Gun Control Film Wins Award For 2 Montgomery County Middle-Schoolers

TAKOMA PARK, MD — Two Montgomery County middle-schoolers recently won second place in the middle school category of C-Span's Student Cam 2017 video documentary competition for their examination of gun control. This year, students made documentaries to answer the question, "Your message to Washington: What is the most urgent issue for the new president and Congress to address in 2017?"

Dhruv Pai, a seventh-grader at Takoma Park Middle School, collaborated with Priya Moorjani from Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring to create their winning documentary. Pai and Moorjani decided to address gun control in their documentary.

"The war on guns divides our nation and was one of the biggest issues in the 2016 presidential campaign, and still is now," Pai said in the documentary.

Since 2006, C-SPAN has partnered with local cable affiliates in communities across the country to invite middle school and high school students to produce short documentaries on an issue of national importance.

"With the new president and Congress in office, we wanted to hear from students about public policy issues they would like addressed in 2017," Craig McAndrew, C-SPAN's Manager of Education Relations said. "StudentCam offers young people the opportunity to connect with lawmakers and experts and provides them with a platform to voice their opinions creatively."

Students invest weeks or months in planning, researching, filming and editing their documentaries.

Pai and Moorjani's prizewinning documentary is titled, "The War on Guns." The two middle-schoolers talked to multiple experts with contrasting views on guns, and asked them why they feel that way. They also examined Maryland gun laws compared to the laws across the U.S.

"We have among the most permissive and loose gun laws on earth," Congressman Jamie Raskin told the students. "We have more firearms in America than we have people."

In their seven-minute video, the middle-schoolers interviewed Raskin, who represents the 8th District of Maryland; Aruna Miller from Maryland Delegate District 15; Kathleen Dumais from Maryland Delegate District 15; Peter Davidov, a lieutenant in the Montgomery County Police Department; Ned McFadden, a media productions teacher at Eastern Middle School; and Dr. Michael Frew, veteran and staff radiologist at Walter Reed Military Medical Center.

Davidov told the students that there's "a need to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them, whether it be due to mental illness or criminal activity."

Raskin said states need to get rid of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Frew countered this, saying, "the quote 'military-style assault rifle, which that is, it's a name, and it doesn't really address how the gun performs. I think the ban on military-assault style weapons misses the point."

C-Span received 2,903 film entries from over 5,600 students, which is the most entries they've received in the 13 years of the competition. Entries came from 46 states, and countries across the world, including England, Germany, Taiwan and Singapore.

The network then chose 150 student prize winning documentaries, and 53 teacher prizes, totaling $100,000 in cash prizes. C-SPAN will air each of the second prize, first prize and grand prize winning documenters at 6:50 a.m. ET during the month of April.

You can watch Pai and Moorjani's documentary here. C-SPAN will air the video on Wednesday, April 5.

Photo: Screen Grab from documentary