Information about an High School Essay Contest (copied from email):

if you’d like me to forward the email to you just email me at (or text me your email)

April 17 Deadline for Students to Enter Our 2021 National High School Essay Contest with $15,000 in Total Awards

Dear Annette,
The April 17 deadline for students to enter our 2021 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest is now less than two weeks away. We would appreciate your help in bringing the contest to the attention of any potentially interested high school students with whom you have contact and in reminding them of the approaching deadline. A contest flyer is attached. Full contest details and the online entry form are posted on the High School Essay Contest page of the Americans Against Gun Violence website.

The contest is open to all high school students in the United States. We’ll be awarding a total of at least $15,000 to 12 winners again this year, with individual awards ranging from $3,000 to $250. We also reserve the option of awarding additional prize money, as we’ve done in the past two years, if we receive more than 12 outstanding essays.

To enter this year’s contest, students must submit an original essay of 500 words or fewer in response to the following prompt:

“Describe the effect on American youth of the confluence of our country’s longstanding gun violence epidemic with the current Covid-19 pandemic and the threat of violent insurrection; and describe what role you believe the adoption of stringent gun control laws should play at this critical time in our nation’s history.”

This is the fourth consecutive year that we’ve offered our national high school essay contest, and up to the time of my sending this message, we’ve received considerably fewer entries into our 2021 contest than in past years. The lower than usual number of entries certainly isn’t due to a lull in the epidemic of gun violence in our country. There have been three high profile mass shootings – in Atlanta, Georgia; Boulder Colorado; and Orange, California – in just the last three weeks. And although gun violence received less media coverage over the past year than the Covid-19 pandemic and the political upheaval surrounding the 2020 presidential election, according to unoffical reports posted on the website, Gun Violence Archive, the number of U.S. gun related deaths reached a record high in 2020, with more than 43,000 U.S. civilians dying of gunshot wounds.

It’s possible that high school students may be finding this year’s essay contest prompt more challenging than in past years, when we asked students to describe their thoughts on various gun violence related quotations. (I’m appending the prompts that we used for our previous essay contests below.) I think that the main reason, though, why we’ve received fewer than the usual number of essays so far this year is that from March of 2020 until just recently, most U.S. high schools were physically closed. We depend on high school educators to help publicize our national high school essay contest, and high school students have had much less direct contact than usual with their teachers over the past year. I’ve been chairing a high school essay contest on different topics for the Sacramento Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility for the past 17 years, and the number of entries in the PSR contest this year was also unusually low.

Whatever the reason might be for the relatively low number of entries we’ve received so far in our 2021 Americnas Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest, we’d appreciate your help in bringing the contest to the attention of any high school students with whom you might have contact. The good news for students who do enter this year’s contest is that if the final number of essays is lower than usual, any student who submits a well-reasoned and well-written essay will have a better than usual chance of being chosen as a winner. The bad news for all U.S. high school students is that 15-19 year old youth in our country are murdered with guns at a rate that is 82 times higher than in the other high income democratic countries of the world. We believe that the essay contest is an important way of fostering and rewarding critical thinking among our youth on the issue of gun violence prevention – an issue that is of vital importance to them.

Shortly after the April 17 deadline for students to submit their essays, we’ll begin the winner selection process. Please respond to this email if you’d be interested in participating in this process by being an essay reader. We read and rate essays blinded to any student identifying information, so even if you know a student who enters the contest, you can still participate objectively in the winner selection process.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who made monetary contributions to Americans Against Gun Violence over the past year to support our work, including our annual high school essay contest, and I’d like to ask you to consider making an additional tax deductible donation to the essay contest fund at this time to help ensure that we’ll be able to continue to offer the essay contest in future years. The winning essays in past contests are posted on the High School Essay Contest page of the Americans Against Gun Violence website. If you have any doubt about the importance of the essay contest (or the other work we do), I suggest you read some of the poignant and inspiring essays of our past winners.

Thanks for your support of Americans Against Gun Violence, and thanks for helping us demonstrate through our actions and not just our words that we are a society that loves its children and youth more than its guns.

Sincerely,
Bill Durston, MD

President, Americans Against Gun Violence

Essay Contest Prompts Used in Past Years

(Click on the year to read the winning essays.)
2018: “The time has now come that we must adopt stringent gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.” – The Late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, June of 1968

2019: “The Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have ‘some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.'” – Excerpt from the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in the 1980 case of Lewis v. United States

2020: “Firearm regulations, to include bans of handguns and assault weapons, are the most effective way to reduce firearm related injuries.” – Position Statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics, issued in April of 2000.