National Post (National Edition)
‘Enough is ENOUGH’
THOUSANDS OF YOUTHS MARCH IN PROTEST OF GUN VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS
Declaring enough is enough, tens of thousands of young people from Maine to California walked out of school to demand action on gun violence Wednesday in one of the biggest student protests since the Vietnam era.
Braving snow in New England and threats of school discipline in places like Georgia and Ohio, they carried signs with messages like “Am I Next?,” chanted slogans against the National Rifle Association and bowed their heads in memory of the 17 dead in the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
Fifteen-year-old Chloe Appel of Gaithersburg, Md., held a sign that said, “Fix this before I text my mom from under a desk.”
“We’re sick of it,” said Maxwell Nardi, a senior at Douglas S. Freeman High School in Henrico, Va., just outside Richmond. “We’re going to keep fighting, and we’re not going to stop until Congress finally makes resolute changes.” Supporters say the protests represent a realization of power and influence by young people raised on social media who have come of age in an era of never-ending wars, highly publicized mass shootings and virulent national politics.
As the protests were being staged, the National Rifle Association sent out a defiant tweet that included a picture of an assault-style rifle and a comment saying: “I’ll control my own guns, thank you.”
Around the nation, students left class at 10 a.m. local time for at least 17 minutes — one minute for each of the dead in Florida. At some schools, students didn’t go outside but lined the hallways, gathered in gyms and auditoriums or wore orange, the colour used by the movement against gun violence, or maroon, the school colour at Stoneman Douglas.
Over and over, students declared that too many young people have died and that they are tired of going to school afraid of getting killed.
“Enough is enough. People are done with being shot,” said Iris Foss-Ober, 18, a senior at Washburn High School in Minneapolis.
Some schools applauded students for taking a stand or at least tolerated the walkouts, while others threatened punishment.
Protesters called for such measures as tighter background checks on gun purchases and a ban on assault weapons like the one used in the Florida bloodbath.
“We’re tired of sitting around and listening to politicians tell us what they are going to do without ever actually doing anything. And we’re also just kind of tired of adults not making it happen — adults saying what they are going to do and then just entirely blowing us off,” said Dominic Barry, 16, a junior at Minnetonka High School southwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul. “We’re the next generation for all these issues, and we want people to know that we’re not going to sit around and let other people not take action on these issues.”
“We want our Congress to know that some of us will be old enough to vote in the midterm elections, and the rest of us are going to be able to vote in 2020 or 2022, and they’re going to lose their job if they don’t do what we want to keep us safe,” said Fatima Younis, a student at Frederick Community College in Maryland, who organized a walkout.
Walkouts interrupted the day at schools from the elementary level through college, and at some that have witnessed their own mass shootings. About 250 students gathered on a soccer field at Colorado’s Columbine High School, while students who survived the Sandy Hook Elementary School attack in 2012 walked out of Newtown High School in Connecticut.
Historians said the demonstrations were shaping up to be one of the largest youth protests in decades.
“It seems like it’s going to be the biggest youth-oriented and youth-organized protest movements going back decades, to the early ’70s at least,” said David Farber a history professor at the University of Kansas who has studied social change movements.
“Young people are that social media generation, and it’s easy to mobilize them in a way that it probably hadn’t been even 10 years ago.”