Students at Saugus High School rally for safer campuses, tougher gun laws

SAUGUS, Calif. - Dozens of students walked out of class Thursday at Saugus High School -- site of a fatal campus shooting in 2019 -- to demand safer campuses and changes in gun laws in the wake of this week's shooting rampage at a Texas elementary school that killed 19 students and two teachers.

"Twenty-one people are now dead, and this is not our generation's fault," student Mia Tretta, a junior who was wounded in the 2019 shooting at Saugus High School, told reporters at the morning walkout. "This is the people who are making the laws and they are not listening to the fact that we are dying at our schools."

Five people were shot in the Saugus shooting on Nov. 14, 2019, with two of them dying. The 16-year-old gunman killed himself.

The Saugus students stood outside the campus Thursday morning, waving signs and chanting, calling for tougher gun laws and demanding safety on campus.

Walkouts were also held at other schools, including Locke High School in South Los Angeles and El Camino Real in Woodland Hills. Similar actions were held at other schools across the country in the aftermath of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

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Students at the various protests waved signs with slogans such as "Enough is enough," "It happened to me, it could happen to you" and "Education>guns."

"We don't want to ban guns, we want gun control and gun safety to make sure that guns don't end up in the wrong people's hands and people don't have ginormous guns they don't need," said one student at Saugus high.