Walkout Sows Unity, and Discord, in Montana

Plans for the student walkouts Wednesday, when tens of thousands of people left their classrooms to protest gun violence, had stirred controversy for weeks in Montana, where the gun ownership rate outranks that in nearly every other state. In Billings, the state’s most populous city, parents threatened to ground students who left their classrooms. And organizers of a walkout from Billings West High School changed a call for “gun reform” on their Facebook page to one for “school safety.”

In the end, there were walkouts at three Billings high schools. At Billings West, administrators cleared the snow on the front lawn and hundreds of young people in a school of 1,800 came streaming out of their classrooms.

Two Billings West students share why they walked out — or stayed in class.

He had seen coverage of mass shootings at other schools, and he initially considered participating in the walkout, to protest “the evil that is almost stirring within our country.”

But as he watched the students organize over several weeks, he said, he realized that “some of the crowd would be walking out for the wrong reasons.”

They wanted to skip class, he said. They wanted to “fraternize.” And some students were calling for an outright ban on firearms like the AR-15.

Brown is in favor of background checks. He said he was in favor of waiting periods for some weapons but not of a ban on the AR-15, since he thinks that would “infringe on the Second Amendment.”

He said that he realized his fellow students want to stop gun violence, but that he didn’t think they had the right answers. He believed that his school needed to bring in another armed guard, and that it should allow teachers and students with proper licenses to bring firearms to school.

When the walkout began at 10 a.m. Wednesday, he sat in his English class as more than half of his classmates left.

“It was almost foolhardy,” he said of the walkout. “To me it was a demonstration of a lot of our students here trying to represent that they believe they can make a change — but a lot of them don’t know what that change is yet. To me they aren’t quite ready and they don’t know where to start.”

Another student approached him with the idea of the March 14 walkout. A Facebook page went up, calling for “gun reform.” Then the backlash began. Adults began harassing him on Facebook, he said. Students balled up protest flyers and threw them in his face. His group changed the protest’s focus, he said, to “school safety.”

Sholar was not sure how many people would show up, but he walked out anyway. “I own a gun; my dad has a shotgun that I can use,” he said. “But I just don’t understand why we need military-grade weapons in our arsenal.”

Hundreds of students gathered for the protest, he said. They joined hands and read the names of the Parkland victims.

“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said of his critics, who were mostly adults. “Times have changed since they were in high school. We’re a lot more politically active and involved in Montana than a lot of the people who grew up here.”

Sholar went on: “They don’t have to grow up every day with the possibility of a person coming in with a gun. That’s not on their mind. But it’s on every high school student’s mind.”