East HS Student Tells Stories Of 1,200 Children Killed By Guns

DENVER, CO – By Tina Griego for The Colorado Independent. A year ago last week, a former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student in Parkland, Fla., entered the school and gunned down 14 students and three adults. Not long afterward, The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom focused on guns and gun violence, began working with teen journalists to tell the stories of the lives of every young person killed by guns in the year after Parkland.

The toll: 1,200 children and young people. More than 80 were infants or toddlers.

The teen journalists wrote of a 3-year-old from New Mexico shot by his father during a custody dispute. They wrote of a 17-year-old shot while apparently fleeing another car on Colfax Avenue in Denver. They wrote of an 11-year-old shot while hunting in Alabama. The collection of these 100-word profiles, the heart of a project called ”Since Parkland,” is powerful, wrenching work. The stories can be searched by state (Colorado here) and are intended to be works in progress. The Trace, the Miami Herald, and McClatchy Newspapers built on the student journalists’ work, examining patterns in these gun deaths.

The 1,200 killed do not include youth suicides, which are harder to track. The project’s editors estimate that had they been included, the number would swell by another 900 to 1,000 young people.

Among the student journalists participating in “Since Parkland” was East High School’s Allie Kelly. Kelly, a senior, is the editor of the school’s magazine, the Spotlight. As a writer and assistant project editor, she also brought into the project six of the school’s magazine staff: Audrey Abel, Maddy Levin, Javier Boersma, Yoni Manor, Anna Bock and Ethan Hale.

In an intro to “Since Parkland,” which Kelly helped write, the teen journalists say that the project was necessary “because it speaks for those who can no longer speak for themselves …

“Children are dying. They should get to grow up. Training wheels, skinned knees. Middle school, graduation. First love, heartbreaks, faces, experiences, aspirations, even mistakes are what comprise the lives we lose every day. In telling their stories, we want to overwhelm you. We want you to feel that every child’s gun death is unacceptable.”

READ MORE at The Colorado Independent

A demonstration, organized by Teens For Gun Reform, an organization created by students in the Washington DC area, in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. (Photo by Lorie Shaull)