Sam Fuentes is a veteran of March for Our Lives. Zoe Touray is a newcomer to the movement. Will it be different this time?

June 12, 2022 at 1:00 p.m. EDT Zoe Touray, left, who survived the Oxford High School shootings last fall, and Sam Fuentes, right, who was shot at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in 2018, prepare to go to the Capitol to pressure lawmakers to scrutinize of weapons. (Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post) The children who did not die are young adults now, and on Wednesday morning in Washington, D.C., gathered just before 9 a.m. in a hotel meeting room in the Capitol. The school shooting survivors had come from all over the country, each hoping that this time it would be different. “Are you Life?” Alexa Browning asked Zoe Touray, who was standing alone by the door, playing nervously with a cell phone wrapped in a Mickey Mouse case. “Yes,” the 18-year-old replied, smiling and extending her hand. This was her first trip away from home without an adult. He had just graduated from Oxford High, Michigan, where four students were killed in November, including one of Turay’s closest friends. He went to funerals after funerals, looking at open caskets of swollen faces that looked nothing like the children he knew. Browning opened a black envelope and removed a package of documents that read “MARCH FOR OUR LIVES” on one side and “END TO US” on the other. But none of the people who gave them the packages knew if that was true. Many of them have been here before. In 2018, survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, staged a demonstration that drew tens of thousands of protesters in DC. pass restrictions on gun ownership to protect children from slaughter in their schools. One of the most memorable who appeared was Sam Fuentes, then a Douglas officer, who a month earlier had been shot in the leg and hit in the face with shrapnel. At the time, Fuentes thought she was lucky. With tears and blood running from her eyes, she had seen two of her friends die. “Our mission is simple and our ambitions are unrivaled,” she shouted to a roaring crowd, so choked with nerves that she vomited on stage before finishing her speech. He had recited a poem he had written entitled “Enough”. But, of course, none of that was enough. Lawmakers who had asked to listen ignored them and the school shootings continued. Samantha Fuentes, an 18-year-old Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student who was shot in the leg and face, spoke at the March for Our Lives rally. (Video: The Washington Post) Now Fuentes, 22, had returned for a second run, but had long since lost the naive hope of those early days. Substantial progress, he knew that this time, would not be easy, if ever. Standing just outside the meeting room, she watched Browning explain their program to Turai, who had been recruited to help members of the congressional lobby and give a speech at an event that afternoon. In the four years since the massacre that led Fuentes to stand on the DC stage for the first time and Touray’s intention to do the same, there have been at least 130 school shootings, another 57 people killed and more than 115,000 children admitted to circle of survivors. 311,000 students have seen gun violence at school since Columbine Browning, a March for Our Lives policy contributor, went through the pages of the package, detailing all the information that Touray and others wanted to submit to lawmakers: universal background checks on arms buyers, our child protection law, a prohibition of weapons of attack. Turai chewed her lower lip. He did not really know about any of these things. “I will not talk much. “I’m nervous,” said Turai, who was intimidated and inspired by other activists. They were all so smart and determined. He could not have imagined that the authorities would not listen to them, especially since 19 fourth-graders in Uvalde, Texas were shot to death in May. Fuentes could have imagined it, though. He had given so many speeches to approved crowds, he had put pressure on so many offices decorated with US flags and promises of American excellence. “I try not to get tired,” said Fuentes, who still had shrapnel embedded in her leg and behind her right eye. But she had come to DC despite her growing cynicism, because she needed this community of survivors and the activism that helped her manage the trauma. Fuentes has been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, panic disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Some nights she wakes up sweaty, piercing, screaming. Touray had just started seeing a therapist, because the fear had changed who she was. At the Detroit airport the day before, he started panicking about what he would do if someone pulled a gun. He saw no diodes. She imagined she was being shot, she was dying alone. But, like Fuentes, he had found it that way something helped her ease her anxiety. So she ignored her terror and got on the plane. Now, at the hotel, Fuentes went to wear the blue “March for Our Lives” T-shirt, the black envelope with the speech points still open, and Touray found a quiet space on the other side of the room where she could study. all of them, hoping to find a question that would make a difference.

“The day that haunts me” Turai was walking behind the scenes, her forehead sweating. She was invited to speak at an Moms Demand Action event in front of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, but did not realize until she and Fuentes arrived that hundreds of people and dozens of cameras would be watching. “I really need you to advertise me that this rally is huge,” she texted her mother behind a tall black sign that read, “DO NOT LOOK AWAY.” At the microphone was Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Who had followed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Who had followed Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Who had followed Moms Demand founder Shannon Watts. He was one of the most important figures in the struggle for reform, as Turai had just learned. And now it was almost her turn. “I just got here and there are so many people and now I’m talking,” she wrote in another text, before her mom called. “Just calm down. It’s okay,” Vicky Brent-Touray told her. “You were destined for that.” Six months ago, she was sad and distraught, struggling to sleep despite melatonin and Benadryl. Touray had not thought much about the school shootings before hers. As a child, she rarely paid attention to the news and was only allowed to watch PBS Kids on weekdays. He had heard of Parkland, but knew almost nothing about it. After Oxford, Touraie was asked to talk about what she had been through at a state event. Her mother encouraged her to talk, and she did. Touray, who plans to study anthropology at North Carolina A&T State University, saw herself as a messenger of a message her classmates would never have the opportunity to convey. And so, as the summer heat rose to over 80, he refused to take off the black sweatshirt that bore each of their names: Madisyn Baldwin, Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre, Justin Shilling. “I want them up there with me,” Turai said after someone suggested she change her clothes. Fuentes understood. At the end of her speech on March 24, 2018, she led the crowd singing happy birthday to Nicholas Dworet, one of two friends who had died in her class. He would turn 18 that day. As Touray prepared to take the stage, repeating the lines in her mind, Fuentes sat away, under the shade of a white oak. The shrapnel that was buried in her muscles made it difficult to stand for a long time. He had to take breaks. Everything about these rallies left her in conflict. Seeing new young activists like Turai was both refreshing and frustrating, because he was part of a movement that had failed to end the crisis. He felt the same way when he saw old friends from other weapons security organizations. She liked the reunion, but what almost always brought them together was another massacre. “I think, as a collective, we are all very tired,” he said, between wires in a pen. Fuentes studied film at Hunter College in New York and worked as a jewelry wholesaler in Manhattan, but activism has long felt like her real job. He was represented by a news agency and, prior to the pandemic, traveled several times a month to speak to colleges and nonprofits. A few hours before flying to Washington, he gave an interview to ABC’s “Good Morning America”, which he referred to only as “GMA”, because he had been to it many times. Now a young woman holding a sign reading “Pro-Life Is Gun Laws” approached her and stared at her. “Are you Sam?” asked. “You’re from Parkland, right?” “Thank you very much for all your work,” he said. A few minutes later, a man with a clipboard and a headset led Touray to the stage. She stood on the podium and glanced at the speech on her phone. “November 29 was the last good day,” he said. “November 30th is the day that haunts me.” She described going to class after lunch and her friends hearing a sound that reminded them of popping balloons. They were shots. “We are sitting in the back of the room,” he recalled. “We talk, we send messages, we call, we cry. “We are waiting in terror, fearing for our lives, until the shootings end.” What Turai did not say: They had escaped through a window and ran. Her sister was killed at Oxford High. He refuses to let it go. “Nothing about it was easy. I was drowning. I’m floating now. “I want to be able to swim; not in a sea of ​​grief,” she said, before asking Congress to pass new laws that helped March for Our Lives executives work on the speech. “Save the next Madisyn. The next Justin. The next Tate ….