Hundreds of students walk out, rally in Seattle against gun violence

Students across the nation — including in the Puget Sound region — walked out of school to mark 19 year since the deadly Columbine High School shooting. Many of them attended a rally at Seattle’s Occidental Park on Friday afternoon.

One Garfield High School student says she was at the “We Won’t Be Next Seattle” rally to learn more.

“I know that as a teen it’s really stressful because people won’t listen to you because they believe you don’t have the information that they want from you,” she said. “And I would like to come down here and prove them wrong.”

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Aidan, a gun owner, was also at the rally. He wants people to know there are people on the other side of the other argument aren’t “heartless and cold-blooded and don’t care about dead kids.”

“I think the media has portrayed everything in a very unfair light,” said Aiden. “I think that they’re just not giving us a voice to speak our opinion and I feel like a lot of times when they they put someone up that’s frankly not a very good representative of the rest of us.”

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Niko Battle, a junior at Kamiak High School in Mukilteo, and Alicia Heia, a senior at Ingraham High School in Seattle, worked for more than three weeks organizing the rally.

“Research has shown that violence can affect how students perform in school,” Battle told KIRO 7, “and how they live the rest of their lives.”

Both Battle and Heia were connected through the Alliance for Gun Responsibility. They both participated in last month’s “March for Our Lives” against school shootings.

But they’ve seen how violence outside school impacts students and they want to give those students a voice.

On March 28, two girls, ages 13 and 19, were killed during a shooting at a Burien apartment complex parking lot.

“I myself hear about this and feel very sad,” Heia said. “But some people hear a gunshot on their street go off at night. And that’s something they deal with daily.”

“And it’s that type of fear that students in our community live with day in and day out,” Battle said. “And it’s that type of fear that us students are trying to address with the event on Friday.”

The two say the entire community is the audience and that this is a moment in a movement.

“Our goal is to create passion in the youth and students of Seattle,” Heia said, “and to encourage them to get involved at whatever level they want to.”

KIRO 7’s John Knicely contributed to this report.

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