Written for The Argo by Jared Keane

On Wednesday, April 5, Stockton students gathered outside the Campus Center with signs and a mission: to spread awareness and end gun violence across the nation.

“I’m just tired of hearing in the news about school shootings because it’s been happening for so long. We need those who represent us to take action,” said Irenonsen Eigbe, one of the protesters and an organizer of the event. 

The four members of the protest passionately voiced their concerns about the ever-growing fatalities due to gun violence, as it relates to schools and mass shootings in general. 

There was an unusually-limited number of students both attending and observing the event. As a result, the four participants talked amongst themselves about the rise in firearm-related violence in the U.S. and their hope that other schools across the nation could participate in walkouts of their own.

According to the Washington Post, there have been 377 school shootings since 1999, directly affecting 349,000 individuals. The students present at the protest offered a variety of solutions, all of which centered around increased awareness. They believe that if the public remains ignorant about how serious mass shootings are in the U.S., change will be even harder to implement.