GUN MARCHES DRAW THOUSANDS
Grass-roots movement grows in days since Parkland shooting
Tired of losing their peers to gun violence and spurred by last month’s Parkland, Florida, school shooting, thousands of students and gun control advocates gathered across the country Saturday morning to deliver a clear message: keep guns out of our schools.
In San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and more than a dozen other Bay Area cities, thousands
joined the national March for Our Lives calling for stricter gun control. This grass-roots political movement — led by Parkland students such as Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg — has stirred hundreds of thousands of young Americans in particular, hungry to incite change.
“I want to march for the protection of our schools, so that we all feel safe in our schools instead of feeling unprotected
and scared,” said Sophia Henderson, 14, of Palo Alto, a student at Jordan Middle School who marched in San Jose with her grandmother, Mardell Oller.
Marina Zavala, who brought her 9-year-old daughter to Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza, where hundreds of mostly adult demonstrators gathered Saturday, said “if those kids can be in the streets, we can be in the streets.”
“We’ve protested before and voted before and kind of been beaten down, but Parkland changed that,” Zavala said.
In Washington, hundreds of thousands of people attended a noontime rally, which included performances by such entertainers as Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato. Protesters bearing signs reading “We Are the Change,” “No More Silence” and “Keep NRA Money Out of Politics” packed Pennsylvania Avenue from the stage near the Capitol, stretching many blocks back toward the White House.
“We will continue to fight for our dead friends,” Delaney Tarr, a survivor of the Florida tragedy, declared from the stage. The crowd roared with approval as she laid down the students’ central demand: a ban on “weapons of war” for all but warriors.
Large rallies with crowds estimated in the tens of thousands in some cases also unfolded in such cities as Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Fort Worth, Texas, Minneapolis and Parkland, Florida, the site of the Feb. 14 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 people dead.
It was the latest in a series of school massacre shootings that have sparked debate over gun restrictions in a country where a citizen’s right to
bear arms is a bedrock constitutional liberty. Other notorious school shootings have included Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, Columbine, Colorado, in 1999 and Jonesboro, Arkansas, on a March 24 two decades ago in 1998.
Saturday’s demonstrations followed a March 14 nationwide student school walkout over gun violence that came exactly a month after the Parkland shooting. A 19-year-old expelled student has been charged with capital murder in the shooting deaths, and Florida lawmakers have passed laws to raise the buying age for all guns to 21 or older to bolster school security.
Tighter security
Gun rights groups such as the National Rifle Association say they support tighter security around schools and other public places as well as measures to disarm the mentally disturbed and dangerous. But they have opposed banning
specific types of weapons or raising the age to legally buy guns.
The NRA was silent on Twitter Saturday morning, in contrast to its reaction to the nationwide school walkouts against gun violence March 14, when leaders tweeted a photo of an assault rifle and the message “I’ll control my own guns, thank you.”
About 30 gun rights supporters staged a counterdemonstration in front of FBI headquarters in Washington, standing quietly with signs such as “Armed Victims Live Longer” and “Stop Violating Civil Rights.” Other gun control protests around the country were also met with small counterdemonstrations.
In San Francisco, several politicians spoke to demonstrators Saturday, including U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who authored a national assault weapon ban in the 1990s that has since expired.
“Is this the country we
want our children to grow up in?” Feinstein said to cheers and yells of “no.”
‘Melt the guns’
Among those in the crowd was 14-year-old Owen Pontoriero, an eighthgrader from Petaluma, who brought a sign taped to a small tree branch that said “Melt The Guns.”
“I think there’s horribleness to gun violence, and this is how we stop it,” said Pontoriero, adding that “when I’m old enough” he and other kids will vote out politicians who won’t curb access to guns.
In San Jose, the crowd of thousands assembled outside City Hall in a light rain, marched down Santa Clara Street toward the Arena Green, and chanted “Hey, hey, NRA, how many kids have you killed today.”
Amid the crowd was Ally Strasen, 23, of Gilroy, holding a bright orange poster that read, “I thought you were pro-life.” The faces of dozens of victims of recent
school shootings framed the message. Strasen and her sister lost their swim coach to gun violence in 2012.
“At the time, it was kind of random, and we weren’t hearing about a whole lot of gun violence,” she said. “Now, all of a sudden it’s everyday. When I turn on the news, I wonder whether or not I’m going to see another school shooting, and it just breaks my heart.”
Strasen, who recently got her master’s degree in special education and worked as an elementary school teacher, wants to see stricter background checks and help for people with mental health issues in order to prevent mass shootings in the future.
Trump in Florida
President Donald Trump was in Florida for the weekend, where a motorcade took him to his West Palm Beach golf club in the morning.
Organizers of Saturday’s nationwide demonstrations have urged the reinstatement of a national ban on military-style semi-automatic “assault weapons” and high-capacity ammunition magazines as well as background checks for all gun sales. Advocates note that since a deadly 1996 mass shooting by a gunman using such a weapon in Tasmania, Australia banned them and hasn’t seen a similar massacre since.
But in the U.S., Congress allowed a 1994 national assault weapons ban to sunset a decade later, citing a federal report that found its effectiveness inconclusive.
In the crowd of Oakland demonstrators, Emeryville resident and NRA member Ledd Lindsay said the Second Amendment has been “grossly overused” and held a sign saying, “I fully support your right to keep and bear a musket.”
“It is not inconsistent,” Lindsay said, “to own a gun and want limits.”