When he was a junior, a student had planned a shooting at another high school in the community but was stopped by his grandmother, who discovered the plans and turned him in. Then during his current senior year at Mukilteo’s Kamiak High School, there was an incident at a football game where someone fired shots into the air. Coupled with the mass shootings at high schools around the country, Battle said there’s a cumulative impact that’s created a culture of fear for students.
“It’s not OK when gun violence has defined a generation,” he told a crowd of initiative supporters gathered at an Election Night party at Seattle’s Edgewater Hotel
Wanting to do more than live in fear, he and his friends helped start a nonprofit, We Won’t Be Next. And though he wasn’t even old enough to vote this election, he also volunteered with the Initiative 1639 campaign, knocking on doors and calling voters in an effort to pass a suite of new, more stringent gun control measures in Washington.
The work of teens like him and others in support of the
