Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Students deliver message on guns
Marches call for halting bloodshed
WASHINGTON — Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them teenagers infuriated over deadly school shootings, poured into the nation’s capital Saturday and gathered in hundreds of cities around the world to demand that politicians take action to prevent gun violence in classrooms.
In Washington, survivors of last month’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., assembled to lead a rally, called the “March for Our Lives,” along Pennsylvania Avenue, delivering a message of #NeverAgain.
More than 800 “sibling” marches were taking place in cities and towns around the country and in several foreign cities, organizers said, including in 390 of the nation’s 435 congressional districts. The goal was to demonstrate new political pressure for politicians who oppose tougher gun laws.
Counterprotests and separate rallies organized by gun-rights groups also took place Saturday.
About 30 gun- rights supporters staged a counterdemonstration in front of FBI headquarters, standing quietly with signs such as “Armed Victims Live Longer” and “Stop Violating Civil Rights.”
Aerial images captured seas of people — in front of Trump International Hotel in New York; in a central square in Tokyo; along the streets of Boston; at a rally in downtown Fort Worth; and crammed into a park less than a mile from Stoneman Douglas High.
Delivered in speeches, emotional chants and hand-painted signs, the protesters’ messages offered angry rebukes to the National Rifle Association and politicians who have left gun laws largely intact for decades. A sign in Washington declared “Graduations, not funerals!” while another in New York said: “I should be learning, not protesting.” Crowds in Chicago chanted “fear has no place in our schools” as they marched.
Celebrities — including Lin-Manuel Miranda, the star of Hamilton, and pop singers Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus — performed in Washington, where politicians and adult activists were largely sidelined as fresh-faced students offered stories of fear and frustration, and called for change.
The most powerful and emotional moments of the Washington event came from the surviving students of the Parkland shooting, who declared themselves angry, impatient and determined to stop the shootings.
Emma Gonzalez, one of the first students from Stoneman Douglas to speak out after the tragedy there, implored people of voting age to vote.
She recited the names of the Parkland dead, then held the crowd in rapt, tearful silence. Her time on stage lasted just more than six minutes, the time it took the gunman to shoot her classmates.
“We will continue to fight for our dead friends,” Delaney Tarr, another Parkland survivor, declared from the stage. The crowd roared with approval as she expressed the students’ central demand: a ban on “weapons of war” for all but warriors.
“If you listen real close, you can hear the people in power shaking,” Parkland survivor David Hogg said to roars from the protesters packing Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol. “We’re going to take this to every election, to every state and every city. We’re going to make sure the best people get in our elections to run, not as politicians but as Americans.
“Because this,” he said, pointing behind him to the Capitol dome, “this is not cutting it.”
ARKANSANS IN CROWD
The Washington rally drew Arkansans, including three students from Future School of Fort Smith.
Johnny Rose, 16, and Elizabeth Gonzalez, 17, flew to Washington for the protest. Sebastian Jennings, 18, made the trip on a Greyhound bus, a move that he says saved him several hundred dollars.
On Saturday morning, they rented bicycles and pedaled near the White House, then joined the throngs along Pennsylvania Avenue, staking out a spot near the Trump Hotel.
Rose said he felt compelled to take a stand.
“Every time you see one of those Parkland kids stand up and talk and speak out against gun violence and advocate for gun control, it makes you want to get up and do the same thing,” Rose said. “If you sit by and you watch terrible things happen … and you don’t do anything about it, that’s unacceptable. It’s almost an obligation to come up here and protest and march and just make sure people know that gun violence is not OK.”
Gonzalez said she’s alarmed by the ongoing gun violence.
“You never know where it’s going to happen,” she said.
She’s skeptical that arming teachers is the answer, saying “it may create more problems than it would create solutions.”
Gonzalez said she welcomed the opportunity to go to Washington and speak out.
“It’s really refreshing to be able to talk to people who actually want to discuss this; [who] don’t just want to brush it aside,” she added.
Jennings said there’s too much division and not enough civil discourse in America.
“I would not be quick to demonize anybody,” he said. “I’d like to just hear a calm discussion about [gun policy.] You know, something level-headed.”
Allison Montiel, who teaches a health literacy class at the Future School, said she was pleased to accompany the students to Washington.
“I believe in what these kids are rallying around,” she said.
“Out on the streets … the energy is buzzing,” she said. “I went to college here; I’ve never seen it like this.”
Richard Wright, another Arkansan in the crowd, was also impressed by the size of the crowd.
The Jacksonville man and his wife, Norma Fox, grabbed a spot at Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventh Street near the National Archives building.
Wright, 66, said he learned about the rally while watching MSNBC and soon was making travel plans. “There was just something that inspired me about it. … These kids deserve our support.”
