Brown’s chapter of Students Demand Action — a national advocacy organization aiming to end gun violence — hosted its first weekly meeting of the semester last Wednesday. Since the Dec. 13 shooting at Brown, the club has nearly quintupled its membership, SDA@Brown co-leader Michael Citarella ’27 told The Herald.
For Citarella, the shooting at Brown hit particularly close to home.
Growing up about 10 miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School, Citarella said his drive to become an anti-gun violence activist emerged after the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first graders and six adults at the Connecticut elementary school.
While Citarella has spoken with victims of gun violence in the past, he said, experiencing the shooting at Brown changed his perspective.
“It’s never really the same until you’re in that environment,” he said. “Our biggest thing we can do is just provide that empathetic support that we now can.”
“I think that all people, especially young people, have a stake in preventing gun violence,” said Jonah Roberti ’28, SDA@Brown’s treasurer.
Over the next few months, SDA@Brown plans to organize protests, bring in speakers to discuss gun safety, forward artistic initiatives for students to “channel their feelings” and allow students to “talk directly to their legislators,” said Avery Redlich ’28, the group’s secretary.
“We have nearly an event a week planned straight through April,” she said. “The goal is just to give students a space to … grieve, to heal and to immediately demand action.”
Redlich added that though the group is “very committed” to following through with initiatives directly related to the December shooting, they plan to remain focused on their preexisting plans for the semester. Citarella pointed to the upcoming R.I. midterm elections, where the seats of several local legislators remain up in the air, as a potential place to champion gun violence prevention.
“Students Demand Action at Brown has always been multifaceted,” Redlich said. “We target these large-scale legislative initiatives, but also things directly on our campus that are more geared towards addressing lives lost, supporting survivors and building community.”
Citarella said that SDA@Brown has advocated for the passage of the Safe Storage for Firearms Bill in 2024, magazine capacity laws and an assault weapons ban. He added that members of the group hope to support more legislative change in the future.
“It’s horrific and tragic that we had to go through this on our campus,” Redlich said. “Now we can do the work to make sure nobody else has to go through that. We can prevent it from happening at the next school.”
Marat Basaria is a senior staff writer covering activism.
