"Lawmakers aren't listening": Parkland students demand action after El Paso shooting
Parkland, Fla. — Nearly a year and a half before the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and in Dayton, Ohio, the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, sparked some of the largest youth-led protests since the Vietnam War. Young survivors changed America's gun debate, but they say real change has yet to come.
"It's so much for all of us to have to keep dealing with this over and over and know that as hard as we fight it continues to happen," Delaney Tarr told CBS News.
The 19-year-old Parkland survivor turned social activist helped start March for Our Lives. The national movement against gun violence grew out of the Parkland massacre.
There have been 566 mass shootings since.
"It almost feels like we keep shouting into this nothingness because nobody is listening. Lawmakers aren't listening, but this is quite literally life or death," Tarr said.
Tarr, along with 16-year-old Ryan Servaites and 21-year-old Trevor Wild invited CBS News to their headquarters in Florida.
"Students are sick and tired of planning vigils ... these are 15, 16, 17-year-olds ... and they're experts at vigil planning," Wild said.
"Every time we see another shooting, it's this mixture of defeat, of anger, of renewed spirit," Tarr explained. "There is this certain level of personal responsibility that a lot of us feel every time we find out somebody else has died at the hand of a gun."
What they've done is organize a nationwide bus tour, registering 50,000 voters for the midterms. They even helped pass a universal background bill in the House in February, but it has stalled in the Senate.
"Right now it's up to Mitch McConnell to bring that to the vote in the Senate and to get it into law," Wild said.
"We've seen so much lack of action. I am angry, I am filled with rage and I would like to see it get done," Tarr said.
They said they won't stop until the violence stops.
