By: Teresa Mull

Emma Gonzalez, a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor who has become the poster child for gun control through her leadership within the March For Our Lives (MFOL) movement, recently told Variety Magazine the group is “pro-Second Amendment.”

Gonzalez said in a video for Variety:

I’ve talked to many men who are like, ‘You need to say that you’re not against guns and that you’re not against the Second Amendment,’ And I’m like, ‘We have been.’ But a lot of media takes that out.

We try our very darndest to get out the fact that we don’t want to take away guns and that we are pro-Second Amendment. We’re not trying to take guns out of society; we’re trying to regulate them.

Gonzalez famously wore a Fidel Castro-style Army green jacket with a Cuban flag pin on it to deliver an anti-gun speech during an early MFOL protest. The 18-year-old says the group is trying to make it mandatory for people to lock up their guns, “so it doesn’t concern you if you already do that.” Gonzalez also says arming teachers is “not a good idea,” and funding would be better spent on paying teachers higher salaries than on training them with firearms.

As Gunpowder Magazine reported earlier this year, the MFOL website states the group is specifically calling for: “Universal, comprehensive background checks, Bringing the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) into the 21st century with a digitized, searchable database, Funds for the CDC (Center for Disease Control) to research the gun violence epidemic in America, a High-capacity magazine ban, [and] a ban on semi-automatic assault rifles.”

Cameron Kasky, a fellow Parkland shooting survivor, announced earlier this month he is leaving MFOL after traveling the country on tour with the gun control group.

“I learned that a lot of our issues politically come from a lack of understanding of other perspectives and also the fact that so often young conservatives and young liberals will go into debate, like I said earlier, trying to beat the other one as opposed to come to an agreement,” Kasky said. “… I’m working on some efforts to encourage bipartisanship, or at least discussion that is productive and help a lot of people avoid the mistakes that I made.”

Teresa Mull is editor of Gunpowder Magazine. Contact her at [email protected].