‘We have to be that change’: UNC students demand action after campus shooting
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UNC Shooting
UNC professor Zijie Yan was fatally shot Aug. 28, 2023, in Chapel Hill, NC,, prompting an hourslong lockdown and questions about campus security. Yan’s graduate student has been charged with his murder. Here is ongoing News & Observer coverage about the killing, the campus response and the aftermath.
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The anger and frustration on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus was palpable Wednesday as hundreds of students demanded during a rally that lawmakers address gun violence across North Carolina and the rest of the country.
Holding up a large banner that read, “This is our reality,” students from different groups, including March For Our Lives and Students Demand Action, took turns talking about the fear and panic they and their friends felt on Monday as the entire university went on lockdown while police searched for an armed man.
“In a matter of seconds, we went from taking notes, walking in the quad, being at home, to being forced to run, barricade the doors; there’s nothing normal about returning to school tomorrow,” said Kyle Lumsden, a volunteer with UNC Students Demand Action. “There’s nothing normal about hearing from people, ‘Thoughts and prayers,’ and the continuous idea that we cannot prevent these tragedies.”
The lockdown that students, faculty and staff were forced into Monday ended after authorities arrested Tailei Qi, a 34-year-old graduate student at UNC’s Department of Applied Physical Sciences, later charging him with shooting and killing his faculty adviser, Zijie Yan.
Just over 48 hours later, the university is preparing to return to normal operations. Classes are set to resume on Thursday. Before that, UNC held a vigil on Wednesday night for Yan, an associate professor who joined the faculty in 2019. Another vigil was held for Yan on Tuesday.
Shooting threats not new for many students
Outside UNC’s South Building on Wednesday, the large crowd that had gathered repeated Yan’s name to remember the professor, who has been described by colleagues as an enthusiastic scientist and an outgoing, kind friend.
Several students who spoke at the rally lamented the fact that for many of them, the fear of an active shooter situation was nothing new.
“Our entire lives, as a generation, we’ve been told to run, hide and fight,” said David Hogg, a survivor of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that claimed 17 lives in 2018.
Hogg, who co-founded the group March For Our Lives in response to the Parkland shooting, asked people in the crowd to raise their hands if they had heard those instructions while growing up in school.
Several students raised their hands. One student held up a sign that said Monday was her second shooting. Another student, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, spoke about having to evacuate the state fair a few years ago when a series of shots rang out. She never went back to the fair again, she said.
“We’ve asked for too long, and waited for too long to make this change, and we have to be that change,” Hogg said, adding that it was time for more young people that have grown up intimately aware of the danger of mass shootings and other gun violence to run for office themselves.
“If they won’t change the gun laws here in North Carolina, guess what, it’s time to change the government,” Hogg said.
“We need to refuse to hide from the responsibility that we have to protect future generations,” Hogg added. “We need to refuse to listen to the people that say to us, ‘Oh, you’re too emotional to be talking right now, what happened just happened one time,’ when this happens every single day in America.”
Several calls to go to polls
The renewed push for stronger gun safety laws in light of the February 2018 school shooting in Parkland has seen success in some states and at the federal level. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — which was supported by several Republicans, including North Carolina U.S. Sens. Thom Tillis and Richard Burr — provided states with incentives to enact red flag laws, and allocated resources for school safety and mental health care.
In Raleigh, however, proponents of stricter gun laws and supporters of Second Amendment rights remain far apart when it comes to policy.
Democrats in the General Assembly have proposed creating a red flag law and adopting universal background checks. Republicans have touted this year’s elimination of the state’s permit law for buying handguns as a commonsense step to protect gun rights. It was the first bill the new GOP supermajority enacted over a veto from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.
During Wednesday’s rally, students denounced the pistol permit law repeal and urged the rest of the student body to get involved in the political process, with the university’s chapter of College Democrats setting up a table to help people register to vote.
State Sen. Graig Meyer, a Democrat who represents Chapel Hill, said that lawmakers will return to Raleigh during the week of Sept. 11 to vote on the state budget and other major bills, and that he wanted to see the students who showed up to the rally make their voices heard at the legislature as well.
North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton, meanwhile, said that Republican lawmakers weren’t taking Monday’s shooting seriously.
“You need to know that they are afraid of movements like this, and every single one of you standing here in front of us right now and behind me right now, of your power in this election cycle, and every single one after,” Clayton said.
This story was originally published August 30, 2023 at 5:49 PM with the headline "‘We have to be that change’: UNC students demand action after campus shooting."
