March for Our Lives tour visits City Hall
Santa Fe, Parkland shooting survivors call for gun control
More than 200 rallied at City Hall on Sunday to prevent gun violence, with at least a dozen speakers imploring politicians to enact “common sense” gun laws and urging the audience to vote out politicians who won’t.
“The term ‘surviving high school’ has taken a new meaning for my generation,” said Austin organizer Jack Kappelman. “We must educate. We must organize. We must vote.”
The Houston event was one stop of the national “March for Our Lives” bus tour, started by students following the February shooting that killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The tour, with plans for 50 events in 20 states this summer, is making its way through Texas. Students and organizers stopped in Dallas on Saturday and will head to San Antonio on Monday.
Emma González, the Parkland student who became famous for her impassioned speeches after the shooting, headlined the event.
“We can no longer be apathet-
ic to the issues surrounding us. We can be the difference,” she said. “Young people hold all the cards … It’s time we put an end to the notion that one vote cannot make all the difference.”
But the rally also featured Texas students and parents.
Rhonda Hart, 36, lost her daughter at the Santa Fe High School shooting, just south of Houston, in May. Jessica Vaughan, 14, died in the Santa Fe art room, shot twice by the gunman’s shotgun and twice by his handgun, Hart said.
“I can stay at home and I can cry about it,” she said before her speech, “or I can speak up.”
Bree Butler, 18 and a Santa Fe High graduate, still wakes to nightmares, wracked by survivor’s guilt.
“An entire generation of politicians lacks the spine to address the country’s gun violence,” she said. “If they can’t, we will.”
And Marcel McClinton, 17, cofounder of the Houston gun violence prevention group Orange Generation, described what it felt like as a survivor of the 2016 Memorial Drive United Methodist Church shooting.
Students, parents and grandparents filled the audience. Most were supporters and organizers. But scattered throughout were those touched by the violence.
The Parkland shooting shook her, said Santa Fe senior Azia Miranda, 16. “I was like, ‘Oh, that could have been my friends.’”
“And now” she continued, “it is my friends.”
Across the street from City Hall, 50 or 60 gathered to protest the rally. Some worked to interrupt the speeches, bellowing at the speakers or shouting into a bullhorn. Others stood quietly.
CJ Grisham, 44, founder of protest sponsor Open Carry Texas, drove in from Temple, three hours away.
“Texas is not a gun control state, and these policies are not welcome here,” he said.
Police kept the groups separate, and the rally ended without incident.