On June 1, I sat at school scanning Facebook for posts from my friends at UCLA letting their followers know that they were safe. Many posts advised fellow Bruins to stay indoors. Some had campus police department lines listed. After reading all the posts I could manage, I leaned back in my chair in my high school classroom in Marin County. Everyone I knew at UCLA was safe and accounted for after the shooting in a campus building. But that wasn’t much of a relief. People were murdered. A community was terrorized. The people sitting around me didn’t even know what had just occurred.
The normalcy of gun violence in America is unparalleled. When mass shootings are near weekly occurrences and the only response is Facebook posts, it isn’t difficult to grow frustrated. However, on that day, I was done being passive. I was done sitting at school reading article after article, waiting for someone to stand up and take action.
The next morning I woke up and got dressed for my last day of school. Instead of staying until the noon dismissal, I left early to join with hundreds of others for a march across the Golden Gate Bridge organized by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense In America. There were marchers from Rabbis Against Gun Violence, Brady Campaign, Organizing for Action — and regular Bay Area residents outraged by the epidemic of gun violence in our country. Instead of saying goodbye to my friends for the summer, I helped a mother say goodbye to her daughter who was killed in a shooting just a few months earlier.
I went on the march because I felt I had to do something. I left the march knowing that the movement to end gun violence is so much bigger than me. I was reinvigorated and ready to keep fighting. Being on the march reaffirmed my belief that gun violence prevention is not a political issue, but a humanitarian one.
I am privileged to go to a school that did not have to close its doors this past year due to the threat of a shooter. I am privileged to live in a neighborhood where gun violence is hardly routine. I am privileged to be able to count the number of people I know who have died from guns on one hand. With every mass shooting, that privilege becomes less accessible to many Americans. Knowing that after every shooting and every gun scare politicians will take to the media to advance their political agendas is almost as terrifying as the silence that is beginning to replace this phenomenon.
I remember the first shooting that really had an impact on me as a young adult. In December 2012, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting took place. I was 13 years old, and “gun violence” suddenly became part of my vocabulary. It was all I could talk about for days. The idea that such a thing could happen to children not much younger than me was shocking.
Luckily, I have had opportunities in my life that have pushed me to make a difference. I recently was elected social action vice president of the Central West Region of the North American Federation of Temple Youth; I am in charge of social action for NFTY in Northern California, Hawaii and western Nevada. Through this opportunity, I have had the privilege of working with Rabbi Joel Mosbacher and Do Not Stand Idly By to push for using smart guns (which allow only a single authorized user to fire them) over traditional firearms in government agencies. Working with inspiring teens from around the country, marching side-by-side with victims of gun violence, and hearing from the leaders of the gun violence prevention movement has reminded me why it is so essential to keep working on this issue.
I am tired of how we politicize gun violence. I am disturbed by the air of normalcy we have around shootings. And I am ashamed to be a citizen of a country where 90 people a day are killed by guns. I do not know what lies in the future of gun violence prevention in America, but I pray that my children will not have to grow up reading the same news stories that I have been reading for the past three years of my life.
Adam Friedman is a junior at Marin Academy in San Rafael. He is the social action vice president for NFTY’s Central West Region. Adam is a lifelong member of Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael.