Students from around the Bay Area are in Sacramento today to lobby for stricter gun laws. They began planning a month ago when junior Ruby Baden-Lasar of Head-Royce School in Oakland and three other high schoolers started a group called Bay Area Student Activists after the Feb. 14 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead. This lobbying trip is the group’s first action, and there’s a steep learning curve.
“We have like so many spreadsheets and lists, and it would boggle your mind,” Baden-Lasar says. “I can't keep track of all of them.”
The organizers say they were expecting at least 200 students to go to the Capitol on buses paid for in part by a Go Fund Me campaign.
Fellow organizer Kira Galbraith, a sophomore at Berkeley High School, says part of what motivated her after Parkland was a threat at her own school.
“I was really scared at school, and so I had all these emotions and I didn't know how to deal with them. So planning this was my way of kind of dealing with my emotions but also coping with them,” Galbraith says.

For organizer Zoe Benjamin, a junior at French American International High School in San Francisco, this face-to-face show of force at the Capitol is a way to compensate for the way their age limits their political might.