Lane Murdock | |
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Born | Lane Maxine Murdock April 3, 2002 |
Education | Ridgefield High School, Edinburgh Napier University |
Lane Maxine Murdock (born 3 April 2002) is an activist and founder of The National School Walkout. [1] [2]
Lane Murdock was born in 2002 in Texas. When she was four years old she moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut. [3] She attended Ridgefield High School. [2] The school is a 20-minute drive from Sandy Hook Elementary School, the site of the 2012 massacre in which 20 children and 6 staff members died. [4]
After the shooting in Parkland, Murdock created a petition on change.org asking people to protest the lack of responses that follow school shootings in America by participating in a walkout. The petition accumulated over 270,000 signatures. [5] [6] Murdock and fellow RHS students then set about organizing their nationwide walk-out with Indivisible. [7] [3]
The NationalSchoolWalkout Twitter account accumulated more than 100,000 followers in five days. [8] National School Walkout scheduled the nationwide walkout to take place on April 20, as it marked the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High school shooting. [1] [7]
The April 20 walkout organized by Murdock was set to last until the end of the school day, because the issue is one that needed to be ‘addressed [for] longer than 17 minutes’. [4] This was said in reference to the March 14 walkout which lasted for 17 minutes to mark the 17 lives lost at the Marjory Stone High School shooting, with students returning to their classrooms soon after. [6]
Murdock moved to Scotland in 2020, where she studied public relations at Edinburgh Napier University. [9] [10]
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is a public high school in Parkland, Florida, United States. Established in 1990 as part of the Broward County Public Schools district and named after the writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas, it was the only public high school in Parkland, serving almost the entire city as well as a small section of neighboring Coral Springs.
Ridgefield High School (RHS) is a public high school in Ridgefield, Connecticut, United States. It is part of the Ridgefield School District. It was ranked 119th in Newsweek's 2015 list of the top 1,600 high schools in America and 226th in U.S. News & World Report's 2012 list of the top 4,813 high schools.
On December 14, 2012, a mass shooting occurred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, United States. The perpetrator, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, shot and killed 26 people. 20 of the victims were children between six and seven years old, and the other 6 were adult staff members. Earlier that day, before driving to the school, Lanza fatally shot his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza killed himself with a gunshot to the head.
Public opinion on gun control in the United States has been tracked by numerous public opinion organizations and newspapers for more than 20 years. There have also been major gun policies that affected American opinion in the 1990s. Throughout these polling years, there are different gun control proposals that show promise for bipartisan action. Over the years listed there have been mass shootings, most notably school shootings, that have affected public opinion. There have also been a growth in states around the United States taking more drastic measures on gun control.
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The Parkland high school shooting was a mass shooting that occurred on February 14, 2018, when 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz opened fire on students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Miami metropolitan area city of Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others. Cruz, a former student at the school, fled the scene on foot by blending in with other students and was arrested without incident approximately one hour and twenty minutes later in nearby Coral Springs. Police and prosecutors investigated "a pattern of disciplinary issues and unnerving behavior".
X González is an American activist and advocate for gun control. In 2018, they survived the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history, and, in response, co-founded the gun-control advocacy group Never Again MSD.
Never Again MSD is an American student-led political action committee for gun control that advocates for tighter regulations to prevent gun violence. The organization, also known by the Twitter hashtags #NeverAgain, and #EnoughIsEnough, was formed by a group of twenty students attending Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD) in Parkland, Florida at the time of the deadly shooting in 2018, in which seventeen students and staff members were killed by the gunman, Nikolas Cruz, who was a 19-year-old former student of the school and was armed with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle. The organization started on social media as a movement "for survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting, by survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting" using the hashtag #NeverAgain. A main goal of the group was to influence that year's United States mid-term elections, and they embarked on a multi-city bus tour to encourage young people to register to vote.
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Cameron Marley Kasky is an American activist and advocate against gun violence who co-founded the student-led gun violence prevention advocacy group Never Again MSD. He is notable for helping to organize the March for Our Lives nationwide student protest in March 2018. Kasky is a survivor of the February 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Kasky was included in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People of 2018".
In 2018, protests against gun violence in the United States increased after a series of mass shootings, most notably at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14 that year. An organized protest in the form of a national school walkout occurred on March 14. March for Our Lives was held on March 24. Another major demonstration occurred April 20, 2018.
Alexander Blake Wind is an American student activist against gun violence. A survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and a founding member of the Never Again MSD movement, he is a critic of politicians who are supported by the National Rifle Association of America. Wind was one of five Stoneman Douglas students featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2018.
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Sarah Chadwick is an American activist against gun violence and one of the leaders of the Never Again MSD activist movement.
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Lauren Elizabeth Hogg is an American author and activist against gun violence. She survived the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 and after became a co-founder of March for Our Lives and advocates against gun violence. She is the younger sister of gun control activist and former Marjory Stoneman Douglas student David Hogg. She graduated from MSD High School in 2021, three years after David.
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