Around 35 students participated in a walk-out event at Grays Harbor College on March 7 to stand in solidarity with victims of gun violence, as well as the 17 who were killed in last month’s shooting in Florida.
After convening in the college’s upper quad Wednesday morning, participants (who included a few non-students) held a seven-minute period of silence, the same length shooter Nikolas Cruz was inside Florida’s Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14.
The event’s organizer, Tyson Owen, who is a 16-year-old Running Start student at the college from North Beach High School, then addressed the crowd. His main goal for the walk-out, he said, is not to politicize the event or make it about gun control, but rather to focus it on standing with the victims and realizing that something needs to change.
“I don’t care what gets done, if it’s gun reform, or whatever else,” said Owen. “As long as something gets done to fix this problem — it gets better. This can’t be something that happens every six months and then it goes away. We need something to prevent this or make it less easy, because it happens all the time.”
Only a couple people showed up with signs protesting school shootings. One read, “Why does the right to bear arms matter more than my education w/o fear?”
Owen also made sure to emphasize that the event was also a way to protest U.S. gun violence in general, and not just school mass shootings.
“We don’t always have events like Stoneman Douglas, we have gun threats, bomb threats and violence threats in schools all across America, and no one does anything about it,” he said. “We need to be the voice that things get better.”
Students at the college are allowed two days of excused absences each year for “reasons of faith or conscience or for organized activities conducted under the auspices of a religious denomination, church or religious organization,” according to an absence request form at the college.
Lance James, safety and security coordinator for the college, then spoke to the crowd about what security policies have been implemented over the years to protect against shootings. Following the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon several years ago, James said the college began focusing more on improving the school’s security.
“Umpqua is very similar in size to Grays Harbor College, and that (shooting) got a lot of attention from our executive team, our president, and we started talking about what we can do,” said James.
If needed, James said he has an app on his phone, as well as panels throughout school offices, that can be used to lock some of the school’s main doors.
“In the event of an active shooter, we can hit one button, and it locks all the external doors on that system,” he said.
Additional measures include magnetic strips on some classroom doors, which James said can be ripped off if a shooter is in the building to secure the doors. He added that the college is partnering with Homeland Security to run an active shooter drill with local law enforcement and from five other counties on campus April 28, which is a Saturday. James said he appreciated the students’ speaking out on the issue.
“I applaud all of you for taking a stand and getting involved.”
