Students lead region’s March for Our Lives
Tim McCoy already has led one major anti-gun violence protest, and Saturday he’ll help lead yet another. He turns 17 next month. “When they hear us speak, they hear us talk, they hear our stories, they definitely know that we’re a force to be dealt with,” said Tim, a senior at Boone High School in Orlando, of his and other students’ activism in the wake of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. “We’re getting the attention we are because we’re articulate, because we’re smart and we’re passionate. I think they know that we aren’t going to give up.”
Orlando’s March for Our Lives event is expected to draw 10,000 to 15,000 protesters for a 1 p.m. rally
Saturday at Lake Eola Park that will include a march to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio’s downtown office and Pulse nightclub.
It’s just one part of a national movement calling for stronger gun control measures that aims to draw as many as 1 million people at hundreds of events nationwide Saturday in the wake of the Feb. 14 Parkland shooting, including sister rallies scheduled in Apopka, Mount Dora and Tavares.
The main demonstration will be in Washington, D.C., organized in part by Stoneman Douglas students and expected to draw 500,000 people.
The Orlando rally is being put together by high school and college students such as Tim and University of Central Florida sophomore Trevor Wild, 19, president of the group Never Again UCF.
“This is an issue directly affecting us,” said Wild, a graduate of Stoneman Douglas. “We’ve been doing shooting drills since kindergarten. This is not going to go away.”
One reason the student movement has gained traction, Tim said, is because of the impact of gun violence on many of their lives, including his own.
Matthew Manolas, the best friend of Tim’s father, was fatally shot during a robbery in 2011 Orlando, and Tim witnessed the devastating aftermath.
“When you have to go through some sort of traumatic experience,” he said, “it really makes you reflect and think on things.”
Tim, who led a Parkland-inspired student walkout on March 14 at Boone, has a politically active background and is involved in LGBT organizations at the school. But he’s also in the U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and plans to join the Army after graduation, a career path that results in “a few raised eyebrows sometimes” when he talks to others in the movement.
But, he said, it has given him a different take on the AR-15 rifle used in the Stoneman shootings and other such weapons in the U.S.
“I’ve gotten to know a lot of military personnel and ex-military personnel,” Tim said. “They come back home after going to Iraq and Baghdad and they see the same weapons in our streets that they see in these war-torn countries, and they’re like, ‘What the heck are we doing over here?’ ’’
The recent bill signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott, which bans “bump stock” devices that make semiautomatic weapons fire faster and raises the age requirement on gun sales to 21, is “a good first step,” he added. “But we want to see an outright assault weapons ban.”
Wild said students from Central Florida “are affected so deeply, given what happened at Pulse right down the street from us,” referring to the 2016 mass shooting that killed 49.
The contrast between the push for gun control measures then and now is stark, he said.
“[Pulse] was two years ago, and no changes were made,” Wild said. “It took another big tragedy for change to happen.”
Princeton University student Samuel Vilchez Santiago, a 20-year-old Colonial High School grad who’s spending his spring break helping plan the Orlando march, is another of those students personally affected by gun violence; a family friend was killed in the Pulse shooting.
He also fears for his 13year-old sister, who attends Odyssey Middle School. Earlier this month, parents there were alerted to a threat on campus.
“When the issue hit home, it made it more personal for me,” he said.
Vilchez Santiago reached out to Never Again UCF, told them he’d be home for spring break and wanted to help.
“We expect a big turnout,” he said, “and we’re preparing for it.”
While his office is the focus of Saturday’s march, Rubio has put forward his own federal plan to end gun violence that includes the creation of school threat assessment and crisis intervention teams, restraining orders to prevent gun sales from people who pose threats and strengthening background checks. But Tim wants more. “Gun violence is gun violence,” he said. “It touches everyone unanimously throughout America. And that’s what we’re really aiming to end here. … What we want to do is hold our elected officials accountable and [hear them say] ‘I do want an assault weapons ban,’ and ‘I don’t support guns in our schools.’ ”
“And if they don’t,” Tim said, “we’ll vote them out.”