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Emboldened by Parkland, Newtown Students Find Their Voice

From the left, Tommy Murray, Jackson Mittleman, Natalie Barden and Jordan Gomes in front of a barn with the date of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn. Natalie’s brother Daniel was killed that day.Credit...Jessica Hill for The New York Times

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Last year, Natalie Barden heard an announcement about a meeting of the Junior Newtown Action Alliance, a club for high school students working to reduce gun violence.

Natalie, who is 16 and about to start her junior year on Monday, knew of the club, but didn’t know much about it. The announcement caught her attention. “I was like, ‘Well, why am I not in that club?’” she said, perched on a stool in her family’s kitchen in the village of Sandy Hook last week.

Natalie’s parents, Mark and Jackie Barden, have been active in gun violence prevention since their 7-year-old son, Daniel, was killed. Daniel was one of 20 first graders and six educators shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

More than five years after the Sandy Hook massacre, the first-grade students who survived are 11- and 12-year-olds entering seventh grade in middle school.

But there were 400 other students in the school the day of the shootings. The oldest — fourth graders at the time — are now in high school, and have gradually begun to realize the power they wield by speaking out. And in increasing numbers, Newtown’s teenagers are joining a network of young activists around the country who say they have had enough.

Those students remember the hourslong lockdown on Dec. 14, 2012. They knew something terrible had happened, but they did not know exactly what. They did not know if they were safe, or if they would see their families again.

Last fall, Natalie joined a handful of students at the first meeting of the Junior Newtown Action Alliance club, run by two seniors, Jackson Mittleman and Tommy Murray. She felt a little uncomfortable, she said — talking about guns and shootings and death is emotionally draining for a teenager who lost her brother in the Sandy Hook massacre. But she stuck with it.

The club had struggled to attract members; at times just a few students showed up to meetings, Jackson and Tommy said. (Tommy Murray’s mother, Po Murray, founded the Newtown Action Alliance after the shootings, and her children have been active in the junior club.)

In February, when 17 people were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Natalie said she knew she needed to take decisive steps. “I decided that I just needed to do more,” she said.

Natalie was not alone. About 100 students attended the Newtown High School club’s next meeting. Jackson and Tommy watched as the room filled. With a newly energized membership, they quickly delegated jobs. One early focus was finding ways to increase their presence on social media to bring attention to their activism and to educate other teenagers. A club member started an Instagram account called HumansOfNewtownCT that features people telling their own stories.

In Parkland, students took to the national stage almost immediately. They began lobbying lawmakers to tighten Florida’s gun laws and planned a coast-to-coast day of protests centered around the March for Our Lives in Washington that boosted activism among teenagers nationwide, including those touched by the Sandy Hook violence.

“That was definitely inspiring for me,” Natalie said. If the Parkland students could mobilize so quickly to demand change, even as their wounds were fresh, Natalie said she realized it was her turn, too.

“I should be able to, five years later, use my voice in that way as well,” Natalie said. She began talking with reporters who called, attended a Vogue Teen summit to talk about guns and wrote about her family’s loss.

The students in Connecticut began focusing on organizing voter-registration drives and encouraging their peers to vote for candidates who support stricter gun laws, a Newtown student and activist, Jenny Wadhwa, said in an essay for Vice last spring. “What people need to realize is that we’re not scared of mental illness or unarmed guards,” she wrote. “We’re scared of guns and inaction.”

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Clockwise from top left, Natalie, Tommy, Jordan and Jackson.Credit...Jessica Hill for The New York Times

Among the Newtown group’s goals: banning semiautomatic magazines that can hold dozens of bullets; closing loopholes in background check laws; and providing a route for courts and law enforcement to temporarily remove guns from people who pose a threat to themselves or others.

Newtown itself has shied away from its unwanted role as the poster child of mass school shootings.

Sandy Hook Elementary School was demolished months after the killings. Town leaders have encouraged the media to stay away on anniversaries, pleading for privacy. Students say teachers stick to a normal schedule each Dec. 14, as if it were a typical day.

But earlier this month, students from Parkland and teenagers who had joined the Road to Change bus tour as it crossed the country arrived in Newtown, their final stop. Ending their tour in Newtown felt important, said Jaclyn Corin, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. “Unfortunately, Newtown and Parkland are forever connected,” Jaclyn said.

The tour had included discussions with teenagers and victims of gun violence around the country, in city neighborhoods and in communities such as Aurora, Colo., and Las Vegas, the scenes of other mass shootings.

“I didn’t know the strength of my voice until I met other people,” Kyrah Simon, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who participated in the bus tour, said in an interview. “It’s so crazy and surreal to see how what happened in my school inspired people all over the world.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Emboldened by Parkland, Newtown Students Find Voice. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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