By Sarah Elbeshbishi
Students at the University of Maryland created a March for Our Lives chapter to campus to advocate for gun reform through lobbying in Annapolis and increasing voter registration among students.
According to chapter president Celeste Iroha and vice president Gideon Epstein, they brought March to Our Lives to campus due to being personally affected by gun violence and realizing there was nothing like it on campus.
“I realized there was no gun violence prevention advocacy group or student group dedicated to the cause and that’s how I got interested in it,” Epstein, a senior government and politics major, said. “And I reached out to a couple other students I knew to have also been affected by gun violence.”
March of Our Lives formed after the Parkland Shooting in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed and 14 were injured after a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The advocacy group held a march roughly a month after the shooting, calling politicians to address the issue of gun violence in schools, according to CNN. The march was organized by the survivors of the Parkland Shooting.
The group’s mission is “to harness the power of young people across the country to fight for sensible gun violence prevention policies that save lives,” its website states.
Ben Curtis, a sophomore journalism major, got immediately involved with the chapter. Curtis, who went to high school close to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, originally became interested in gun control advocacy after the Parkland shooting.
“It was a wake up call for a lot of us,” Curtis said. “We hear about a shooting in this town, you go, ‘Oh, my God, that’s so terrible’ and then you maybe spend a day thinking about it and then you move on. But here we are a year and a half later and still with all of us.”
While the chapter formed during the spring semester, it didn’t officially start until this semester. “We just decided that we’d wait till the fall to get more students involved,” Iroha said.
Previous to starting UMD’s chapter, Iroha was a part of March for Our Lives Washington D.C, where the Regional Director told her how to start a chapter.
“After losing so many of my family and my friends to gun violence I felt like we needed to do something as a university,” Iroha said.
While there are several chapters around UMD, like March for Our Lives Washington and Maryland it was important that there was a chapter specifically for the campus because of the advantage of better reaching students on a local scale than a national one, Epstein said.
“When we have campus chapters and local chapters exist, like they exist all over the state, we really can do a better job of organizing, which I think is it’s difficult to do when you’re outside of large scale,” Epstein said. “The national chapter and state chapters aren’t really able to reach students so easily.”
Along with gun reform advocacy, the chapter also aims to be a safe place for students personally affected by gun violence or just those wanting to make a difference.
“I’ve been personally affected by gun violence through people close to me in my life and I wanted to take action because I found that very cathartic,” Epstein said. “And I think similarly there are other students on campus who need the same relief.”