At 10 o'clock on Friday morning, thousands of students across the country commemorated a moment that not one of them was alive to experience: the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado that killed 13 people 19 years ago today. Kids walked out of their classrooms on Friday to remember and to protest in the latest iteration of the student-led movement against gun violence that burgeoned after February's Parkland, Florida, school shooting.
It's fitting that the student who organized Friday's walkouts—the first protest of its kind pegged to the massacre that happened nearly two decades ago—is a history buff. Lane Murdock, a 16-year-old from Ridgefield, Connecticut, had spent her early life reading about protests and walkouts in history books, she told me, and always wondered what she'd do in the face of injustice. She started a Change.org petition immediately after learning of the Parkland shooting, laying the groundwork for Friday's demonstration, which included participants from at least one school in every state.
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