Building a Community, Building a Movement

Gun violence is rampant across the United States, impacting schools and communities every day. Many educators are desperate to keep their students safe but are not sure what to do. We spoke with two survivors of school shootings, Abbey Clements and Mei-Ling Ho-Shing, to learn about their activism and, just as important, how they care for themselves while doing this incredibly difficult work. Abbey Clements, an elementary educator with over 30 years of experience, is a co-founder and the executive director of Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence. Mei-Ling Ho-Shing is a community organizer with Chainless Change who is helping develop new ways to increase community safety, support, and collaboration. We are grateful to them for sharing their experiences and showing all of us how to join the movement to end gun violence.

–EDITORS

EDITORS: Tell us about your personal experiences with gun violence and how they led to your activism.

MEI-LING HO-SHING: I was catapulted into advocacy and activism in 2018, when I was a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. It was Valentine’s Day, two days before my 17th birthday. I was in math class, and a friend was showing me a snow globe with gold sparkles and a Buddha inside that he had bought for a girl he was trying to impress. That’s the moment when I heard two shots ring out. I stood up and asked my teacher if she’d heard it. She reminded me that it was quiet time, and then we heard rapid fire.

We had been expecting a mass shooting drill, so that’s what many students thought at first. We tried to follow the protocol we’d been taught. We shut off the lights and went into the corner. I will never forget my teacher’s bravery. As we were hearing screams and gunshots, she was covering us with her arms as if she were a bird in a nest, making sure that we were quiet and safe. As a teacher, she didn’t ask for this. It’s not in her job description. But when she was faced with death, she was willing to put herself in front of a bullet for us.

Once the shooting stopped, we started hearing police sirens. The SWAT team broke down the door and held us at gunpoint, telling us to keep our hands up and everything would be OK. For me, a Black youth who knew of so many Black people murdered by law enforcement officers, this was another level of trauma. Many of my Black classmates at Stoneman Douglas (11 percent of the student body at that time) have expressed the same feeling.

After we were evacuated, I had to walk a long way to get to a place where my grandparents could pick me up. As another Black student and I walked through the predominantly white, affluent neighborhood near the school, we got a lot of unfriendly looks, but eventually a Black family asked if we needed a ride. I know we’re not supposed to get in a car with strangers, but to be honest that was the first moment that we felt safe in many hours. They dropped us off with another friend, and later my family was able to come get me.

It’s important to me to talk about my perspective as a Black student because so many of the students from Stoneman Douglas who have shared their stories don’t have that perspective. The shooting affected Black students differently—especially because of our fear of guns and distrust of police, the difficulty of finding help at our most vulnerable time, and the challenges of getting mental health care because of stigma within Black communities. This became a main focus of my advocacy, taking an intersectional approach to gun violence and its effects on Black students.

ABBEY CLEMENTS: I’ve long been a voter aware of social issues, and I attended several protests in college and as a young adult. But what really pushed me into activism was experiencing the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012. My second-grade students and I huddled together terrified, listening to the endless gunshots. When you’re in that situation, your brain doesn’t really allow you to go into panic mode—you’re just right there in the moment. I didn’t know where the sounds were coming from or how many people were shooting. I just remember trying to muffle the noise for my second-graders, hoping to protect them from the trauma of it all.

My daughter, who was 16 at the time, had to go into lockdown in her physics class, and for a while she didn’t know if I was OK. That experience turned her into an activist overnight. She started going to meetings, and then she got involved nationally; before we knew it, she was invited to speak all over. She was so poised and passionate. For me, it took a little longer to be ready to speak out. In the aftermath of the tragedy, I had such a complex set of emotions: intense survivor’s guilt and grief, trying to figure out how to hold my family together when I felt like I was falling apart, and anger at the situation and the lives that were taken. But within a few months, I realized that my anger had turned into a different kind of fury—for change. I knew that I had to get involved.

EDITORS: What did getting involved look like for you then, and how has it shifted over the years?

ABBEY: In the summer of 2013, I went to a small, informal Moms Demand Action meeting in someone’s home—and for the first time, I told my story. A traumatic experience like that is visceral; as I spoke I was almost miming my actions, remembering how the kids told me to move the file cabinet, going to get the keys so I could open the door and lock it from the outside.

Everyone in the meeting cried. Some were also survivors from Sandy Hook, and some were mothers from the next town over who couldn’t imagine how they were going to send their kids back to school after the summer. Even months later, Connecticut was in shock. The whole world was impacted by what happened. But these people were there because they were committed to doing everything they could to try to make change.

Once I went to that meeting, I never turned back. I knew we needed to find creative ways to organize and break through with the narrative that we deserve to be safe at school, at the grocery store, at a yoga studio, on a stoop, in a park, at church. So that’s what I did, and it’s what I have continued to do for the last 11 years. I would teach and then I’d go to meetings at night or help organize emerging groups of activists. I went to events, spoke at vigils and protests, held signs—anything that would help get people’s attention on this issue. There are no words to express how important it has been for me to be involved in this work and to forge new relationships in this positive way.

