren’t students’ voices being lifted up? Why weren’t they being centered as the people that are most affected, disproportionately, based on gun-violence rates around the country? That’s something I recognized really early on, and advocated for. And that’s one reason why I’m just so proud of these Parkland students. I’m grateful for this moment that we’re in in terms of organizing. And I think it’s going to be a real shift in how we talk about guns.

Johnson: How have you felt in the past, each time news of mass shootings would come up?

Clements: When shootings happen, my biggest emotion is just anger and rage that this keeps happening. A lot of people ask, “Do you go back to that day?” I don’t think I do, and my mom says that she doesn’t either, necessarily. How can another community be facing what my family had to face, what my community had to face? That feeling is so overwhelming and so suffocating, especially when you’ve been fighting for change for so long. The biggest reason I do this work is so that eventually, no family, no community has to face this terrible tragedy of gun violence. And when it keeps happening over and over again, it’s extremely difficult to work through that rage, and to work through that impatience with the situation that we’re in.