As a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Jaclyn Corin was the junior class president at the time of the shooting in 2018. Her close friends Joaquin Oliver and Jaime Guttenberg were killed; she had once tutored the alleged gunman and former student at the school, Nikolas Cruz. During the shooting, Corin was locked in with other classmates for several hours, emerging with hands up as instructed by the police SWAT units.
Advocacy
Corin met with fellow students at Stoneman Douglas, including David Hogg, Emma González and Cameron Kasky, at Kasky's house; they formed the Never Again MSD movement during these meetings. At first it was a small core group of students, but subsequent meetings came to about twenty students. She explained that their media strategy was to knock through the gun-safety defeatism, reframe the debate, and keep making noise with powerful demonstrations. They acted quickly to take advantage of the news coverage. Corin was a key organizer of the bus trip protest to the Florida state capital on February 20, six days after the shooting. A report in Vanity Fair suggested it was her idea to have the bus trip soon after the shooting because it was alive in the news cycle; she said "the news forgets -- very quickly -- we needed a critical mass event." Working with fellow students-turned-activists Cameron Kasky and David Hogg, she recruited several hundred MSD students to make an eight-hour bus trip to Tallahassee as part of a "lightning strike". She helped engineer the behind-the-scenes logistics including transportation, chaperone and sleeping arrangements, scheduling meetings with Florida lawmakers and getting permission slips from parents. She demanded the group wear normal school attire and not quibble about bus seating; when some asked for changes to sit with friends, she said "No -- get on your bus." The trip was organized largely by social media and texting. Corin was a key planner of the March for Our Lives nationwide student protest that occurred on March 24. She advocates that adults register to vote and vote, and that children pre-register. She discussed media coverage: Corin has made YouTube videos; one called "WhatIf" got 1.4 million views in three days. She has appeared on national television. In anticipation of the March for Our Lives, she appeared on the March 21 episode of the Rachel Maddow Show, along with Gonzalez and Sarah Chadwick. She is scheduled to speak at a rally in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on March 29. She, Gonzalez, Hogg, Kasky and Alex Wind are pictured on the third week of March's Time cover. Corin criticized the NRA and gun manufacturers for touting the Ideal Conceal, a handgun that folds up to resemble a smart phone. She faulted the NRA for "enforcing the normality of shooting other people"; further, she argued that police, confronting people including persons of color with smart phones, might believe that their phones were weapons, and shoot them accidentally.
