I found out she was dead on Feb. 15. I think it was the 15th — that’s when The Miami Herald released the names of those who had been killed the day before in the shooting at my high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, in Parkland, Fla. I’d thought she’d only been injured. I remember thinking that very clearly; she has only been injured, don’t worry about her.

On the 16th, I was asked to speak at a gun control rally by a woman on the school board. For what seemed like the first time, adults were treating me and my peers as though they cared about what we had to say. I started writing my speech and didn’t stop until I got up to the lectern. I gave it my all. All of my words, my thoughts, my energy, every political fact I knew. My mom had “Rachel Maddow” on the TV and was saying: “Pay attention to this! It’s about Chuck Grassley! You should consider putting it in your speech!” and I did. The speech followed a pattern: I had a thought, I wrote a new paragraph, I filled in the gaps, I ranted, and then deleted the rants. I had waves where all I wrote was a kind of scream of consciousness: “How could this have happened? So many people died, so many people died. I can’t do this. How do I do this? How do we do this?”

My friend Cameron Kasky called after I gave my speech and asked if I wanted to join the movement. He was getting a group of students together to organize what we ended up calling the March for Our Lives — a march on Washington to call for better gun laws.

We worked out of Cameron’s house in the early days. A lot of my friends outside the movement were having trouble sleeping. Even those who weren’t on campus the day of the shooting had nightmares. But for those of us in the movement, there wasn’t time to sleep. You can see very clearly in those early interviews that all of us had deep dark circles under our eyes. No one had an appetite. No one wanted to leave Cameron’s house, not even to take a shower. None of us wanted to stop working. To stop working was to start thinking. And thinking about anything other than the march and the solutions to gun violence was to have a breakdown.

One day all of us seemed to have a breakdown around 4 p.m. Cameron ran off, and I ran after him, because I was worried. Once I saw that he was O.K., I realized that I was having a breakdown, too.

I lay in the grass. The sky was spotted with clouds, so when they passed over the sun, it felt too cool, and when the sun was out, it felt too warm. There were trees all around, and I was fully realizing, once more, how miserable we all were. How miserable I felt. How much I wished I could just be a tree so that I didn’t have to know people who had been murdered in a mass shooting in a life I thought would be forever safe from this kind of mourning.

Suddenly I couldn’t stand being alive. I didn’t want to kill myself — let me make that very clear. I just didn’t want to have a human consciousness. Trees face many difficulties, what with deforestation and pollution, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to be one — to just stop feeling and live.

I wanted to go back to when blood hadn’t stained the walls of our campus. Back to when I would hang out with Carmen on the bus. Back to before people would stop me to say, “Aren’t you one of those kids from Parkland?”

But we couldn’t go back. All of us know what it feels like to be Harry Potter now. Even when people come up to us quietly to say thank you, you never know if they’re just trying to shoot you at close range.

Going up against the country’s largest gun lobby organization was obviously something that needed to be done, but it means that the people we’re arguing against are the ones with the guns. I am personally deathly afraid of them, and I know, from traveling the country during the summer for the Road to Change tour, that many of the people who disagree with us mean it when they say that they only want to talk if we’re standing on the other end of their AR-15s.

In the midst of all this, I try to take good care of myself. I shaved my head a week or two before senior year. People used to ask me why, and the main reason is that having hair felt terrible. It was heavy, it made me overheated, and every time I put it up in a ponytail (and I looked terrible in a ponytail) it gave me a headache. And, it sounds stupid, but it made me insecure; I was always worried that it looked frizzy or tangled. What’s the best thing to do with an insecurity? Get rid of it. It’s liberating to shave my head every week.

I also cry a lot. But crying is healthy and it feels good — I really don’t know why people are so against it. Maybe because it’s loud. Crying is a kind of communication, and communication is awesome. The lack of communication is what keeps us in this situation.

People say, “I don’t play the politics game, I don’t pay attention to politics” — well, the environment is getting poisoned, families are getting pulled apart and deported, prisons are privatized, real-life Nazis live happily among us, Native Americans are so disenfranchised our country is basically still colonizing them, Puerto Rico has been abandoned, the American education system has been turned into a business, and every day 96 people get shot and killed.

