BOISE, Idaho — The first time Kate Stevens remembers having an active shooter drill in school, she was in second grade.
In ninth grade, Stevens, now a senior at Boise High, said one of her teachers, who she described as “kind of a jokester,” had corn cans and bug spray in the classroom. The teacher told students if there was an active shooter, that was their line of defense. They’d throw the cans and spray the bug spray.
“The first thing we should be thinking about when we walk into school and when we walk into a classroom is not, ‘Oh, am I going to die today?’ “ Stevens told the Idaho Statesman. “It should be, ‘What am I going to learn?’ “
Simon Richardson, now a junior at Boise High, remembers having a lockdown in fourth grade because there was a man outside his school with a gun, he said.
“I can still remember (it) today and how scary that was thinking that I could die or my classmates could be injured,” he said. “And I was so little. … That really sticks with me to this day, that we were so powerless.”
Students in high school have grown up with the idea that someone could come into their school with a gun at any point. It is something they have been learning about and preparing for since they were young.
Now, they are trying to take steps to change that.
Stevens, Richardson and a group of Boise-area high school students on Idaho’s March for Our Lives board are drafting legislation to require licensing for minors to purchase weapons. It’s a small step, they said, to eventually achieving the organization’s bigger goal: ending gun violence.
The hope is that it’s a bipartisan bill that will help prevent suicides, school shootings and other forms of gun violence. The aim is to slow down the process minors go through to buy a gun, so students in the midst of a mental health crisis can’t as easily access a firearm, Stevens said. The group is working with lawmakers to draft the bill.
“We don’t want students to come to school and be able to shoot other students,” said Stevens, the state director of the board. “It’s just an issue that shouldn’t be an issue.”
What do Idaho’s gun laws say now?
Minors younger than 18 in Idaho can’t buy or possess firearms unless they have written permission from a parent or guardian, or are accompanied by a parent or guardian.
“It shall be unlawful to directly or indirectly sell to any minor under the age of eighteen (18) years any weapon without the written consent of the parent or guardian of the minor,” Idaho law says.
Children under 12 in possession of a weapon must be accompanied by an adult, according to the law.
Children and teens younger than 18 can’t be in possession of a handgun, fully automatic weapon or sawed-off shotgun “regardless of parental consent except as specifically provided.” Exceptions — which don’t apply to handguns — can include taking part in a class or competition, or being on private property.
Stevens said the current laws make it so that kids who don’t have firearm safety training can handle deadly weapons.
“You can be 12, and go down to your Walmart as long as your parent is with you, and buy a deadly weapon that you don’t have adequate safety training with, and operate it legally,” she said.
Students also said the laws around concealed carry are inadequate, and reflect that Idaho’s gun laws for minors are part of a bigger problem. It’s not an issue the students are trying to change now, as people younger than 18 can’t legally carry a concealed weapon.
But the students wanted to show the steps people need to go through to get the licenses are, in their opinion, too easy.
So several students on the March for Our Lives board completed the concealed weapons course and finished it within a matter of minutes. To get a concealed carry license, people need to be able to “demonstrate that they are familiar with firearms,” according to the Idaho Sheriff’s Association website.
“What we did was we took our concealed weapons permit class,” said Shiva Rajbhandari, a junior at Boise High. “It took me 5 minutes and 31 seconds to complete.”
What does the draft legislation say?
The legislation the students are drafting, which is still in the early stages, would require minors to go through a few steps before they can buy a firearm.
Those include submitting an application for a license from the sheriff’s office and exhibiting familiarity with a firearm by showing proof of in-person training on firearm safety by an approved instructor. Idaho does not have licensing requirements to purchase guns.
The legislation is still being drafted, so some of the provisions could change, Stevens said.
Students hope the bill isn’t made political.
“Mental health is an issue that should not be politicized,” Stevens said. “We’re trying to make it so that we have support from both Republicans and Democrats in the Legislature.”
The group said any amount of friction they can add to the process of minors buying or possessing a gun will help.
“Especially common-sense things that everyone agrees on,” Rajbhandari said. “Let’s implement those. And I mean, see how it goes. We’re kind of at rock bottom right now.”
Students also cited research showing how licensing can reduce gun homicides.
Legislation passed in Connecticut in 1995 that required a permit or license, including a background check, to buy a handgun was “associated with a 28% decrease in firearm homicide rates and a 33% decrease in firearm suicides from 1996 to 2017,” according to a study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
That law was not focused on minors, but it did have some similar provisions to what students are putting forward, including requiring people who wanted to own a handgun to apply for a permit in-person and receive at least eight hours of “approved handgun safety training.”
“I don’t understand why children … need a license to drive a car but they don’t need a license to operate a firearm when they’re both deadly machines,” Stevens said.
The students are working with state Sen. Melissa Wintrow, a Boise Democrat, who said she wants to help them understand the process, regardless of how hard it might be to get this legislation passed.
Wintrow said students are still doing research for the legislation. It’s not the first time, Wintrow said, that she’s been contacted by students concerned over gun laws.
“Our state does have some of the most liberal, lax gun laws,” Wintrow said.
It’s not unreasonable, she said, to require safety training for kids to use deadly weapons.
It could be an uphill battle, though. Wintrow said she has presented other bills before this that deal with firearms, but they didn’t become law.
Students said they’re not trying to take away people’s guns. They’re just trying to make it safer for people to own them.
“We’re trying to make it a safer process, we’re trying to make it take a little bit more time,” Stevens said.
Because it is so easy to get a firearm in Idaho, Stevens said, people could access one while going through a mental health crisis, making suicides, homicides and avoidable accidents more likely. In Idaho, 19 children and teens on average die by gun every year, and more than 80% of those are suicides, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.
“It’s really important to put a kink in that process,” Stevens said. “And make sure that kids who are operating firearms do have adequate safety training.”
The students also said they shouldn’t have to feel unsafe at school. Rajbhandari said every time there is a lockdown at school, he thinks back to the text messages and phone calls students made to their parents or loved ones during past school shootings.
“Why are we allowing this to happen when there’s common-sense laws that can be passed to prevent it?” he said.
The 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a gunman killed 17 people, made it even more clear to Rajbhandari how real of a threat this is.
“The place where we go to feel safe, the place where we go to learn, we can be killed,” he said. “Our friends can be killed.”
Last school year, a sixth grade girl injured three people in a shooting at Rigby Middle School in East Idaho. Rajbhandari said he wants gun legislation that could help prevent that.
“That’s going to stay with them their entire lives … that’s not something you can change,” he said. “When we’re saying we’re cognizant of mental health, that looks like putting barriers up to prevent people with mental health issues from getting a gun and using it when they’re having an issue.”
It also includes building up institutional support, he said, such as having enough counselors in schools to help students.
The pandemic has made that even more important. Doctors and mental health providers reported seeing an increase in kids experiencing anxiety and depression over the past year and a half, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association last month declared an emergency in children’s mental health.
“Sensible gun legislation is the cheapest, most effective way to reduce suicide and reduce homicides,” Rajbhandari said. “So why not do it?”
This bill is just a “baby step,” Stevens said. But it’s a start.
“Baby steps are what we’re doing right now to hopefully get to bigger goals,” she said, “which is just to help gun violence prevention in Idaho.”
