‘Keep us safe’: Iowa students protest bill allowing guns in school, college parking lots

DES MOINES — Seven-year-old Collins Montgomery Peyton, a first-grader from Des Moines, held a sign that read: “I’m tired of being scared at school!”

The sign implores Iowa lawmakers to “think of us when you do your jobs” and ends with a polite plea of “keep us safe, please.”

Collins was among a group of about 50 Iowa students and gun safety advocates who held a rally Monday in the Iowa Capitol Rotunda to protest a bill that passed the Iowa House that would further loosen Iowa's gun laws, including allowing gun owners to have a firearm in their vehicle on school and college grounds.

Ankeny High senior Jemma Bullock, 18, said she prays before walking into the school building every day that she doesn’t become another victim of a shooting. She cited an incident last fall where a student brought an unloaded gun to an Ankeny middle school.

“I say, ‘Please, please, not me today,’” Bullock said. “ … I’m freaking terrified.”

Luke Rowley, 18, a senior at Valley High in West Des Moines, recounted he and other classmates being frightened by the sound of a balloon popping days after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, using an AR-15-style rifle he purchased days after his 18th birthday. An additional 17 people were injured in the mass shooting.

"I'm not afraid of a trans kid in the bathroom, I'm afraid of a freaking gun!“ Rowley shouted into a bullhorn, referring to a measure recently signed into law by Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds that bans transgender students in K-12 schools from using the bathroom, locker room or changing facility that matches their gender identity.

The students staged a “die-in” in the Capitol Rotunda and led chants of “enough is enough,” “protect kids, not guns” and “We don’t want your thoughts and prayers. We want policy and change.”

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The death rate of America’s children and teens rose between 2019 and 2021, with gun-related deaths representing the largest share of the increase by far, according to reporting by Stateline based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

The number of children and teens killed by gunfire in the United States increased 50 percent between 2019 and 2021, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest annual mortality statistics from the CDC.

Homicide was the largest single category of gun deaths among children and teens in 2021, accounting for 60 percent of the total that year, according to Pew Research. It was followed by suicide at 32 percent and accidents at 5 percent.

Guns rose to become the leading cause of death for U.S. children and teens in 2020, surpassing car crashes, according to an analysis of CDC data by The New England Journal of Medicine.

Monday’s rally was organized by March for Our Lives Iowa, a student-based organization founded after the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Fla., and Iowa WTF, a coalition of high school students that fights “discriminatory legislation.”

The groups, in a statement, worry the “harmful legislation” will “perpetuate ongoing gun violence in the state” by loosening already lax Iowa gun laws and allowing firearms to become even more accessible in locations that are common mass shootings targets.

“Our legislators claim to be concerned about protecting the innocence of our children, but ignore student activists across this state as we plead for them to protect us from gun violence,” said Hannah Hayes, a junior at Des Moines Roosevelt High and member of March for Our Lives Iowa.

Anyone legally allowed to carry a firearm would be allowed to keep a weapon in their locked vehicle in the parking lots of schools, public universities, jails, prisons, courthouses and other lots operated by the state, counties or cities, under House File 654. The bill also would allow a person to carry a handgun in a car if dropping off or picking up a student, staff member or other person at a school. It also applies to people who are making deliveries to the school.

It prohibits Iowa’s community colleges and regent universities from enforcing policies that bar concealed dangerous weapons on campus grounds when the weapons are locked in a personal vehicle.

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Rep. Steven Holt, a Republican from Denison and the bill’s floor manager in the House, rebuffed claims the bill would make schools less safe and result in more guns around children. He said the people who would be allowed to have guns in their cars on school grounds would be only those with a valid permit to carry handguns — meaning they've passed a background check and undergone training.

“It fails to understand what is at the heart of school shootings, which is mental illness,” Holt said of the protest. He stressed firearms would still not be allowed inside schools.

The Iowa Firearms Coalition, a gun-rights advocacy group, argues that “signs and rules alone do not create ‘gun-free zones,’ but rather free-fire zones for criminals who wish to harm innocent people.”

A companion firearms bill, Senate File 543, is active in the Iowa Senate.

Comments: (319) 398-8499; tom.barton@thegazette.com