MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Wednesday morning was cold and blustery, and Nicholas Chaffins shivered just a bit as he stood near the 50-yard line on Pony Lewis Field.
Why he was there wasn’t a game.
“We shouldn’t have to be out here protesting,” the 17-year-old Morgantown High School junior said.
“But there are victims who aren’t being heard.”
Chaffins was talking about the victims of gun violence in America’s schools.
He and several MHS classmates had just walked out of school that morning — with the blessing of Principal Paul Mihalko — because they wanted 17 such victims to be heard.
They wanted to honor the 17 victims shot dead last month at Parkland High School, in Florida, by a former student who stormed the place.
Like everyone else of his generation in this country, Chaffins has grown up under the shadow of such violence.
While he doesn’t necessarily live in fear, he doesn’t take anything for granted, either.
Instead, Chaffins, who wants to be a psychologist, employs a lock-and-load pragmatism about guns and gun violence.
“I legitimately wouldn’t be surprised if something like that happened here,” he said.
Ballot-bull’s eye
That it could happen anywhere was the point of the nationwide walkout.
Students across the country left their desks for 17 minutes Wednesday morning — one minute for each victim at Parkland — so they could tell lawmakers that it’s time to empty the clip on America’s current gun laws.
That sentiment was reflected in the wording on the signs carried by several MHS students.
“Hey, NRA,” read one that was directed to the National Rifle Association: “How many kids did you kill today?”
“We stand with Parkland,” was the wording on another, which celebrated the fact that students from the school lobbied Florida lawmakers after the tragedy.
“Change NOW,” was the mandate on another.
Tia Akers, an MHS student who turns 18 in two months, said she hoped the country’s elected officials were listening, for their sake.
“We’re going to be voting in elections really soon,” she said.
‘You have to be responsible’
Across Morgantown and Monongalia County, students at University High School held similar observances.
After a moment of silence in the main hallway, several students, despite the cold temperatures, took to the grounds and parking lot of the sprawling campus on Baker’s Ridge, to talk and take reflective walks.
At both high schools, student council leaders and others helped plan the proceedings.
“We just left it up to them as to how they wanted to organize the morning,” UHS Principal Kim Greene said.
Brice Wade, 18, a University High senior who is either enlisting in the U.S. Army or U.S. Marines after he graduates this spring, shook his head as he watched his classmates in action.
Not that he wasn’t sympathetic, he said.
He was thinking more about the easy availability of guns, coupled with what he said is the fallibility of a system that allows emotionally disturbed people to languish in their pain — right up to when they pull the trigger on a large scale.
“You’re going to have gun violence in schools as long as you have that,” he said. “If I wanted to, I could go to High Street today and buy a gun. Not from a shop, but from a person.”
Yasmine Colebank, 18, a University High senior and gun enthusiast, doesn’t want to take away your weapons, she said.
She just wants you to draw a bead on common sense, when you shoot.
“I’ve gone hunting,” she said. “I’ve gone to gun ranges. You have to be responsible.”
Mihalko, meanwhile, said he appreciated that young people were engaging in measured, thoughtful discourse on an issue that affects them all.
“We’re talking about kids who can change the world here,” the principal said.
This story, which appeared in the Dominion Post’s March 15 edition, was written by Jim Bissett.