By: Robert Davis
A group of Florida students staged a walkout last Friday to show their support for the Second Amendment in the wake of students across the country walking out of class demanding gun control.
“It’s all over the news right now that all students hate guns. I wanted to show that not all students feel that way,” said Zachary Schneider, a junior at Rockledge High School in Brevard County, Florida, where 75 students walked out.
“We were built on certain rights and that was one of the original rights, that we should have the right to bear arms,” said sophomore Chloe Deaton, an event coordinator who was wearing a shirt that read, “My rights don’t end where your feelings begin.”
“I’m pro-Second Amendment,” junior Anna Delaney, who helped organize the walkout with Deaton, told Fox News affiliate WFTV. “I wouldn’t mind deeper background checks, of course, but the Second Amendment will not be infringed upon.”
Delaney and Deaton, students in Rockledge’s Criminal Justice and Legal Studies Academy, said they organized the walkout for students who felt their opinions were silenced after the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida last month and the subsequent protests in favor of more restrictions on guns.
School administrators told Florida Today the student demonstration began on the school track and ended on the football field, where students formed themselves into a shape of a heart, just as the gun control students had done the week prior during the “March for Our Lives” protests. Some students carried “Don’t tread on me” flags and signs reading “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
Delaney was one of the students who spoke to fellow students during the walkout. She read a quote from President Ronald Regan’s 1983 speech at a National Rifle Association banquet that said, “The Constitution does not say that government shall decree the right to keep and bear arms. The Constitution says ‘… the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’”
Robert Davis is a journalist from Colorado. He covers defensive gun use and Second Amendment litigation for Gunpowder Magazine. Contact him at [email protected].