Approximately 300 young adults filled the four corners of Wall Street and Newport Avenue Monday afternoon, while many more in vehicles circled the downtown core, hanging out car windows, standing in truck beds, screaming and revving their engines. Nearly an hour after the mass walkout staged by Bend-area students, young people continued to run through the downtown area, hurriedly making their way to the ongoing demonstration.
The assembled throng chanted “Stop the silence, end gun violence” while many waved handmade signs, some of which read “Your politics, our funerals,” “The scariest thing in school should be my grades” and “I’m in school to be a student, not a target.” Meanwhile, drivers blared their horns in a show of support, while young adults hung out of car windows, yelling that they’d be there as soon as they found a place to park.
“I think it’s important to show that this isn’t something that the community is going to forget easily, and this isn’t something that’s just going to be pushed aside, because I don’t think it can be pushed aside for much longer. It’s just going to keep happening,” said Rynn Van Meter, 18, a Summit High School senior, as she held a sign that said, “This isn’t right or left. It’s life or death.”
“I think that a lot of times gun control can have a connotation that sounds like it’s on one side of (politics), and then people will just make a single assumption about it and decide to dismiss it,” she said, adding that she believes politics must be put aside so people can work together to stop gun violence. “I think it’s important to know that it’s not people against people. It’s people against the death of children.”
Wyatt Holmberg, 17, a senior at Bend High School, attended the protest with his friend, fellow Bend High senior Bentley Malacon-Deal, also 17.
“I think it’s important for people to take action. Going quiet is one of the worst things that you can do after tragedy, and just in general. Expressing your feelings and getting everyone to go and vote for what they feel is right is such an important thing,” said Holmberg.
“I’m doing this today because it’s really important to me, and I think all students, that we show our support for Silver Rail and our support for our community,” added Malacon-Deal, before going on to say that it’s a scary time to be a student. “I think a lot of kids here feel afraid to go to school.”
Local youth mobilized on social media to stage the walk out at 1:45pm Monday, in response to the Oct. 15 shootings at Silver Rail Elementary School, where a teacher and three students were killed when Griffin J. John II, 16, shot his way into a special-education classroom. Megan Lambert, 25; a first-year Silver Rail teacher, and student Rhoam Summers, 5, were killed, in addition to 8-year-old and 11-year-old students who’ve not been named. Saylor Graham, 7, a wheelchair-bound student, and teacher Becky Drury, 54, were injured. Kaylub Giamanco, 36, whose two children attend Silver Rail, was passing the school on his lunch break Oct. 15 when he saw John approaching the school with a shotgun after having shot twice at a pickup truck. Giamanco pursued John into the school, shooting and killing him.
Students weren’t the only attendees at Monday’s demonstration. There were a fair number of adults congregating, including Karen Zacharias, 69, a former reporter and journalism professor who’s had her work featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and on CNN and NPR. She lives in Bend and has grandchildren who attend local schools. She’s very familiar with school shootings, having reported on the Thurston High School shooting on May 21, 1998 in Springfield that left two dead and dozens wounded.
“It’s always been terrifying to me, since the very first school shooting that I covered, which was Thurston in 1998. The very next year, almost to the day, was Columbine,” she said, referring to the April 20, 1999 mass shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School that left 12 students and one teacher dead that day. More later died as a result of their injuries.
Prior to that, while living in Scotland and completing her master’s degree in creative media, Zacharias learned about that country’s March 13, 1996 Dunblane Primary School shooting that left 16 students and a teacher dead and many others injured. She said Scotland immediately set about changing its gun-access laws and “they have never had another mass shooting, not in schools, not anywhere, because it’s access to guns that is creating this problem in America. Americans refuse to deal with the root problem, which is access.
“We’ve now had three decades of kids growing up with school shootings, and nothing changes,” Zacharias said, before gesturing to the assembled youth and adding, “They have the power to change this. We have the power to change it.”
Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler, 44, a Bend High graduate who has a child in elementary school, said she turned out to support Bend youth, taking a break from city work and campaigning for a second mayoral term that’ll be decided in the upcoming Nov. 3 general election. She’s running against Bernadette Strome.
“There’s so many kids here, and they don’t want to have to deal with this at their schools anymore,” Kebler said. “I’m just here to support our community and support our kids if they want to make their voices heard. I think we should listen.
“It’s every parent’s nightmare, and we have to live with it in this country,” Kebler added, referring to the Silver Rail shooting. “I think what the kids are saying is we should not have to live with it. They don’t want to live with it anymore, and we shouldn’t have to live with that threat in our country.”
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