Survivors asking youth to step up
After historic nationwide marches Saturday, student leaders take aim at getting out the vote
WASHINGTON — After Saturday’s “March for Our Lives” rallies for tougher gun laws, students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were gunned down in February, said Sunday that getting young Americans mobilized and registered to vote will be their focus in the months to come.
Several hours earlier, coming from a place of heartbreak to claim their spot in history, hundreds of thousands of teenagers and supporters rallied across the United States for tougher laws to fight gun violence.
The “March for Our Lives” events Saturday drew massive crowds in cities across the country, marking the largest youth-led protests since the Vietnam War era.
In Washington, New York City, Denver, Los Angeles and other cities, demonstrators heard from student survivors of last month’s school shooting in Parkland, Fla. At Saturday’s march, voter registration groups roamed the crowds, offering to pre-register anyone over the age of 15.
Survivor David Hogg told attendees at the Washington march that the effort wouldn’t stop at the close of the rally, but would be carried on to every election in every
state to vote out those who stand in the way of gun control policy.
“If you listen real close, you can hear the people in power shaking,” Mr. Hogg said to roars from protesters packing Pennsylvania Avenue from a stage near the Capitol to a spot near the White House many blocks away.
“Because this,” he said, pointing behind him to the Capitol dome, “this is not cutting it.”
And speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and other Sunday morning news programs, student Cameron Kasky called young voter turnout in recent elections “embarrassing.”
Mr. Kasky said: “The youth of America need to step up and start voting.” He appeared on the show with Emma Gonzalez and other student leaders after helping lead the march in Washington.
“We need to make sure everybody registers, pre-registers and shows up at the polls, because our youth in this country don’t vote,” said Ryan Deitsch, one of the 18 students behind March for Our Lives. “They’ve been fear-mongered and basically fooled into not voting. And we’re tired of this BS.”
The students said they plan to focus on the coming midterm elections but wouldn’t endorse candidates.
Democratic lawmakers, who’ve done little to pass a gun-control agenda since a now-expired assault weapons ban in 1994, appeared genuinely excited to see the outpouring of student activism. Outside a reception she hosted Friday afternoon for marchers from Broward County,Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said students “will ignite our ability to achieve” gun control legislation.
Delaney Tarr, another Parkland student and speaker at the march, argued that some of the momentum for new gun laws had been slowed when President Donald Trump “had a meeting with the NRA” and “backed down” on some of what he had proposed at a meeting with members of Congress. She called the timing “sketchy.”
Compared with 2012, voter turnout for millennials, those ages 18 to 35, increased to just below 50 percent in the last presidential election, according to the Pew Research Center and U.S. Census data. But that turnout still lags behind other generations.
Still, Dianne Daley, a 60year-old corporate events planner from Long Beach, California, said the students have done a lot to inspire their older peers.
“Maybe that’s what it’s going to take — children leading us,” Ms. Daley said. She comes from a family of educators and marched Saturday in her hometown with three generations of her family, including her 87- year-old father, an Air Force veteran.
The message at the different rallies was consistent, with demonstrators vowing to vote out lawmakers who refuse to take a stand now on gun control. Many rallies had tables where volunteers helped those 18 or older register to vote while speakers detailed policies they wanted and the impact gun violence hashad on their lives.
By all appearances — there were no official numbers — Washington’s March for Our Lives rally rivaled the women’s march last year that drew far more than the predicted 300,000.
Mr. Trump was in Florida for the weekend and did not weigh in on Twitter.
In her speech Saturday, Ms. Gonzalez recited the names of the Parkland dead, then held the crowd in rapt, tearful silence for more than six minutes, the time it took the gunman to kill them.
Andthe crowd roared with approval as Ms. Tarr laid down the students’ central demand: a ban on “weapons ofwar” for all but warriors.
Student protesters called for a ban on high-capacity magazines and assault-type weapons like the one used by the killer in Parkland, comprehensive background checks, and a higher minimum age to buy guns.
Meanwhile on Sunday, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum — originally from Penn Hills but now residing in North Virginia — said Sunday that students who have rallied for gun control should instead learn CPR or find their own way to prevent a school shooting.
“How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that,” the Republican said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The 2012 and 2016 presidential candidate said students could work to stop bullying in their communities or respond themselves to a shooter instead of asking lawmakers to approve legislation to protect them, comments that drew outrage on social media.
Mr. Santorum said that if the rallies are about more than politics, then the country needs to have a broader discussion that doesn’t revolve around “phony gun laws” that don’t work.
“They took action to ask someone to pass a law,” he said of the demonstrators. “They didn’t take action to say, ‘How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem?’”