MCPS Students Partake In 'National School Walkout Day'

BETHESDA, MD — Two months after the deadly rampage at a high school in Parkland, Florida, students across the country, including in Montgomery County, walked out of class Friday. The event has been dubbed the "National Day of Action Against Gun Violence in Schools."

Montgomery County Public School students showed their support in various ways.

Hundreds of students sat silently for 19 minutes outside of the White House — one minute for every year since the Columbine shooting. They then marched to the Capitol.

Other students placed nearly 200 white t-shirts on a fence outside of Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in honor of 2018's gun victims.

Each shirt says the name of a student, their age and when they were killed. The installation faces East-West Highway and is visible to cars driving by.

Students also hung 12 orange shirts on the front path to the school to honor the Columbine shooting victims.

“We’re all working for common-sense gun legislation, but we didn’t want to forget the everyday violence that is prevalent throughout communities and our schools,” Emily Schrader, who organized the art installation, told WTOP.

April 20 marks the 19th anniversary of the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. In that shooting, two students killed 12 of their peers and a teacher before killing themselves following a shootout with police.

SEE RELATED: Montgomery County Students Walk Out, March For Gun Control In DC

“It’s really upped my paranoia,” Hannah Weisman, 18, a senior at Walt Whitman High School told The Washington Post. “We’ve gotten bomb threats, we do these active shooter drills. But it just feels so much more real now. It could happen here.”

Columbine also inspired the gunman at The Mall in Columbia, who killed two people and himself in 2014. In the months leading up to it, police said he showed "a particular fascination with the Columbine shooting," which he researched until the day before he opened fire at the Columbia mall on Jan. 24, 2014.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)