Photo: Courtesy Julia Spoor
Julia Spoor could always count on her dad to make her smile.
“He was the person who I would go to if I wanted to laugh or maybe if I wasn’t having a good day,” the 16-year-old Pennsylvania resident tells PEOPLE. “He was a goofy guy who just had this radiance about him.”
But her father, Scott Spoor, became depressed when Julia was 7 and then twice tried to overdose on pills. On Sept. 25, 2009, the 43-year-old electrical engineer killed himself with his handgun, just 10 days before her 8th birthday.
“It’s a really awful feeling,” says Julia, who didn’t learn the details of his act until years later.
Though her dad had no mental problems when he bought the gun, after those issues arose, says Julia, “that would have been the point for someone to say, ‘This guy should not possess a firearm.'”
Courtesy Spoor Family
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The loss moved Julia to activism. Working with the nonprofitEverytown for Gun Safety, she began with her mom to march and share her story, and now advocates for change such as “red flag laws,” currently in place in six states, which help families remove guns from someone in crisis. She also promotes theWear Orange initiativethat urges Americans to wear orange this weekend in an effort to raise awareness about gun violence.
The prevalance of school shootings — Julia was in 5th grade when a gunmankilled 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut— has only made the need for change more urgent, she says. After the Feb. 14shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killed another 17 people, she helped launch Students Demand Action, a national student-based group advocating for tougher gun legislation.
“She knows that she can change the world with the certainty that only somebody her age can have, and I love that about her and about all of these kids,” says her mother, Jennifer Lugar, who works in corporate marketing and serves on the borough council in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, where they live outside of Philadelphia.
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Says Julia, who will be a junior next fall: “When you are a high school student and you see high school shootings happening all the time, it’s hard to not walk into a classroom and wonder where you’d go in case of a lockdown.”
“I try to just always focus on the fact that change is gained, change is made, change is happening,” she says. “That’s really what keeps me going. We are making a difference.”
“I believe my dad would be proud.”
source: people.com