He drove from Arkansas to Washington via Connecticut, picking up his 13-year-old grandson along the way.
It was a chance, Wright said, to witness history.
“I just had a feeling this is going to be one of those seminal events,” he added.
Fox, 52, said she was glad to make the journey.
“I’ve got grandkids. Five of them,” she said. “They’re young, they’re in school, and I don’t want them to have to be afraid to go to school, worried about getting shot. … I’m speaking up for the little ones that can’t speak for themselves.”
SOME GUN ACTIONS
For many of the young people, the rally was their first act of protest and a political awakening.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday announced a proposed rule to ban socalled bump stocks that allow semi-automatic guns to fire more rapidly, similar to a fully automatic weapon. A sniper in the Oct. 1 Las Vegas mass shootings used such a device to kill 58 concertgoers.
Also Friday, Congress voted to bolster background checks for gun purchases, spend more on school safety, and let the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study gun violence, ending what was in effect a 22-year ban on such study that was supported by the NRA.
The measures, included in a larger spending bill signed by President Donald Trump — were the first congressional action in years on gun legislation. But they’re small steps compared with the 1994 assault-weapons ban that lapsed in 2004. Congress seemed ready to act after the 2012 massacre of 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., but the effort failed.
Organizers at national gun control groups, who provided logistical support and public relations advice as the students planned the Washington rally, said they believed that the students would not become disillusioned by the lack of immediate action in Congress.
“The mass shooting generation is nearing voting age,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a national group that advocates tougher gun laws. “They know the midterms are six months away, and they plan to make sure that they vote and they get others to register to vote. They are absolutely poised to turn this moment into a movement.”
Gun-rights organizations largely stayed silent Saturday. A spokesman for the NRA declined repeated requests for comment.
In Salt Lake City, several hundred people gathered for a counterprotest near a high school, some carrying signs with messages like “AR-15’s EMPOWER the people.” Brandon McKee, who wore a pistol on his belt, had his daughter, Kendall, 11, with him. She held a sign that read “criminals love gun control.”
“I believe it’s their goal to unarm America, and that’s why we’re here today,” McKee said of the Washington marchers. In Boston, about 20 gun-control protesters confronted a small clutch of Second Amendment supporters gathered in front of the state House. The two sides quickly got into a shouting match.
GLOBAL REACH
Around the world, Americans living abroad gathered to honor those who have died in school shootings and to echo the call for gun control.
Groups gathered outside U.S. Embassies in Copenhagen, London and Stockholm. In London they shouted “gun control now.” In Tokyo, people gathered at Shibuya Crossing, holding signs with the names of people killed in mass shootings. In Frankfurt, a group walked along a street shouting, “No guns in our schools.” In Sydney, a group of children held posters.
Protesters in Rome jammed the sidewalk across from the U.S. Embassy, next to the upscale Via Veneto, raising their voices in chants — “Hey hey, ho ho, the NRA has got to go,” and waving signs with messages like “A gun is not fun” and “Am I next?” many made by high school students at a local international school.
Between 150 and 200 people in Berlin gathered in solidarity in front of the Brandenburg Gate, just steps from the U.S. Embassy. Many carried hand-painted signs, among them: “Arms should be for hugging,” “bullets aren’t school supplies” and “Waffeln statt Waffen.” (Waffles instead of weapons).
One of the largest rallies outside Washington took place at a Florida park not far from Stoneman Douglas High School. During that event, 17 students from the school silently took the stage to represent their friends who were killed.
Anthony Montalto, brother of Gina Rose Montalto, one of those killed, solemnly held a sign that read “My sister could not make it here today. I’m here for her.”
“Turn this moment into a movement,” Sari Kaufman, a sophomore at Stoneman Douglas, implored the sea of students, parents and teachers. She urged her friends at the school to vote out of office politicians who take money from the NRA. “They think we’re all talk and no action.”
Stoneman Douglas students began pitching their message a day earlier, meeting Friday with lawmakers on Capitol Hill as part of a trip organized by Giffords, the gun-control group founded by former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was shot at a constituent event in 2011 in Tucson. The students were among 200 young people who arrived in Washington from south Florida to meet with lawmakers and share their gun-violence experiences and to attend Saturday’s “March for Our Lives.”
Students from Stoneman Douglas and from Chicago and Minneapolis spoke Friday, urging members of Congress to take action to stop gun violence.
“We students have become victims of our government’s glaring inaction,” said Demetri Hoth, a Stoneman Douglas senior. “But never again. We have come here today to hold accountable politicians and their disturbing inaction. Never again will our voices — student voices — be shunned into silence.”