As a high school teacher in Orange County, California, Colleen Happ regularly took part in shooter drills, crouching with students and pretending the school was under attack. In one, she played the part of a hostage.
On Saturday, Happ, now a Victoria resident, joined hundreds of others at the legislature to call for action on gun control, an event held in solidarity with more than 800 March For Our Lives rallies around the world.
Many of the protests, including the one in Victoria, were organized by students demanding gun-safety legislation in the wake of the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 students and teachers were shot and killed.
Happ, a U.S. citizen and supply teacher with the Greater Victoria school district, said she moved to Canada in August because she refused to live in President Donald Trump’s America.
She was horrified to hear Trump’s call for teachers to be armed.
“I became a teacher to teach,” said Happ, who carried a sign that said Arm Teachers With Resources, Not Guns.
“I’m not a police officer, I’m not a soldier. I shouldn’t have a gun in the classroom — no one should have a gun in the classroom.”
In an emotional speech, organizer Magritte Gordaneer, a 17-year-old student at Esquimalt High, read the names of the 17 victims of the Parkland shooting, which was followed by 17 seconds of silence.
“We cannot allow these people to go down as just more victims of a school shooting,” said Gordaneer, who is part of an advocacy group called Youth Political Commons.
While Canada has not seen the same spate of mass school shootings as the U.S., Gordaneer cited the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, in which 14 women died, and the Dawson College shooting in 2006, which left one woman dead and 19 people wounded, as evidence that this country is not immune to gun violence.
She recounted an experience in November in which Esquimalt High was put under lockdown as police searched for a robbery suspect nearby. Many students feared there was an active shooter.
Gun-safety reform should have happened after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, or after 20 elementary school students and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook in 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, Gordaneer said.
“We are one of 844 movements worldwide saying ‘never again,’ ” she said.
Victoria Coun. Jeremy Loveday said the hundreds of thousands of people rallying around the world Saturday have one common demand: “That kids can go to school without fear.”
Loveday said he was honoured to stand behind students who are demanding stricter gun laws.
“I pity anyone who tries to stand in your way.”
