Nearly 26 years after the Columbine school shooting, civil rights attorney Qasim Rashid told a group of Chicago youth that he once believed such tragedies would be rare, the Chicago Tribune reports.
“Obviously, we were horribly wrong,” he said, opening a youth-led event aimed at changing attitudes about guns.
The gathering was part of Project Unloaded’s “Social Media for Safer Communities,” a summer program where teens create digital campaigns to counter gun violence. Founded in 2022 by advocate Nina Vinik, the nonprofit targets 13- to 17-year-olds with peer-to-peer messaging designed to replace the belief that guns increase safety with the idea that they increase risk.
For six weeks, more than 50 students from various Chicago youth organizations developed social media concepts with the assistance of advertising mentors. The winning campaign, “You a Goofy,” flips street slang to suggest that owning a gun is foolish, aiming to engage 20,000 teens when it launches this fall. Judges praised the team’s use of humor as a powerful, shareable way to reach young audiences.
Project Unloaded runs year-round, combining new campaigns with past efforts, such as “Leave Guns in the Game,” which engages young gamers. The group says these conversations—whether in schools, community spaces, or online—are starting to shift teens’ views on gun ownership. As board member Desmond Patton noted, the approach is innovative: using the same social media spaces where youth culture thrives to foster dialogue that could save lives.
