#NeverAgain summary

So why did these students try to make a difference? After all, plenty of shootings have happened before and ended with only thoughts and prayers. Well, there are many reasons. For starters, this generation of students grew up in fear of school shootings but with a belief in the power of technology and social media. What’s more, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School emphasized the importance of understanding real-world social issues.

However, much of it also comes down to personal experience.

Shortly after David started high school, the Hogg family moved to Parkland, Florida. Sad to be leaving his friends in California, David was, by his own admission, a bit of a jerk at this point in his adolescence. He didn’t exactly make life easy for his parents.

However, their new school taught lots of diverse subjects covering politics and media. David found himself taking debate and TV production, and pursued his interest in both by watching news shows hosted by pundits like Hank Green and John Oliver. He would do his own research on the issues being presented, and, as he got older, he found himself interested in topics such as women’s rights and the 2016 presidential election. Finally, he began to truly apply himself at school.

On the evening of the shooting, Lauren went to bed distraught, thinking that two of her good friends had been killed. The next day, she found out that it was actually four. Each of these friends, and each victim of the attack, had had a family. Each had had friends. Each had had interests and a life filled with potential. Now, they were gone.

Gina Montalto had played in the school band. She’d had a quirky personality that everybody loved. She and Lauren had been in the same science class, so they’d talked and worked together every single day.

David wasn’t really close friends with any of the victims of the shooting, so when he ran back to school to speak to camera crews, he thought he might be suffering from survivor’s guilt. It wasn’t until much later that a therapist helped him realize that he was running from his inability to console his sister and looking for some way to help.

This desire first appeared during the attack when he was trapped in a classroom with other students. He began filming himself narrating what was going on, before interviewing others, too. One girl admitted that she was planning on becoming a junior member of the National Rifle Association – the NRA – but couldn’t anymore after such a traumatizing experience.

Many students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas always wanted to make a difference in the world and help others. They assumed, however, that they had to finish high school first. After the attack, they realized they might not get the chance to wait that long. They needed to act now.

Since then, they’ve achieved a lot. They planned a huge protest march supporting tighter gun control, receiving donations from supporters like Steven Spielberg and George Clooney and bringing in over $4 million on their GoFundMe page. On March 24, 2018, thousands of people joined the students for March for Our Lives in Washington, DC. That same day, more than 800 marches took place across the United States and around the world. Some 800,000 people participated in Washington alone.