Time for a Change: Student Activists Speak on Gun Safety in David Mushegain’s Video

Gun Violence Awareness, highlighted nationally this weekend, isn’t a passing event for students and their families across America, it’s a grim and quotidian reality. “We are generation lock down drills and generation coming home from school is not a guarantee,” proclaims sophomore student and activist Julia Heilrayne. “We’re the generation defined by the pop of a gunshot.” But not solely: This generation is making another kind of noise. Vocal in their advocacy for gun control, they are unafraid to stand up for what’s right, they believe that change is possible to enact through grass-roots activism. “Anybody, no matter where they come from, who they are, who their family is, what their background is, can make a difference,” says high schooler Sasha Ashton, who organized an anti-gun rally in Texas.

Both of these women appear in a video created by the itinerant photographer David Mushegain who, with the help of non-profit Everytown for Gun Safety, has been traveling across the company recording the faces and voices of students working together for change. “The atmosphere at all the events I attended was electric,” says the artist who filmed in Columbine, Austin, and New York City. “The young generation has heard the rhetoric, they’ve watched the politicians spin their webs and they’re not buying it.”