Green Bay Reporter

Fox Valley area residents are demanding an end to gun violence following a spate of recent mass shootings that left dozens dead across the country.

Locals gathered earlier this month at Houdini Plaza to honor the lives lost following shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, a grocery store in Buffalo, New York and a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

"We don't have to have any more Uvalde's," Forward Appleton’s Emily Tseffos told NBC26.com.  "We don't have to have any more Sandy Hooks. It doesn't have to be how we live. How our kids grow up."

Throughout the day, fed up community members lined College Avenue holding signs that read, "I Substitute Teach, Not Substitute Police" and "Enough is Enough."

Fox Cities Gun Violence member Ann Muenster summed up the feelings of many protesters in adding "I'm a retired educator and before I retired, I was involved with intruder drills, huddling in a corner with preschoolers. I know that I would've taken bullets for those children and every one of my colleagues would do the same. But we can do better than that. We can really do better than that."

All told, roughly a dozen speakers addressed the crowd, including North High student Mya Koffie of Appleton.

"At any moment, it could be us,” Koffie told the crowd. “It could be any of us. You never know when an armed person is going to break into the building somehow."

Koffie shared the story of how seniors at the school recently popped balloons in the hallways of the school as a harmless prank, and how she almost mistook the sound for gun fire.

"I wondered are people being shot right now? Am I going to be shot right now? Is this the last time I'm ever going to walk around a corner? What am I going to find? So, I was terrified," she said. "And I think that constitutes being a high schooler in America right now, is you never know when walking around the corner is your last time."

At the rally, attendees wore orange to highlight National Gun Violence Awareness Day, which fell on June 3. The nationwide campaign was created to honor 15-year-old Chicago student Hadiya Pendleton, who marched in former president Barrack Obama’s second inaugural parade in 2013 and was shot and killed a week later at a playground near her school.

In Washington, bipartisan discussions are currently underway in Congress, with the House Judiciary Committee recently approving the "Protecting Our Kids Act."

Proposed by democrats, the package of gun control legislation includes calling for raising the age to buy certain semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21, enacting new federal offenses for gun trafficking and strengthening federal regulations on ghost guns.

With the full House slated to vote on the measure later this month, some GOP members have already expressed concerns about some of the legislation infringing on American's 2nd Amendment rights.