You might not be a big fan of politics, but you can still participate. All you need to do is vote for people you believe will work on these issues, and if they don’t work the way they should, then it is your responsibility to call them, organize a town hall and demand that they show up — hold them accountable. It’s their job to make our world better.

It has been months since the shooting. But whenever one of my friends finds an old picture of someone who died that day, or another shooting happens, or I hear helicopters or one too many loud bangs in one day, it all starts to slip. It feels like I’m back at the vigil, in the hot Florida sun, with volunteers handing out water bottles to replenish what the sun and sadness had taken away. Looking for friends and finding them, hugging them, saying, “I love you.” Looking for friends and not finding them.

Everything we’ve done and everything we will do is for them. It’s for ourselves. It’s for every person who has gone through anything similar to this, for every person who hasn’t yet, for every person who never will. This isn’t something we are ever going to forget about. This isn’t something we are ever going to give up on.

Emma González graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this year and is an activist for gun reform. She is one of the authors of the forthcoming “Glimmer of Hope: How Tragedy Sparked a Movement,” from which this essay is adapted.

He had spent the larger part of his second year at the University of Texas Law School learning how to operate a 3-D printer. Familiar with the robust gun culture of the South from his Boy Scout years in Arkansas, he soon began to wonder whether he could create the first fully 3-D-printed, functional firearm.

Wilson was not confident it was feasible. The technology was new, and printable materials were brittle and plastic. But Wilson was motivated by curiosity, hypothesizing that he could design a printable weapon and build a platform for users to download gun blueprints without government regulation.

“Even I was glamoured by the magic of 3-D printing,” he said, recalling when he removed the first functional plastic piece from the printer. “It had an unusual polymer, fleshy feel and a silicate structure about it that had to be washed off. All the trappings of some kind of alien birth.”

Wilson admired the object. The screw, buffer tower, the grip face. They all had perfect resolution, he said. “That’s the devilry of this technology. They can do things that have machine quality.”

Wilson drove to west Texas and learned to assemble a gun, swapping in his printed part — a green lower receiver. He shot the low-powered AR-15 into the dirt five or six times before it broke. Wilson showcased the accomplishment on YouTube.

Convincing Americans that 3D-printing guns was a worthwhile endeavor proved to be a challenge, said Wilson, who had begun fundraising. His bleak investor base was mostly 3-D printer enthusiasts with several straggling gun-rights advocates. Gun owners could already own many guns. Why did they need new ones printed?

Less than two weeks passed before 20-year-old Adam Lanza opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School, fatally shooting 26 people before turning his weapon on himself. Suddenly, interest and his efforts changed.

“After Sandy Hook, everything was backward, cast as some kind of race condition: Is there gun control in America or 3-D printing of guns?” he said. No longer the outliers, Second Amendment support flowed in. “These things become about red team, blue team after a while,” Wilson said.

With national interest piqued, Congress and the Obama administration stepped in, leading a nationwide crackdown on gun ownership. Citing corporate responsibility, websites took down gun files and online community forums removed gun enthusiasts. The Senate pushed for stronger laws and introduced the Manchin-Toomey Amendment in January 2013, calling for background checks on most firearm sales. The bill failed three months later.

Inspired by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Wilson and his friends set out to create an open-source platform.

“We wanted to be the wiki for guns,” Wilson said. Defcad.com, an unregulated file-sharing website, launched, birthing what became the first 3-D-printing gun community.

A printable pistol released online, named “Liberator,” in April 2013. (Cody Wilson)
Testing of the “Liberator,” his first fully printed pistol, finished in late April 2013, during his second-year exams. He dropped out of the program the same week and uploaded his design files for ghost guns, firearms without serial numbers. In a few days, there were more than 100,000 downloads. Then he was stopped by the feds.

In May, Wilson told Infowars’ Alex Jones, who has promoted various conspiracy theories, that the State Department emailed him demanding the files be taken down. The department alleged that by uploading a weapon blueprint, which constituted an export under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Wilson was violating federal law. With 30 days to respond to government demands, Wilson removed the files from defcad.com, then filed suit against the U.S. government for violating his First Amendment right to free speech.

