Students and educators urge state lawmakers to pass gun safety legislation

When Iman Azeez was a senior at a Bucks County high school, she tried to spend as little time as possible inside the building because she was terrified there would be a mass shooting.

In order to get out of the space on a regular basis, the 2024 graduate participated in Council Rock High School’s dual enrollment program. That way, she could take college courses and regularly leave the high school campus she dreaded would become engulfed in violence.

Like millions of students across a country where gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and teens, Azeez grew up with active shooter drills and mounting school shootings. The idea that someone would storm into her classroom with a gun was something that felt like an inevitability for Azeez, who’s now in her freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh.

“When I was in high school, I think school shootings were something that I honestly feared on a daily basis, especially because my last name was in the beginning of the alphabet,” Azeez said at a recent forum organized by the CeaseFirePA Education Fund. “I was also in the seat that was closest near the door. So if anything were to happen, I was always like, Oh, I’m the first target. So you kind of had to come up with an escape route on the first day of school, which really shouldn’t be the first thing on your mind on the first day of school.”

The forum organized by the CeaseFirePA Education Fund, a group that works to increase awareness about gun violence in Pennsylvania, was held Sept. 18, exactly two weeks after a 14-year-old gunman shot and killed two students and two teachers at a Georgia high school. During the online event, educators, students, law enforcement, a mental health specialist, and a Democratic state lawmaker shared their experiences with gun violence and spoke of possible solutions.

Many of those who spoke advocated for limiting access to firearms and backed preventive gun violence policies, including extreme risk protection orders and safe firearm storage. Democratic lawmakers in Pennsylvania have supported both to varying degrees, while Republican legislators largely have not.

Gun violence claimed the lives of 1,941 people in Pennsylvania in 2022, the latest year for which there is data. Thousands are wounded by gun violence every year in the state.

After Democrats won a majority in the state House in 2022 for the first time in 12 years, Democratic lawmakers worked to pass numerous gun safety bills.

In 2023, the Democratic-led state House passed legislation that would create extreme risk protection orders. Colloquially known as red flag laws, extreme risk protection orders would create a process for family members or law enforcement to petition a judge to temporarily suspend a person’s access to firearms in order to stop them from harming themselves or others. That bill currently sits in committee in the Republican-led Senate.

Also in 2023, Democratic House members voted out of committee a bill that would mandate the safe storage of firearms in homes. Democratic leaders have yet to bring that legislation to the floor for a vote by the full House, and advocates are pushing for them to do so.

In addition to the safe storage and extreme risk protection order legislation, the state House passed a bill in 2023 that would repeal the exclusion of long guns from the state’s background check requirement. Long guns include rifles, shotguns and military-style assault weapons. House lawmakers in 2024 passed legislation that would ban the purchase, sale and production of ghost gun parts. Ghost guns are homemade firearms that can be assembled from a kit with no serial number and can be purchased without a background check.

Both of those bills remain in committee in the Senate.

“Until the leadership in the Senate decides that they want to run these bills, they will continue to sit and grow dust, and so anybody who’s watching today, please call your state senator,” state Sen. Lindsey Williams, the minority chair of the Senate Education Committee, said during the CeaseFirePA event.

While Republican lawmakers across the country, including in Pennsylvania, have advocated for arming teachers in the wake of the hundreds of school shootings that have occurred since the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, at the time the worst such shooting in the United States, educators have overwhelmingly urged legislators to keep firearms out of schools

“I don’t know how more guns are going to make a problem better,” said Kara Easly, who has taught for 30 years in the Erie School District. “I would be afraid in a situation to use a gun. There’s a lot of stress going on. There are a lot of things going on. Teachers, we’re trained to teach. We’re not trained to kill.”

The Rev. Kate Harrigan, a middle school teacher at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Harrisburg, agreed with Easly.

“I feel very strongly about this: More guns makes more trouble,” Harrigan said.

Mia Suaudeau, a junior at a Montgomery County high school, asked lawmakers to restrict access to guns and said arming teachers is “solving violence with more violence.”

“That’s not addressing the root of the problem,” Suaudeau said. “And the way I see it, the root of the problem comes from easy access to firearms, especially for the youth, and I think that definitely having statewide laws that are a lot stricter would help prohibit that.”

As the number of mass shootings continues to increase in the U.S., educators and students said lawmakers need to act quickly on gun safety legislation.

“No 6-year-old should be scared to come to school,” Easly said. “No teacher should be scared to come to school.”

The CeaseFirePA Education Fund is asking for input from parents for a survey about school safety. Those who are interested in participating can find the survey at https://forms.gle/Rh6i86meCMJ99eLXA.