Student walkouts planned at Bay Area schools
Pupils from Mountain View to Oakland are organizing demonstrations to call on Congress to pass stricter gun laws
Students at more than a dozen high schools across the Bay Area are planning walkouts next month to pressure Congress to pass stricter gun laws.
The walkouts will take place at 10 a.m. March 14 from Oakland to Orinda and Palo Alto to Mountain View. Organized by the youth arm of the Women’s March, the local demonstrations are part of a nationwide series of walkouts by students, teachers, parents and administrators to urge lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to “do more than tweet thoughts and prayers in response to the gun violence plaguing our schools and neighborhoods,” according to a statement released by the group.
The walkouts will last 17 minutes in memory of the 17 people killed at the Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Fierce debate over the nation’s gun laws typically follows school shootings, but this case is unusual because the movement is being spearheaded by students who say they’re fed up with the adults around them failing to make their schools safe.
“I’m really hoping that as students become the real force behind it, it gains a little more momentum, because it’s our voices that seem to carry,” said Carolyn Moor, an 18-year-old senior organizing a walkout at Mountain View High School.
The school is currently on a winter break, but more than 100 students have expressed interest online in participating and Moor hopes that number will rise once people return to class on Monday. Moor is still trying to decide what to organize for the 17 minute walkout, whether it’s a silent display or speeches. Regardless, she said, it will involve students wearing orange, the color of the nationwide walkouts, to “show that enough is enough.”
On Monday, a group called Teens for Gun Reform organized a lie-in for gun control outside the White House that drew more than 100 people. Today, students from Stoneman Douglas will march on the state capitol in Tallahassee to call on Florida lawmakers to pass tighter gun laws. On Thursday, Florida State University students are expected to march at the capitol.
On March 24, student organizers from Parkland and elsewhere are planning a march in Washington, D.C. called March For Our Lives to call for stricter gun laws at the federal level. Sister marches are expected to take place across the country, including in San Jose and San Francisco. And the Network for Public Education is planning another nationwide walkout for April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado.
“They might be on different days,” Moor said, “but they’re all for the same cause and that’s to get some action, some real change.”
The White House has suggested that President Donald Trump might support bolstering federal background checks for gun buyers and on Tuesday, Trump directed the U.S. Justice Department to propose regulations to ban bump stocks, which the gunman in the October shooting in Las Vegas used to make his semiautomatic rifle work like an automatic weapon.
But last year, Congress failed to pass a ban on bump stocks. The Obama administration’s attempts to strengthen the nation’s gun laws after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, also didn’t pan out.