After the Oxford High School shooting in Michigan happened on November 30, 2021, two AFT member activist friends of mine—Sarah Lerner, a teacher at Mei-Ling’s school who also survived the 2018 tragedy there, and Sari Beth Rosenberg, a New York City high school teacher—were in a group text voicing outrage that yet another school shooting happened, that we rarely, if ever, hear from the teachers impacted by them, and asking why isn’t there a gun violence prevention organization focused on organizing teachers? We decided to launch Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence that day.

Two and a half years later, we’re nearly 15,000 strong! We’re educators from across the country, including teachers, school staff, volunteers, retired folks, and supporters and allies. We’re the bridge connecting gun violence prevention and education spaces. We speak at conferences, collaborate with many organizations, and work with our local and national unions to empower teachers to speak up on this issue. We’re especially grateful for and proud of our collaborative work with the AFT.

We know we’re following in the footsteps of many activists before us, especially young people, who have pointed out that everyday shootings don’t get the same kind of news coverage as mass shootings. What happened in Newtown opened our eyes to that. Media attention and support services flowed in. But 45 minutes down the road in Hartford, gun violence happens on a near-daily basis, and most people never hear these stories. It was true in 2012, and it’s still true today. Who follows up with those kids in six months? A year later, who’s asking families what they need? We need to do better for those kids and their communities.

Thankfully, this is a focus of the White House’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which was established in September 2023. One of its priorities is caring for people who have been impacted by gun violence and making sure their communities have adequate resources. It’s especially important for us to vote for candidates who will ensure that the office continues to have adequate funding and opportunities to be effective.

MEI-LING: In 2018, when I started speaking out, we as a society were focused on mass shootings, even though they  were only 1 percent of gun violence. Many thousands of lives are lost each year to domestic abuse, everyday gun violence in urban communities, and suicide. If we want to solve the problem, we have to talk about it all.

So I shared my mic and my platform with other Black students from South Florida and, eventually, the nation. I began by reaching out to Dr. Rosalind Osgood, the only Black school board member in my county. She validated my experience and supported me 100 percent in speaking up. She taught me how to make a press release for our first event and guided us through it, and the whole community showed up for us.

I began talking with more and more students about what gun violence means for our community, how to seek mental health care, and what real public safety looks like, which is looking out for each other in a healthy and holistic way. I remember speaking at a high school in Chicago, and I could tell those students didn’t want to hear from someone who experienced a mass shooting at a primarily white school because it was so different from their experience. So I asked how many people in the room had lost someone to gun violence or experienced gun violence themselves, and every single student raised a hand. I shifted the conversation to focus on their own experiences and their own pain, and on understanding that inflicting that same pain onto others creates an endless cycle of violence that harms our communities.

I held a lot of workshops like that at schools and in communities. I also worked with the AFT on the Student Gun Violence Summit in 2018, which was the epitome of intersectionality and what students coming together looks like, and I did a lot of public speaking as well as participating in marches and protests.

At the same time, at 17 and 18 years old, I was attending vigils and funerals at least once a month, including one for a coach I had met at that Chicago high school. This work is rarely hope—it’s grief. It can be beautiful to grieve together and do what I call “freedom dreaming,” which is imagining the ideal situation of liberation, life, and public safety. But for me, the grief took over. My therapist was concerned about how often I was working, but I was so angry—about how many students lose their lives to gun violence, about how little attention they get compared to the coverage of Stoneman Douglas. That’s what was fueling my advocacy, but after a while it began to consume me. So I took a break. I went to college out of state, at Alabama A&M University, just to be in a place where people didn’t know me and I could choose when to tell my story. I took some time to just be a student and find some normalcy in enjoying being young.

Now, the focus of my work has shifted a little bit. I work as a community organizer at a nonprofit named Chainless Change based in South Florida. We are a recovery community organization that is created by and for people with arrest records who want to rebuild their lives and make meaningful contributions to their community while fighting the systems that cause harm in the first place.

My definitions of safety, justice, and accountability have changed a lot because of the Stoneman Douglas shooting. For example, my experience being held at gunpoint by the officers followed protocol, but it was harmful. We as advocates and community members need to imagine a better way.

As for the gunman himself, locking him away for life isn’t justice—it doesn’t stop harm from happening, and it doesn’t make the trauma go away or give me closure. I’m hoping to create more community programs and find funding for alternatives that can prevent harm and lead to true rehabilitation. There were multiple calls to the police, and even calls to the FBI, prior to the shooting, but no one heeded these red flags. Imagine if there had been social workers and mental health professionals to address his prior situations—the outcome might have been completely different.

When people are convicted of crimes, we put them in prison and then permanently mark their records so they have few opportunities for employment or housing when they’re released. Imagine if we had community programs that offered support and resources. Imagine students having opportunities to learn a trade in school and educators helping kids learn to regulate their emotions. All of these things can reduce gun violence and mass incarceration. These are the types of community-based changes I’m advocating for. I know I don’t have all the answers, but advocates are some of the most creative people in the world, and I believe we can figure it out together.

EDITORS: It must be extremely difficult to engage in work that is so closely related to your own traumatic experiences. What do you do for self-care? What would you recommend to others?

