Every day for the last year, Abby Kisicki has wondered why she and her parents survived the mass shooting in Highland Park that killed seven people and wounded dozens of others during a July Fourth parade.

She has gotten through those days by becoming a fierce advocate for gun control, believing she is fighting for “the seven” by “doing the work they can’t do themselves.”

“I find meaning and it’s how I cope — the advocacy,” Kisicki said outside the Dirksen Federal Courthouse, where judges were hearing arguments for overturning the state’s assault weapons ban.

“It could have been me or my parents … There’s no reason the people who died are the people who died,” she said. “They don’t have a voice anymore and that is so insulting and so violating.”

That’s what brought her and others from Highland Park to the courthouse on Thursday.

“We’re coming together, we’re validating each other, and the more we do that, the more we’re able to increase our power,” Kisicki told the Sun-Times. “Even though they’re in there and we’re out here on the street … they’re going to know we are here.”

Kisicki was one of dozens of gun violence prevention advocates from across the city and state who gathered to protest the legal challenge to a ban that was prompted by the Highland Park massacre. 

Kisicki and her family will not be in town for the one-year anniversary next week, but it was important she be outside Dirksen.

“It is insulting the fact that they’re getting sued,” Kisicki said. “I would say, it’s insulting around the year mark (but) it’s insulting anytime.” 

After the shooting, Kisicki felt the need to immediately jump into action but followed her family’s advice and took some time to recover. 

Toward the end of the summer, she started reaching out to other youth advocates and in the fall took on the role of community engagement associate at the Newtown Action Alliance.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Also at Dirksen was Ashbey Beasley who has made dozens of trips to Washington and Springfield and has spoken to hundreds of lawmakers on behalf of assault weapons bans. 

She too calls the work her form of therapy.

“On July 4th of last year, my 6-year-old son and I ran for our lives after a man opened fire on our hometown parade with an AR-15 style weapon,” Beasley said as she stood with her son.

“The most profound thing that I’ve learned over the last 11 months is that we don’t talk about mass shootings in a way that includes the entire impact they have on communities,” Beasley told the Sun-Times.

Beasley helped work on the Protect Illinois Communities Act, which was signed into law in January and bans the sale and distribution of assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and switches in Illinois. 

It did not take long before a Naperville gunshot owner and the National Association for Gun Rights sued the state. 

“This lawsuit is a direct attack on our democracy,” Beasley said. “We elected legislators who supported gun safety legislation and when tragedy and gun violence hit our state, they stepped up and passed this law to keep us safe. We are not going to stop fighting.” 

Robert Bevis, the gunshot owner who is challenging the law, also was at Dirksen Thursday and told reporters that the ban will only “stop law-abiding citizens from having these firearms and attack our second amendment rights.”

“They are successfully putting me out of business,” Bevis told reporters after Thursday’s arguments. “These laws have completely killed our business.”

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Rachel Jacoby, a Highland Park resident and organizer of March for Our Lives, helped plan Thursday’s rally — one of many she has led in the year since the shooting. 

“My generation, Gen Z, is sick and tired of living in fear,” Jacoby said. “We’ve grown up in a society where gun violence is a daily occurrence and haunts us everywhere we go.

“We cannot sit in our classrooms, go to the bank, dance in a club or attend our Independence Day parade without wondering if we will be the next victims of gun violence,” she said.

Standing beside Jacoby were other violence prevention advocates, youth activists and an emergency room doctor — all from different communities but united in the cause to ban assault weapons and switches. 

When a speaker asked the crowd, ‘Who has lost someone to gun violence,’ nearly everyone raised their hand.

Kisicki, meanwhile, said she does not want to attend a weekend memorial event in Highland Park because she spends every day remembering. 

“It’s my reality already,” she said. “I think about it so much, we all do. It’s added this heavy layer to our community that will never quite be gone. We always think about it.”