More than 100 students and community members’ bodies lay crumpled across the Capitol rotunda Sunday during a die-in held in protest of last week’s gun violence nationwide.
The die-in, which was organized by Middleton and Madison-area high school students, lasted 10 minutes, in honor of each of the victims injured in shootings in Wisconsin and Maryland in the past week, as well as the 600 people who die from gun violence every year in Wisconsin.
Last Wednesday, a gunman opened fire in his workplace and injured four co-workers. Later, police revealed that his gun licence had been revoked several years ago after he made threatening comments about committing a mass shooting.
That shooting was one of three gun-related incidents that occurred on Wednesday in Madison alone. On Thursday, a disgruntled warehouse employee in Maryland brought a gun to work and killed four of her coworkers.
Organizers said it was both an opportunity for activism and community healing.
“The shooting hit pretty close to home for us. We experienced the lockdown, a lot of us were really frustrated that it happened,” said Max Prestigiacomo, a Middleton High School senior and protest organizer. “There were multiple shootings on that day. We were like, this has got to stop, again. The point of doing the die-in was to have a more dramatic impact.”
For Prestigiacomo, making an impact means sending an appeal to the state’s lawmakers for tighter gun control measures, including universal background checks, raising the minimum age to purchase a firearm and implementing a 48-hour waiting period after purchasing a gun.
Student protesters demanded these changes, and said they hope the die-in warns lawmakers that a “youth vote” movement is building.
“The youth vote is coming and if these politicians don't realize that this is coming, they’re going to get voted out in November and every November after,” Prestigiacomo said. “Hopefully we can use this to lobby and get the long awaited gun legislation we have been waiting for.”
Prestigiacomo said he was inspired in part by the student-activists who emerged after the Parkland High School last winter in Parkland, Florida.
“We’ve experienced this through our peers,” Prestigiacomo said “On social media, we witnessed what the Parkland students had to say and we have seen this whole epidemic of gun violence go down.”
