Ella Seaver was 7 years old when she survived the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman wielding an AR-style rifle killed 20 children and six adults. She’s now 19 – voting age -- as the Washington Post reports. In the years since Sandy Hook, there have been a lot more kids like Seaver. More than 383,000 students have experienced gun violence at their schools since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, according to a Washington Post analysis. “Every time I see a school shooting, my first and second thought is: ‘Now there are more kids like me,” Seaver said.
According to a Pew Research poll from July, 61 percent of Americans believe it’s too easy to legally obtain a gun; the poll found that nearly the same share, 58 percent, want stricter gun laws. “The country is so caught up in seeing guns as this political debate, when this isn’t a political problem — it’s a human problem,” Seaver said. The issue has become so politically polarized that seeing eye to eye “doesn’t even look like an option.” For the majority of their lives, the Sandy Hook survivors told the Post, they had grown up with the frustrating reality that little around gun control has changed, even as the death toll from gun violence, particularly among children, rises apace. They are gearing up to become leaders in the next generation of gun violence prevention efforts. First up: voting in their first-ever presidential election. Energized over casting their first presidential ballots, the students are supporting Harris in November; several of those who spoke to The Post met Harris earlier this year, before she became the Democratic nominee, to discuss their experiences. And while their political views are hardly monolithic, they agree that a goal of the next iteration of the gun-control movement should be to extricate what they define as a safety issue from the realm of partisan politics.
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