By: Miriam Barcenas
Trinity Times Correspondent

Nearly 200 battery-lit candles illuminated O’Connor Auditorium on Valentine’s Day 2023, but instead of expressing messages of love, the Trinity Washington University assembly issued declarations of grief and cries to enact laws to curb gun violence.

The gathering was called to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, but the calls for action came on the heels of another mass shooting, this one at Michigan State University Feb. 13, 2023.

“To address this violence, we must come together as one,” said Selina Mathis, a Trinity student and a leader at the T.R.I.G.G.E.R. Project, a Washington-based anti-gun violence organization, as she addressed the crowd. “No more blood should be shed in order for a politician to know that we are in a crisis. Make them see us and let them hear us.”

Survivors of the Parkland shooting recounted their experience to the Trinity community, discussing what they witnessed when a man armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle entered the Florida school and went on a shooting spree, killing 14 students and three staff members, and wounding 17 others.

Nikolas Cruz, now 24 and a former student at that school, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted of 17 counts of first-degree murder.

“We will never be the same after experiencing what we did,” said Alaayah Eastmond, a Parkland shooting survivor who is currently a senior at Trinity. “I was an eyewitness to the death and destruction of gun violence.”

Eastmond has gone on to become a gun reform activist and is a founding member of Team ENOUGH, a youth-led organization whose mission is to educate young people about gun violence and mobilize them to take meaningful action against it.

Team ENOUGH was a sponsor of Trinity’s Feb. 14 commemoration and vigil, which included testimonials from other Parkland shooting survivors and a video message from Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Florida. At 26 he is the youngest member of Congress and a survivor of gun violence at a 2016 Halloween event in Orlando.

Frost has been a gun reform activist since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and urged Trinity students to lobby Congress to enact sensible gun laws.

Last year President Joe Biden signed into law compromise legislation on gun safety passed by Congress, but the new measure doesn’t ban any weapons.

“What would it take to ban assault rifles?” another Parkland survivor, Ivy Schamis, asked the Trinity crowd.

Schamis was a Parkland high school teacher who witnessed the gunman shoot two students — Helana Ramsey, 17, and Nicholas Dworet, 17 — as she taught a holocaust studies class. 

She continued asking what it would take “to enact red flag laws in every state, do extensive background checks, and raise the legal age to purchase firearms? If most Americans agree that gun violence is a big problem in the United States, why can’t we agree to pass laws to keep our citizens safe?”

There were 647 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2022 and 692 mass shootings in 2021, according to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit organization tracking gun violence cases. As of Feb. 14, there have been a total of 67 mass shootings in 2023, Gun Violence Archive records show.

Trinity President Patricia McGuire also urged students to take action, in an email sent out to the Trinity community the day after the Michigan State University mass shooting.

“We cannot stand by in abject hopelessness,” McGuire said in her email. “We need to find ways to overcome the opposition to reasonable gun control and restore a sense of safety and security for all in this nation.”

The event concluded with everyone lighting their battery-operated candle and holding a moment of silence for all victims of gun violence.

Though pro-gun lobbiests have successfully blocked assault-rifle bans and other meaningful gun-control measures, Frost told the Trinity crowd in his video that dedicated and long-term activism is the only way to ensure real gun safety measures in the future.

“I just want to encourage you all to stay in this fight,” he said. “I always think about Angela Davis’s quote, ‘I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.’ We can’t accept a country where we lose 100 lives a day to gun violence.”