Laura Dern says her daughter and her friends are proposing a mass school walkout after the Uvalde shooting
‘What if we just said: kids in America aren’t going to school, because schools aren’t safe until you change gun laws in this country?’ said actor
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Your support makes all the difference.Laura Dern has said that her daughter and her friends are proposing a mass walkout at their school following the mass shooting in Uvalde last month.
On 24 May, 19 children and two teachers were killed after a teenage gunman went on a shooting rampage at Robb Elementary school in Texas.
Jurassic World Dominion star Dern has since revealed that her daughter Jaya, 17 – who she shares with musician ex-husband Ben Harper along with a son, Ellery, 20 – has proposed a walkout in protest against gun laws.
“What if we just said: kids in America aren’t going to school, because schools aren’t safe until you change gun laws in this country?” Dern said to The Guardian.
She added: “There has never, ever been a world where any Democrat or liberally minded politician or caring conservative parent said: ‘We are gonna take everybody’s guns.’ So they created a story. The narrative is: ‘They’re gonna take our guns!’
“And it’s been feeding American culture all these years. And now we have weekly mass shootings.”
She continued: “No boy with mental health history – no human being – should ever be able to go into a store and legally buy an AR-15 and 300 rounds of ammunition.”
The 18-year-old shooter, Salvador Ramos, had one 30-round magazine loaded into the AR-15-style assault rifle he used during the massacre.
He had another six magazines loaded into a tactical vest he was wearing, as well as 15 more loaded magazines in a backpack later discovered by police.
Dern is not calling for a ban on all guns. She said: “You can have a hunting rifle and you can have guns to protect your family or whatever, but there are still profound ways we can effect change so that semiautomatic and automatic weapons and no background checks are not a part of our country.”
The actor recently reprised her role as Dr Ellie Sattler in Jurassic World Dominion. Read The Independent’s two-star review here.
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