Entering the fall semester, American University’s March for Our Lives chapter officially disaffiliated from the national organization and rebranded to a new campus organization with a similar mission: Guns Down DC.
March for Our Lives, a bipartisan organization that aims to educate students and the larger community about gun violence, has 300 chapters in high schools and colleges across the country. Up until this year, AU was the last college chapter left in the DMV area.
“We do some tutoring and some after-school programs to do activities with students to kind of keep them away from guns and things like that after school,” Dillon said.
According to the organization’s co-director, Waverly Zhao, a junior in the School of Public Affairs, the potential transition had been a topic of conversation all last year after several of the club’s main contacts at the national March for Our Lives organization were fired.
When the then-March for Our Lives AU’s executive board voted on it in August, the decision was unanimous. The board is made up of a treasurer, secretary, events chair, diversity, equity and inclusion chair, local affairs chair, social media manager and a freshman representative.
An affiliation with a national organization did have benefits. As a junior at AU and co-director of the organization for two years, Zhao recalls the reason she joined AU’s chapter of March for Our Lives was that she had participated in her state’s chapter in Iowa as a high school student. She wants to shape Guns Down DC’s reputation as a stand-alone organization.
Zhao and the organization's National and Local Events chair, Alex Dillon, a junior in SPA, said they felt the decision had been made with everyone's best interest in mind.
As affiliates with March for Our Lives, AU’s chapter was prompted to focus more on gun violence on a national scale. Now, as Guns Down DC Dillon said the organization can focus more on local efforts.
“We have a lot more freedom. Under March for Our Lives, there were a lot of restrictions,” Dillon said. “They were very adamant that we focus more on a national level, like participating in lobbying days.”
Since there is no national organization for Guns Down DC, the organization would be mostly exclusive to immediate communities, including AU.
“We want to support the community that we live in as AU students, since it will also have an impact on us for at least the next four years,” Zhao said.
According to Zhao, interpersonal gun violence has been increasingly prevalent, especially in the D.C. area, and Guns Down DC wants to tackle it.
However, this rebranding doesn’t mean that the club is changing entirely. According to Zhao, the club’s executive board wants to maintain much of what it was doing before the rebranding, continuing a student-centered approach.
Guns Down DC’s plans for the upcoming year include working with other local and national organizations, continuing community outreach through education and community service work, specifically with AU students.
“We wanna have a more hands-on approach to it. We felt like lobbying was a bit out of touch with what D.C. needed,” Dillon said. “There was kind of a hole in the space in D.C. … some of the local issues were being overlooked.”
Dillon said the club has not completely cut ties with the national March for Our Lives organization and still plans to work with them on upcoming projects, though the details have not been planned yet.
Guns Down DC also plans to work with Team ENOUGH, the youth arm of the Brady Organization, Dillon said.
The Brady Organization is a gun violence organization that focuses on nationwide policy change. It combines the first-hand experiences of survivors of gun violence with professional experts in the field. A member of their executive council, Ayaan Moledina, explained that their organization is also focused on local outreach.
“We empower young people to take action in their own communities. A lot of times they don’t have the resources or the knowledge to make a difference on their own, so we help them.” Moledina said.
According to Dillon, the Brady Organization has asked Guns Down DC to partner with them for a press conference on Capitol Hill, co-sponsored by March for Our Lives. They plan to attend this conference later in the year, the date of which is yet to be decided.
“We also have a large emphasis placed on suicide prevention. The majority of gun deaths in America are self-inflicted,” Moledina explained.
Both organizations have shifted their focus beyond mass shootings.
Dillon said Guns Down DC also wants to work with local high schools and middle schools in D.C. in the coming year.
“One of the things that we are potentially talking about is working with a group that uses weapons left on the streets and they turn them into everyday objects.” Dillon said.
This group is RAWtools, which, according to their website, advocates for gun reform in a variety of ways, including turning donated guns into gardening tools. Guns Down DC hopes to do a community garden day with RAWtools, according to Dillon.
With this new focus, Guns Down DC aims to bring its mission closer to home.
“We are still educating our community on gun violence but it's not going to be on Capitol Hill, it's going to be right here with local organizations,” Dillon said.
This article was edited by Payton Anderson, Abigail Hatting and Walker Whalen. Copy editing done by Sabine Kanter-Huchting, Emma Brown, Avery Grossman, Ariana Kavoossi and Ava Stuzin.
