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Student Walkouts, Suspected Hate Crimes, An Island Lacking Power: The Short List

A student at the Ralph C. Mahar Regional School in Orange, Massachusetts, reads the names of 17 victims in last month's school shooting in Parkland, Florida. A chime was sounded after each name.
Jill Kaufman
/
NEPR
A student at the Ralph C. Mahar Regional School in Orange, Massachusetts, reads the names of 17 victims in last month's school shooting in Parkland, Florida. A chime was sounded after each name.

A big story this week was the student walkouts across the region and the country, on the one-month anniversary of the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Students have been calling on Congress for gun legislation to stop the sale of automatic weapons used by the military. Where do the walkouts go from here? Can gun control become a civil rights movement?

Sunday morning, Nantucket, Massachusetts, residents woke up to find racist graffiti defacing the island’s African-American history museum, which was once a church and a school for African-American children on the island.

And on Monday in Austin, Texas, two people were killed when package bombs were dropped off at their homes, both of them African-Americans. One of the victims was a high school senior. Investigators are not ruling out that the attacks were terrorist acts or hate crimes.

Also this week, a couple hundred people held a rally outside the headquarters of gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson in Springfield. The company is the manufacturer of the semi-automatic weapon used in the Parkland shooting. Some say the company should work with gun control advocates.

It is already illegal in most cases to possess an assault-style rifle in Massachusetts. But a Democratic candidate for governor, Jay Gozalez, also wants to make it illegal to manufacture the guns for commercial sale. He was also at the rally. 

And in Puerto Rico, there are many people still without power. On the mainland U.S., here in western Massachusetts and in Connecticut, many Puerto Ricans are still in flux about whether they’ll stay or return.

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Jill Kaufman has been a reporter and host at NEPM since 2005. Before that she spent 10 years at WBUR in Boston, producing "The Connection" with Christopher Lydon and on "Morning Edition" reporting and hosting. She's also hosted NHPR's daily talk show "The Exhange" and was an editor at PRX's "The World."
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