This article was first published on Waging Nonviolence.
Joaquin Oliver loved basketball, the music of Frank Ocean and his family. On February 14, 2018, only a few months before he was supposed to graduate high school, he was shot down with an AR-15 in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre. He was 17 years old.
The massacre became a turning point for the gun control movement, sparking conversations on bump stocks, background checks, and eliminating NRA money from politics. It also ignited nationwide school walkouts and the March for Our Lives, which became the largest youth-led demonstration in U.S. history, drawing nearly 1.2 million people from across the country.
