Kentucky Students Explain Why They Walked Out of Class Over Gun Control

I honestly don’t see why student walkouts are permitted so often. The rules for free speech in school are that you can engage in it, as long as it doesn’t disrupt the educational experience. That seems a perfectly reasonable line.

However, when students stage walkouts over gun control, administrations do nothing despite the fact that a walkout is pretty damn disruptive.

I wouldn’t mind were it not for the fact that we’ve seen students punished for pro-gun speech that didn’t even take place at school time and time again, so the double standard just makes me angry.

In Kentucky, there was a group of students who walked out a couple of weeks ago to call for gun control, and they’ve taken to the op-ed page to explain why.

On Sept. 5 at 12:45 p.m., hundreds of duPont Manual High School students rushed out of the front doors of the school building, over an hour before their usual dismissal time.

We organized a walkout at our school on Sept. 5 as part of a national event arranged by Students Demand Action (SDA) in response to the Minneapolis shooting in August. Chanting, holding signs and observing moments of silence, it was obvious that every participant had felt the impact of gun violence, or the fear of it, in some way. Now was their chance to show how they felt about it: disappointed in lawmakers for not taking action to protect their lives, confused about why laws advocating for their safety continue to fail and mournful for the victims they know.  

The pain that the families and communities affected by these senseless acts of violence are facing is unimaginable. However, it isn’t individual. Since the beginning of the calendar year, there have been at least 58 shootings at K-12 schools, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.

In JCPS, the fear of facing deadly weapons is a regular concern

Although the most high-profile shootings have occurred in other states, Kentucky schools haven’t been exempt from the threat of gun violence. In our district, Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS), the fear of facing deadly weapons is a regular concern.

In 2023, a fake call to the Louisville Metro Police Department claimed that there was an active shooter on our school’s second floor, prompting the deployment of an armed SWAT team to our campus. For many of us, it was our first time following lockdown procedure outside of a drill. Doors were barricaded, parents were texted and students quietly crowded together in classroom corners for nearly an hour. 

It should be remembered, though, that there was no actual threat in the school. They were locked down as a precaution, and Jefferson County Public Schools is the school system for Louisville, one of the most anti-gun cities in the state of Kentucky.

I get that these kids are worried about their safety. They’re bombarded with reports of school shootings, including the Everytown numbers. Never mind that one of those is a case I wrote about where a school resource officer’s Sig P320 discharged in her holster. No, that’s totally the same thing as a school shooting. Others include suicides on college campuses.

They’re constantly told that these are real, that these are a threat, all while ignoring that no law would stop most of these, especially as most school campuses are gun-free zones.

So yeah, they’re worried, and worried people push for laws all the time.

However, let’s also remember that, like the walkout in Savannah I talked about last week, this was scheduled for the end of the day on a Friday. While this doesn’t invalidate what these students feel, it’s telling that they chose a time when many might join in despite having absolutely no feelings on the subject at all, or even opposing their positions outright, just to have an excuse to start the weekend off a little early.

They’re not walking out at 9:30 on a Monday morning. They’re doing it at a time when it’ll gin up as much interest as possible, all irrelevant of the politics involved.

It’s not stupid. Don’t get me wrong. Tactically, it’s a smart move. It makes it look like there’s more support than there actually is.

But what these kids need to understand is that those who represent a problem for them aren’t people who are going to respect gun control laws. The Everytown list of shootings actually proves that, because many of these shootings that aren’t officers with unintentional discharges or suicides are kids who had guns in violation of existing laws and had them at school in violation of existing laws.

If existing laws aren’t going to stop these kids, what laws will?

What we need is to get a handle on why these people are so violent in the first place; why they want to kill so badly.

Maybe a walkout in support of that would be a nice change of pace, even if it is disruptive to the school day.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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