Our 2025 National High School Essay Contest, with at least $15,000 in total scholarship awards, is now open for entries from all U.S. high school students.   Essay Topic To enter the 2025 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest, students must submit an original essay of 500 words or fewer describing their thoughts about the following excerpt from the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s opinion in the 1972 case of [...]

Americans Against Gun Violence congratulates the winners of our 2024 National High School Essay Contest, which was open to all U.S. high school students in the United States. To enter the contest, students were required to submit an original essay of 500 words or fewer* describing their thoughts about the following excerpt from the Americans Against Gun Violence Mission Statement: In creating constitutional obstacles, where none previously existed, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws [...]

Americans Against Gun Violence congratulates the winners of our 2023 National High School Essay Contest. To enter this year’s contest, students were asked to submit an essay of 500 words or fewer in response to the following prompt, which was chosen based in part on input from some of our past essay contest winners: “Describe your thoughts about lockdown drills conducted in response to the threat of shootings on American school campuses.” We received over [...]

Americans Against Gun Violence is pleased to announce the winners of our 2022 National High School Essay Contest, which was open to all U.S. high school students. To enter the contest, students were required to submit an original essay of 500 words or fewer by April 16, 2022, describing their thoughts about the following statement made by the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger during an interview on the PBS News Hour on December 16, [...]

Americans Against Gun Violence is pleased to announce the winners of our 2021 National High School Essay Contest. To enter the contest, which was open to all high school students in the United States and its territories, students were required to submit an 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 [...]

The prompt for the 2019 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest was the following excerpt from the majority opinion written by the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in the 1980 case of Lewis v. United States: 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." The contest was open to all high [...]

The prompt for the 2018 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest was the following statement made by the late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut in a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate on June 11, 1968: 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 contest was open to all high [...]