No student should fear for their life in their classroom. And yet, we do. Today’s students – the generation raised with lockdown drills and bullet-ridden headlines, the young adults who have been training on how to respond to a gunman since we were five years old – go to class each day aware that at any moment, a firearm could take their life in a place of learning.
Every single instance of gun violence, whether it be on a college campus, at an elementary school, a parade, a religious sight, or anywhere else, rocks the community it is nearest to, and sends ripples of pain throughout the country. We shouldn’t have to live or learn this way, and yet the lawmakers elected to represent and serve us are not doing enough to fix this terrifying reality.
As a student-run organization, Students Demand Action at UW-Madison knows the reality of fear all too well.
For us, the leadership of Students Demand Action at UW-Madison, fighting against this reality is at the front of our minds every single day. While political work may sometimes seem impersonal, there is nothing more personal to us than keeping our peers and ourselves safe from gun violence. We each became involved in the movement because of our own individual experiences with gun violence: from being a survivor of a mass shooting, being from the town of a school shooting, having to instruct first graders through a lockdown drill, and wanting to prevent more gun violence from touching our communities, we all have deeply personal reasons that motivate us to fight against gun violence on campus, in our community, and in the nation.
As we look towards our state-wide Advocacy Day, happening here in Madison on October 21, we want to share more about our mission as an organization and to urge our peers to get involved in advocating to keep our campus and our communities safe from firearm violence.
Students Demand Action is national, non-partisan, and student-led. We work to end gun violence through education, advocacy, and grassroots organizing, working to mobilize voters and motivate our legislators. Founded in the aftermath of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Students Demand Action has spent close to a decade working to ensure no more communities feel the pain caused by mass shootings, interpersonal gun violence, and firearm death.
Here at UW–Madison, we further our national mission in a Madison-focused way. In the past year, we have spoken at the state capitol in support of a bill to keep guns off college campuses, tabled on Library Mall in support of SDA-endorsed Justice Susan Crawford during the Spring 2025 Supreme Court Election, written to our local representatives encouraging them to act in support of Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’s gun safety budget measures, and teamed up with local organizations like Focused Interruption, a grassroots gun violence prevention organization. And this year, we’re ready to do so much more.
Wisconsin Advocacy Day is an annual, state-wide, Students Demand Action-created initiative promoting legislative action against gun violence. This year, Advocacy Day is on October 21. That day, we will be meeting with legislators at the state capitol to discuss policies that can keep our campus and our state safe from firearm violence.
This year, we’ll specifically advocate on behalf of AB10, a bipartisan bill which if passed would make gun safes exempt from sales tax, making safe storage more accessible, and on behalf of AB427, a bill aiming to expand the current ban of concealed carry of firearms on Wisconsin school grounds to include public and private college campuses in our state. Earlier this year we spoke on behalf of AB427, also known as the Guns Off Campus Bill, at a Capitol press conference, voicing our support for this school safety measure in an era of increased firearm violence on college campuses.
The fight doesn’t end with these bills, however. If you are an undergraduate student at UW–Madison interested in joining us in our fight to end firearm violence, on Advocacy Day and beyond, we would love to have you. For more information about our mission, our work, and our team, check our Instagram: @studentsdemanduw. From there, you can see what we’re up to, reach out to get involved, and stay up to date on our mission to end gun violence.
No matter how you choose to engage- or not engage- we want you to consider this: guns are the #1 killer of American children and adolescents. Whether or not you choose to engage with the fight against gun violence, gun violence is engaging with you.
