PARKLAND, FL - One hundred students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School will travel to Tallahassee for a Wednesday march on the state Capitol in the first organized protest of their #NeverAgain movement.

Their demand: that Florida legislators use the remaining three weeks of the annual session to revise state mental health and gun laws to forestall a repeat of the Parkland school shooting that left 17 dead.

“It really needs to be recognized that they need to stop fighting each other and starting working together,’’ said Jaclyn Corin, 17, junior class president and a survivor of the shooting, who conceived the idea for the two-day trip. “This has to be the last school this happens to”, she told the Miami Herald.

Parkland student Corin said she and her classmates want the state to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines. They also want to make it more difficult for those with histories of mental illness to legally access weapons.

“We emphasize the need for more attention to mental health. We know a lot of people, and politicians, would prefer that over gun control, but we want to emphasize both,’’ Corin said. “We don’t want to take away people’s gun rights. This movement understands that people have that right under the Second Amendment, but we just want alterations and restriction.”

Corin said students will start by asking legislators to review gun laws in other countries and reject the National Rifle Association’s logic.

“The NRA brainwashes us to think these rules and laws can’t work here,’’ Corin said. “We think they can. In what world would a civilian need an assault rifle? There’s no common sense reason.”

To sportsmen and those who say they need the weapons for self defense, Corin says: “There’s so many other guns they could use. We don’t need guns in our community that can fire off 100 bullets in a matter of 10 minutes.”

Their demand for changes to Florida’s gun laws face steep odds in the state legislature, which has been more inclined to expand gun access than restrict it, even after the 2016 shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in which a deranged gunman left 49 people dead.

Even after the shooting in Parkland, the Senate scheduled a hearing on a bill by Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, to allow teachers to carry concealed weapons in the classroom.

Story Date: February 19, 2018