Students to work to register young voters

A day after graduating, a group of Florida high school shooting survivors announced they will spend their summer crisscrossing the country, expanding their grass-roots activism from rallies and schools walkouts to registering young voters to help accomplish their vision for stricter gun laws.

David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky, Jaclyn Corin and about two dozen other students who have become the faces and voices of bloodshed in American classrooms stood together Monday in matching black “Road to Change” T-shirts, holding placards at a park just down the street from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where 17 were killed on Valentine’s Day.

In the months since the shooting, the students have rallied hundreds of thousands across the country to march for gun reform, including a massive turnout in Washington, D.C., in March.

But the young activists say rallies won’t matter unless that energy is funneled into voting out lawmakers beholden to the National Rifle Association this November.

“This generation is the generation of students you will be reading about next in the textbooks. … These are students who are changing the game,” Kasky said. “It’s not just my friends and I from Stoneman Douglas High School. We are part of something so much greater. Students from all over the country are beginning to get up, rally, move in the right direction and realize just how important it is to exercise our freedom.”