Tretta’s been in touch with one group of fans from a nearby school, she adds, who want to start their own Students Demand Action chapter to help them with that process.
“It was great seeing how eager people were to kind of fight for what we believe in, what I’ve been fighting for for three years,” she recalls. “And then, of course, we got to see the show, which was amazing.”
Tretta says she is grateful to Styles and his team for championing this issue and highlighting the role of young people in the fight for gun safety. And, she continues, the people she spoke with at the concert also appreciated Styles’ decision to get involved in the fight against gun violence.
“Obviously, most of the people going to Harry Styles are around my age — not everyone, but a good majority. I think hearing from other people your age is much more powerful than hearing from someone older or just reading a tweet or seeing a post about the next shooting,” says Tretta. “I think it’s so much more powerful to have someone standing there in front of you who is doing something about this problem and realizing that you could too.”
Chloe Gayer, a Students Demand Action volunteer and fellow with the Everytown Survivor Network, decked out her car with information and drove roughly six hours from Iowa to Chicago to attend a Love on Tour show — her first concert ever.
“I got the text that asked if I wanted to go to Harry Styles, and I think my entire dorm building could hear me scream at the top of my lungs that I was very happy about it,” recalls Gayer, a student at Drake University. Of the partnership, she says, “It was amazing to be able to have an artist that I love as well as something that I am so passionate about.”
As a student survivor fellow, Gayer, who tells Teen Vogue she experienced abuse in a relationship that “involved firearms as a means of control,” shares her experience of domestic violence to empower other young people affected by gun violence and show her peers they’re not alone. She says she started advocating for gun safety when she was in eighth grade, after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. And she’s been involved with campus initiatives to prevent teen dating violence and advocated for the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which was signed by Biden last year.
Says Gayer, “It’s really powerful” that Styles decided to partner with Everytown. “He obviously knows who his audience is. The majority of us are Generation Z, a generation that has grown up surrounded by gun violence. I am a survivor of gun violence, but I also take into account that pretty much everyone in my generation has been affected by gun violence. We all grew up surrounded by mass shootings. I was eight years old when Sandy Hook happened, and so many others as I was growing up.”
