photo credit: Noah Abrams/KRCB
Analy students walk out in protest of gun violence.

Drive through downtown Sebastopol on a Friday and you’ll likely see protestors lining the four corners of the Main Street - Highway 12 intersection, calling for anything from climate action to support for the troops. This week Analy High School students took to the streets calling for an end to gun violence.

"Ban guns!" The chants rang. "Not books! Ban guns! Not books!"

The March 1st fatal stabbing at Santa Rosa's Montgomery High School sparked a flurry of student demonstrations across Sonoma County.

Following another deadly school shooting in Nashville, dozens of Analy students walked out of class to demand action on gun control.

Freshman Dahlia Richardson helped organize the walk out.

"To my fellow students, really just take action," Richardson said. "It's your school, it's your lives, and you know, you could be in danger, could die by gun violence."

Richardson said her message is simple.

"We need change and we're not going to stop," Richardson said. "We're not just gonna sit at our desks and like do nothing about it."

As students gave speeches in the Sebastopol Plaza, Analy student leader Marin Broadbent-Bell said adults need to wake up to a new reality.

"Our generation is taking over this country and we are not satisfied with how it's being run and, what's occurring and we're done," Broadbent-Bell said. "We can't stand by and let what's going on continue happening. We're fed up and we're ready for change."

Analy senior Rachel Cohen said she hopes action now can help students feel safe on campus even after she has graduated.

"Doing a walkout for gun violence really, to me means talking about school culture," Cohen said. "And so I don't like to talk about it as if it's like this siphoned off issue. Like I'm really seeing the violence at Montgomery and all this new stuff that's coming up as just a part of the overall conversation about our school culture and what we're really doing to make sure that students feel safe on campus, that there's this community."