INDIANAPOLIS (Statehouse File) — A blistering wind chill did little to dissuade dozens of Indiana students, teachers and others from rallying at the Statehouse Saturday, demanding an immediate response to gun violence from their lawmakers.
The event, organized by We LIVE (Linked to Intercept Violence Everywhere) Inc., a student-led anti-violence group based out of Indianapolis, was the second of its kind. The inaugural event in 2018 resulted from a school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the national March for Our Lives Movement.
Advocates — the majority of them young people — gathered on the steps of the west side of the Statehouse from noon until 2 p.m., where they exchanged personal experiences with gun violence, activism and what they see as inactive state and federal governments.
Destiny Hatcher, 18, is a student at Warren Central High School and serves as executive director of We LIVE Inc. In that role, she helped organize Saturday's event alongside founding member Brandon Warren.
Warren started We LIVE Inc. after a Warren Central classmate died from the ongoing gun violence in his community. At the rally, he and Hatcher, alongside a lineup of guest speakers, noted the importance of addressing day-to-day violence among youth, not just school shootings.
"There are teens killing teens on the far-east side of Indianapolis where I reside," Hatcher said. "Families are being affected. They need that awareness and they need that support."
A central theme to the rally, however, did concern school shootings. A score of students indirectly or directly affected by the shooting at Noblesville West Middle School last year, in which a 13-year-old student shot his science teacher and a classmate, also voiced their demands for added restrictions on firearms.
Nolan Weaver, 15, took to the stage to describe his experience on the day of the shooting. He was in the eighth grade at the time.
Weaver played a recording of the automated phone call parents received from the school district that day, a time in which the teen thought he would never see his family again. His mother, he said, made multiple attempts to call him amidst the chaos, each unsure of what had happened.
“I couldn’t hear her,” Weaver said, “because there were so many students crying on the school bus.”
In a separate speech to the crowd, Ball State University student Olivia Carlstedt spoke about the fear she had for her two siblings. On the day of the shooting, Carlstedt was a student at Noblesville High School. Her brother Gus, then in the 6th grade, and her sister Lucy, then in an 8th-grade class for special needs students, both sat through the confusion and panic of their community while their schools went on lockdown.
“To be put in the circumstance that my brother and sister were put into is unacceptable,” Carlstedt said. “On that day, I had never been more scared in my life.”
Carlstedt, alongside fellow Noblesville alumna and BSU student Katie Maudlin, founded their university’s first Students Demand Action chapter, a part of Michael Bloomberg's national Everytown for Gun Safety movement. They are studying to become high school teachers and see their activism as critical to their future careers in education.
They, with other advocates in the state, hope to see policymakers expand background checks to prevent firearms from falling into the hands of potentially violent people.
Democrats in both chambers of Indiana’s legislature presented bills this session to enact universal background checks for any person who decides to purchase a firearm. However, neither proposal—Senate Bill 468 and House Bill 1291—received a committee hearing.
At the national level, members of Congress are considering the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019. The measure would require universal background checks nationwide. While it passed out of the House of Representatives, a majority-Democrat chamber, the bill will face greater obstacles in the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate.
Ultimately, the protestors said, these decisions gamble with their lives.
"This fight isn't one between Democrats and Republicans, blue versus red,” said Isabella Fallahi, a 15-year-old student from Carmel High School. “This is between money and life.”
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