What frustrated Wilson was that the government was attempting to stop him from giving knowledge away.

“It’s not that I’m a nihilist about it. I know that I can’t control it moving forward, but that’s the utopia of the present,” Wilson said, calling himself a political romantic. “Good, something might happen that I can’t anticipate! That’s what inspires a bunch of burnouts like me.”

He understood that the knowledge could be used for radical purposes. Still, he said, there was no way to “violate” his idea. In the public domain, the designs were “equally everyone’s and no one’s,” he said.

At the time it was a pipe dream, but he hoped he had a case.

Joined by the Second Amendment Foundation, Wilson spent five years in litigation. In an unlikely turn of events, on June 22, the federal government settled. It was a narrow victory for First Amendment fans, coming under an administration usually perceived as hostile to free speech.

Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb, surprised the government settled after years of battle, said that the victory cemented gun-ownership law. “The government can no longer effectively ban guns in America because anyone can download the code and make a gun in their own home,” he said.

Wilson, now 30, did not expect to win either. He expected to be content with a moral defeat, taking solace imagining the State Department tasked with the chore of regulating guns on the Internet.

“It’s a troubling 180-degree turn by the State Department,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel of Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “It’s going to make it much easier for dangerous people, otherwise prohibited from getting guns, to get them.”

Skaggs, like many anti-gun-violence proponents, blamed the policy U-turn on the Trump administration, saying it is more focused on the gun lobby’s bidding than protecting public safety.

A State Department spokesman, however, told The Washington Post that this was a voluntary settlement agreed upon by both parties. The June 29 settlement, a copy of which was given to The Post, comes during a transfer of oversight from the State Department to the Department of Commerce.

In 2010, when Barack Obama was president, the departments initiated an overhaul of the U.S. munitions list. Under the proposed regulations, the State Department would continue administrating exports under ITAR of military-grade firearms, munition and heavy artillery. Commercially available firearms and related manufacturing technology would transfer to Commerce control. “These proposed regulations would eliminate the ITAR requirements at issue in this case,” the department spokesman said.

The Trump administration has surged forward with deregulating gun exports, though the initial transfer between departments was in 2015, under the Obama administration.

Weapon manufacturing, in the meantime, is moving away from 3-D printing. According to Adrian Bowyer, a retired engineer, 3-D printers aren’t a suitable technology for weapon-making. The key component of a firearm is that it’s cylindrical and rotationally symmetric. 3-D printers are also restricted to the available materials, and the ones that work with metals don’t provide the best results.

Bowyer said that if he had an interest in making weapons, he would make them with conventional tools, like a lathe. “3-D printers are expensive. Even then, the end result is likely not to be as strong as a 200-year-old technology.”

Because there has been a proliferation of guns built with do-it-yourself kits obtained online, gun-control advocates have maintained that 3-D-printed guns are a future threat. Adam Winkler, professor at UCLA School of Law, said that when printing technology becomes more reliable and affordable — which, he said, is undoubtedly coming — it will have dangerous consequences for public safety. “Climate change isn’t affecting us today, but people can be concerned about the future,” he analogized. For now, though, the 80-percent-unfinished DIY gun looms larger.

Wilson’s website is scheduled to go back online Aug. 1. Throughout the litigation, he developed a trove of other 3-D-printable weapon blueprints, including Assembly AR-15s and AR-10s.

Regulating homemade weapons will be the future-facing obstacle. Several states introduced legislation increasing oversight, but with the proposed ITAR amendments, Wilson should be able to publish all of his blueprints.

“[Code] is the essence of expression,” he said. “It meets all the requirements of speech — it’s artistic and political, you can manipulate it, and it needs human involvement to become other things.” Alternatively, he said a digital file is a weapon, but only in the nonlegal sense. “You can’t characterize 16 lines of code as ‘a gun.’ It doesn’t want to become anything; you still have to make it one.”

Wilson relishes that he edged his way into American gun-control politics.

“Ghost guns are what got me where I got,” he said. “My contribution is to create the hyperbole politicians talk about. Now the public can have access to them.”