This story was originally published by TheStatehouseFile.com
By Schyler Altherr
TheStatehouseFile.com
February 10, 2025
Hoosier high-school students arrived at the Indiana Statehouse Monday morning to protest gun violence. These students have grown up in a time when the leading cause of death among children comes as the result of a gun.
Vivian Baker is one such student who fears gun violence in her high school of North Central. At the Statehouse, she told a story of personally experiencing a school shooting false alarm.
“I was hiding under the librarian’s desk in my middle-school library thinking there was actually an active shooter in my building,” said Baker. “I was terrified to know that it is a reality for students, and that’s something I thought was a reality for me.”
With gun-related violence claiming 600 lives a day in the U.S. and last year alone seeing 83 school shootings, Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action, the biggest grassroots anti-gun violence organization in the country, gave Hoosiers a chance to speak directly with lawmakers about gun violence and to make their presence known in the halls of the capitol.
The event was broken into two parts. First there were guest speakers who shared personal testimony and advice with the young crowd about how to stop the rise in gun violence. The second part was when the 240 registered people attended 50 meetings with lawmakers from their respective districts.
Danyette Smith, the director of domestic violence for the City of Indianapolis, gave a harrowing personal testimony about her own traumatic endurance of domestic abuse to the crowd.
“I stand to ask legislators to require abusers to turn in their guns while under a protection order or after a conviction,” said Smith. “Meeting families of those who have lost loved ones after a protection order was graded or a case was filed but the guns were never taken away has been devastating.”
Cade Smithson, a Students Demand Action leader and a freshman at the University of Southern Indiana, also spoke to the crowd of advocates.
“Let us say, years from now, that we stood up, we spoke out, and we made our schools in our entire state a safer place for all,” he said.
Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action, set the tone for how everyone should interact with the lawmakers when they met with them.
“Now is not the time to retreat, it is the time to get more creative, more strategic, more relentless,” she said.
Sen. Andrea Hundley, D-Indianapolis, talked to TheStatehouseFile.com after her speech to the mostly teen audience.
She offered suggestions to the young advocates on what they should say to Indiana lawmakers.
“What are they [the lawmakers] afraid of?” said Hundley. “In terms of creating some of these common sense pieces: strengthening our background checks, strengthening our laws around storage safety.
“I would also ask them who funds their campaigns because we always say follow the money, and I want to know how much money they are getting from the gun lobby.”
These conversations with lawmakers do not always go as expected. Last year, The Statehouse File broke a national story when it reported that Rep. Jim Lucas, R-Seymour, showed a group of Burris High School students at the event his gun in his holster—to swift backlash. Reached on Monday, Lucas maintained his innocence in the controversy.
“I was accused of brandishing my weapon, threatening students, and nothing could have been further from the truth, but that’s what the media ran with, and that’s the kind of messaging that Moms Demand Action wants; they want sensationalism,” said Lucas.
A bipartisan bill for which Students Demand Action advocated Monday, HB 1597, would provide taxpayers a break for buying a gun safe. But legislation in the past couple years has loosened gun restrictions in Indiana.
Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith responded with his thoughts on those at the Statehouse protesting gun violence.
“The founders didn’t draft the Second Amendment for hunting, they wrote it to ensure that we the people would always have the power to stand against tyranny,” he said in a text statement. “A well-armed citizen isn’t just a free citizen, he is the last line of defense.”
Despite those in attendance knowing that most of Indiana’s lawmakers share similar sentiment, they marched up to the offices of senators and representatives anyway. TheStatehouseFile.com got a chance to sit in on one of the meetings between a group of Indianapolis mothers and students and Rep. Carey Hamilton, D-Indianapolis.
The meeting was calm, and there was little blame for either party. The question asked the most was, “What can I do to help?”
Hamilton said Democrats intend to look to the year 2030 for redistricting in order to get the votes to have a real conversation about gun laws in the legislature.
Two advocates, Marcia Hall and Susan DeVoe, gave insight into how much being able to meet with their representative meant.
“I think it’s a great feeling because we know she is somebody who is going to listen,” said Hall, “but the majority—we don’t feel that way a majority of the time.”
Schyler Altherr is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.
