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Students participate in walkouts on Columbine anniversary

ATLANTA — Thousands of students across the country, including those in metro Atlanta, rallied Friday against school gun violence, an event the teenage organizers hope will empower students to continue their momentum in a push for common-sense gun reform.

The event, called the National School Walkout, focused on high schools and took place on April 20, the anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, where two students opened fire in 1999, killing 12 of their fellow students and a teacher.

When students went outside, they took part in 13 seconds of silence to honor the 13 people killed at Columbine High School.

The March 14 walkout officially lasted for 17 minutes to mark the 17 lives lost. After the 17 minutes, many students returned to their classrooms.

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Local students participate in walkout

Students and staff walked right out of the front doors of Lakeside High School. Students put up 200 shirts that represent 200 lives lost from the 1999 Columbine shooting to the recent one this year in Parkland, Florida.

“I feel like today is a really good first step in this process and this fight against the gun laws,” said Lakeside High School senior Jason Sanford.

Sanford said he will be able to vote soon and he'll use that power to try and make schools safer for all students.

“Honestly I’m really just proud of my school and all the students and everyone who put this together because it just shows that we can work together to like overcome something, you know?” Sanford said.

Hydia Love said she cried when she heard that a 5-year-old wrote out a will because he wasn’t sure if his school would be next.

“I mean put yourself in our shoes,” Love said. “Y’all just sitting here killing us like we’re dogs – we’re humans – we have a voice.”

What inspired the walkout?

Lane Murdock, 16, a sophomore at Ridgefield High School in Connecticut, organized the event. She said the walkout comes as a direct response to the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, because her first reaction to the February shooting was numbness.

"We live in a kind of desensitized country" when it comes to school shootings, she said. "After reflecting on my own lack of emotion, seeing how wrong our country is, the fact that this keeps on happening ... I felt so helpless.... I knew I needed to do something."

"I started to think to myself, 'What can I do to change the narrative?'" Lane said. "But also, 'What can I do to give people who maybe don't have as much time on their hands as I do, to give them that power?'"

Three of Lane's classmates led the National School Walkout with her, including Grant Yaun, a 17-year-old junior.

Grant said he was an 11-year-old sixth-grader at the time of the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, which is near Ridgefield.

That shooting, which killed 20 children and six teachers, was the first time he said he was aware of the realities of school violence and "how disturbing these kinds of things were."

But in the six years since then, Grant said, the "onslaught of shootings" has made him more desensitized, so he also didn't have a strong first reaction to the Stoneman Douglas shooting. But "after some reflection," he said he felt "it was time for something to change."