Cora Lynn Mundy, a native New Yorker, is not one to sit back and do nothing when action is needed. At 17 years old, Mundy is part of the movement to end gun violence in her hometown and across the nation.
Mundy, who lives in Staten Island, is on Students Demand Action’s 2024 National Student Organizing board at Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun violence prevention. As a member of this student grassroots network, Mundy organizes and volunteers for a variety of gun safety advocacy projects in New York City and beyond.
The young activist is part of a team of 14 high-school students from across America who want an end to school shootings, gang violence and other types of gun crimes. The student board meets online once a month to discuss their current and upcoming projects, although they remain in touch on an almost-daily basis.
“We spread awareness for the gun violence prevention movement by hosting voter registration drives, relational canvassing outside the polls on Election Day,” Mundy said.
As a student organizer, her volunteer work stretches from raising awareness into the world of government policy.
“We also do some pretty big things,” she said. “We take trips to our state capitals on what we call Advocacy Days. Team leaders get to meet with our legislators and state representatives to advocate for gun safety laws that we want to get pushed in the country.”
Mundy recalled one project that she is particularly proud of. At the state level, she and her student team went to Albany this year to push for several gun safety bills— some of which have already passed both chambers of the legislature.
“That was pretty exciting because we only went to Advocacy Day in May, I believe, so, that’s pretty good progress,” Mundy happily shared.
Some of the bills that Mundy advocated for include the School Anti-Violence Education Act (SAVE Act) and an update to the state’s gun industry accountability law.
Mundy’s story: Her father was a victim of a gang initiation
Mundy began her involvement with Students Demand Action because she wanted to change the current “normal” to create a safer world for her generation as well as the future generations. She was the president of her school’s Students Demand Action chapter and has served on the Organizing Board since sophomore year of high school.
But the young activist, who graduated from Staten Island Academy this year, has a more personal reason for joining Students Demand Action. In 1991, long before she was born, her father was shot in the parking lot of a Brooklyn White Castle restaurant as part of a gang initiation ritual.
“The doctors had read him his last rites,” she said. “They didn’t think he was going to make it to see the next day.”
But his story is one of survival.
“Thirty-three years later today, he is alive and healthy, thank God,” Mundy said. “But his story is what motivates me, and that’s basically why I got involved in the movement as soon as I could when I knew that a Students Demand Action chapter was formed at my school.”
Her father’s experience is not unique. Almost everyday, headlines in the city show stories of people seriously injured or killed by guns.
In an average year, 870 people die and nearly 3,000 are injuried by guns across New York state, according to Everytown for Gun Safety’s data from 2022.
An average of 457 people in the state die by gun suicide each year, the organization reports.
Advocating for changing lockdown drill policies
Mundy reports that school lockdown drill reform is a current hot topic when it comes to preventing gun violence.
Just this month, the Board of Regents, which is responsible for the general supervision of educational activities in New York, announced that parents now know a week in advance when their child’s school will conduct a mandatory lockdown drill.
The reason? To address concerns that have been raised about “unintended trauma” students and families may suffer as a result of the practice drills, according to a memo written to the Board of Regents on July 11 from Angelique Johnson-Dingle, a state deputy education commissioner.
Mundy said she advocated for school lockdown drill reform in Albany, and said it is her opinion that drills, as they are now, do not have worthwhile benefits on the mental health of students, especially young students, across the country.
“I think we should be focusing on prevention solutions like common sense gun safety laws,” she said.
Mundy will be entering the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this fall, where she plans to continue her advocacy efforts with the school’s chapter of Students Demand Action.
