"Since Parkland": Nearly 1,200 Children Lost in 12 Months, New Project Tells Their Story
- ‘A Parkland Every Five Days’: project tells stories of the children lost to gun violence. A gun violence nonprofit attempts to tell the stories of American children and teens killed with a gun since Parkland. The Guardian, Feb. 15, 2019.
The grim total includes more than 80 young musicians, 30 dancers, 40 community volunteers, at least 80 infants and toddlers and 40 college-bound seniors. In the 12 months since the Parkland school shooting, nearly 1,200 American children and teenagers have been killed with guns. The everyday killings of young Americans add up to “a Parkland every five days,” according to a new project from The Trace, a nonprofit that covers gun violence, in collaboration with McClatchy newspapers and the Miami Herald.
Fourteen high school students and three educators were murdered last Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, a massacre that inspired a national youth protest movement for gun control. SinceParkland.org, a new project from McClatchy and The Trace, attempts to tell the stories of every child and teenager, ages 18 and younger, killed with a gun since that shooting. *Website, https://sinceparkland.org/*
The profiles are simple and devastating. Peyton Nicole Hurt, 15, loved painting watercolors. She was shot to death by her ex-boyfriend at a house party in Kentucky. Sandra Parks, 13, who had just written an essay about preventing gun violence, was killed by a stray bullet in her bedroom in Wisconsin. Mikey Pacheco, 17, a varsity football player, was accidentally shot to death by one of his friends as they sat around his kitchen table in Massachusetts...
The project was designed as a response to young activists, including many Parkland students, who have criticized media outlets for not devoting enough attention to the toll of daily gun violence. “Young people at the center of the movement really chided the press for only covering mass shootings and not going beyond that,” Akoto Ofori-Atta, managing editor at The Trace, and the project director of Since Parkland, said in an interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle.
To write more than a thousand stories over the course of a year, The Trace recruited more than 200 teenage journalists from across the country. There’s no generation that has had to contend with this issue the way that young people today have had to contend with it,” Ofori-Atta said. “We felt it was their story to tell, and their perspective was needed.” MORE, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/15/parkland-gun-violence-children-teens
Arizona 'March for Our Lives' vigil, one year since the Parkland massacre. Feb. 14, 2019.
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