The school shooting in Parkland, Fla., happened more than 600 miles away, but for Kara Litwin, the distance disappeared as she thought of her friends at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Kara, an 18-year-old senior at Cobb County’s Pope High School, is among the young local activists leading the crusade for tighter gun controls. She helped organize a March 14 student walkout at Pope, despite pushback and punishment from the school district.
In the days after the Feb. 14 massacre, Kara felt compelled to speak out.
“It just hit too close to home, and honestly I felt a little sad that it took something that hit this close to home for me to actually do something,” she said.
She grew up in Cobb County and spent summers at Georgia’s Camp Coleman, where several students who attend the Florida high school where a gunman killed 17 people also are campers.
Their friendships began during a 2016 trip to Israel and grew stronger when they spent weeks together last summer at the sleepaway camp.
Alyssa Alhadeff, a 14-year-old student killed in the attack, attended the same camp, though Kara didn't know her personally.
Before the Parkland shooting, Kara said she had always followed the news. She volunteered for Democrat Jon Ossoff's congressional campaign and has done social justice work with her temple youth group.
But she had never taken the kind of prominent activist role that led to her to stand outside her high school with a handful of other walkout organizers and hold a news conference to protest how Cobb County School District was handling the student demonstration.
Kara, joined by fellow Pope students, spoke eloquently and passionately in front of a bank of television cameras and reporters. The next day, she estimates nearly 150 Pope students walked out of school as part of a nationwide protest against gun violence.
She and others were disciplined with a one-day in-school suspension.
Kara also addressed her concerns during a school board meeting and joined thousands of protesters who flocked downtown for the Atlanta March for Our Lives.
She and her classmates learned about civil disobedience and how such movements work in school.
“Younger generations now aren’t afraid. We aren’t afraid to do what we have to do, to let our voices be heard, to do what we have to do to spark change,” she said. “Our generation is much more progressive.”
Kara intends to stay involved in gun-control activism at the University of Georgia, where she plans to study psychology with an emphasis on neuroscience.
She would like to see stronger background checks for all firearm purchases, required training for gun buyers, and a law that raises the minimum age to purchase guns.
“I don’t think it’s fair that a bunch of these people have committed these crimes are people who have legally purchased the weapons,” she said.
She also thinks that government and law enforcement organizations need to do a better job of sharing information, such as numerous times people had reported concerns about the alleged Florida shooter, Nikolas Cruz.
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