(NEW YORK) — Drew Spiegel was preparing to march in the 2022 Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park when gunfire rang out.
“In that short time span, seven people died, 48 more [were] injured,” the 19-year-old told ABC News. “I texted my parents that I might not be coming home from the Fourth of July parade. And my life forever changed.”
For more than a year after the shooting, Spiegel didn’t talk about it. That changed when he got to college and encountered the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
“They asked me straight up like, ‘Are you a survivor of gun violence?’ ” he said. “And I was like, no, but technically I was at a mass shooting. And they were like, so then yes.”
The U.S. sees 43,000 fatal shootings every year, and 120 people are fatally shot every day, according to Angela Ferrell-Zabala, the executive director of Moms Demand Action, an Everytown subsidiary group.
“This is bigger than a mass shooting problem, it’s a gun violence epidemic,” Spiegel said, citing the July assassination attempt and apparent September attempt on former President Donald Trump, who won a second term in the White House on Tuesday, as evidence of the problem’s scale.
“If Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, is not safe from gun violence, then nobody is,” he said.
Now, Spiegel is sharing his story with people who may have different opinions than him.
“The change we’re fighting for, is not mutually exclusive with the Second Amendment. They can coexist,” he told ABC News. “We can have a country where people are allowed to have guns and also a country where you don’t have to worry about going to school.”
But he isn’t just thinking in terms of the next four years — he’s looking at how the laws made in the coming decades could save lives.
He’s found an ally in Rep. Maxwell Frost, who won election in Florida’s 10th Congressional District in 2022 and won reelection on Tuesday. The 27-year-old Democrat is also a survivor of gun violence and was previously the national organizing director for gun control advocacy group March For Our Lives.
That movement didn’t result in gun control legislation getting passed, but Frost accepts that change takes time.
“The way you measure the success of a movement is, you see the seeds are planted in people,” Frost told ABC News. “I’m the first person from that movement to be in Congress. That’s a win, right? And then we got the Office of Gun Violence Prevention[in 2023]. That’s a win.”
However, Frost warned ABC News in August that he foresees this progress being rolled back.
“If Donald Trump wins this election, one of the things he’s going to do on Day One is get rid of the office completely. Get rid of it,” he said. “This office is helping to save lives across the entire country. So getting rid of the office literally means more people will die due to gun violence.”
With Trump returning to the White House in January, it’s unclear how much progress gun control will make. In 2018, the Trump administration banned bump stocks, which allow guns to essentially operate as automatic weapons. However, the Supreme Court struck down that ban in June.
“When I’m back in the Oval Office, no one will lay a finger on your firearms,” he told National Rifle Association (NRA) members in February.
Despite this, Spiegel is hoping people will keep fighting for gun violence prevention laws, to prevent stories similar to his own from happening all over again.
“I think our rights and freedoms will be under a higher attack than ever before. But I don’t think it’s completely over,” he told ABC News. “I think there’s still a country and, more importantly, our friends and family in the country that are worth fighting for. And we just put our heads down and get back to work. You just keep fighting.”
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