MEI-LING: A big part of my self-care has been giving myself time to be a kid. I stopped acting my age after the shooting because I was so focused on the movement. I had to learn to talk to myself differently: “Mei-Ling, I know that this work needs to be done, but did you eat today? Did you hang out with friends today?” I purposefully spent my college years enjoying my youth. And that’s not to invalidate my work—it’s to honor my inner child and the childhood that was taken from me in 2018.

Another really important form of self-care is being persistent in therapy, including changing therapists to make sure I found someone who is trauma informed. All of that time running on anger was focusing outward, but I need to focus inward too. I also spend time with my family, and I make sure that I surround myself with people who understand my struggle and my triggers and who can practice collective care with me. I find peace in community, and I know I’m my best self when I’m with people who love me and are looking out for my best interests and my mental health.

ABBEY: It’s really hard to say no to an action or invitation, but I’m working on this! Sometimes it’s just not the right time or maybe it’s not quite mission-aligned; sometimes there’s no particular reason, but you have a burning feeling that you should decline to protect yourself. Sometimes I think we’re afraid to say no to something because we think we won’t get invited to do anything else. But not every opportunity or form of activism is right for every person, and that’s OK. Activists need to protect our time and well-being if we want to sustain our energy for the long term.

One of the hardest things for me to do is step away when I’m feeling overwhelmed. When there’s news of a shooting, I want to find out everything. I have to learn to put the phone down and remind myself that it’s OK to wait for a couple of hours or even until the morning, when there may be more perspective and more reliable information. It helps to do something else with that time—snuggle with my dog, listen to music, go for a walk. These things help me get a little quiet space. When I come back, I can take a breath and process it.

I also gain a lot from connecting with others in those moments. I have my go-to people who I know won’t be upset if I curse or shout. Teachers Unify started from one of those very conversations.

EDITORS: Many people want to do something about gun violence, but some may still be learning about it, while others are ready to give it everything they’ve got. Where can they get started?

ABBEY: Some of the most important work starts at home. An estimated 4.6 million children live in homes with unsecured firearms. You can talk with members of your family and your friends about securing their firearms and storing ammunition separately. If your child is going to a friend’s house, text or call that parent to check that any guns are locked up. That’s taking care of your family and also spreading the word about common-sense steps everyone can take. Before elections, when local candidates call or text asking for money, ask them where they stand on issues of arming teachers, overpolicing schools, and safe gun storage. Those are important questions.

If you’re looking to get involved in the broader movement, start by visiting gun violence prevention organizations’ websites. Here’s ours: teachersunify.org. Sign up for their newsletters to learn more about what they’re doing. Go to a meeting or two with a friend to see if it feels like a good fit. A lot of groups have virtual meetings, so you don’t even have to leave your home at night.

There’s a role for everyone in this work, for people at every comfort level. Activism doesn’t always have to be the big, dramatic thing. Maybe you can call or email your legislators in the privacy of your own home. Or maybe you want to help make signs for a rally or write thank-you notes to speakers afterward. If you’ve been impacted by gun violence, you might not want to talk about your personal experience in front of a crowd, but you might be willing to write about it to be shared anonymously. Maybe you could go to the farmers’ market with a clipboard and sign people up for an advocacy organization’s newsletter or talk about its work. Talking about this issue is activism. We don’t have to harbor worry and fear on our own. The more we talk, the more we empower one another. There are lots of ways people can get involved, and voting on this issue is one of the most powerful ways we can express ourselves!

MEI-LING: Teachers, parents, and community members can play a big role in supporting students who have experienced gun violence. Please don’t treat a gun death like any other death in the family. Treat it with sensitivity, and do what you can to prioritize that student’s mental health. It’s too easy for the anger and pain of experiencing gun violence to become animosity and a desire for revenge. Anything you can do to help students find other ways to express those feelings can make a big difference.

It’s also important to keep school shooting protocols in schools. It’s terrible that this is the world we live in right now, but knowing what to do in those moments can save teachers’ and students’ lives. That said, many schools should rethink their drills. Students can learn what to do without being terrified. Equally important, let’s shut down the idea of teachers having guns at school. That’s the opposite of safety. So is the militarization of schools and the criminalization of students. After the shooting, our school felt like a prison. There were metal detectors and police on every floor; it felt like we were constantly being wanded. It didn’t feel safe—it just made students anxious.

In terms of building community as a form of prevention, you can push for more accessible mental health resources, guidance counselors, and afterschool programs. Teachers, ideally with support from local businesses, can sponsor student activities and clubs. Helping students find their passion, supporting them, and standing by them can limit harm and anger. We can also teach kids that there’s more to life than college and trades. Marjory Stoneman Douglas instituted a day of service after the shooting, and it was so powerful to know we were coming to school to help and contribute in some way, to be a community with each other versus competing academically.

Our shared responsibility as teachers and students is not to criminalize each other. That leads to separation and distrust. We need to be one in community, to check in on our mental health because everyone is going through a lot. You never know who’s getting bullied or whose self-esteem is dangerously low. That’s ultimately how you reduce harm—you promote love.

[photos: Courtesy of Abbey Clements; and AFT]