The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
⏩ Newtown students embrace Florida counterparts at march in Washington, D.C.
Students from Newtown High School carried a message of solidarity to Washington for their counterparts at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
“After Parkland, we feel hope,” Jackson Mittelman said, as he and others presented a banner Saturday to students from that Florida town, where grief has galvanized into youth activism. “After the media trucks leave, we will stand by you.”
Along with hundreds of thousands, the students had come together in D.C. in a call for action dubbed the March for Our Lives.
The banner read: “Newtown High School stands with Stoneman Douglas,” and featured the image of a red ribbon.
Student survivors of the Feb. 14 mass shooting that took 17 lives at the Florida high school were the primary speakers and motivators at the D.C. rally, one of hundreds that took place across the nation Saturday, including events in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta — and Parkland, Fla.
“We hope our message from Newtown High School will help you through your darkest days,” Mittelman, who is co-chairman of the Jr. Newtown Action Alliance, said to the Parkland students.
Young people from Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles and elsewhere also stepped to the podium in D.C., recounting lives in turmoil after acts of gun violence.
“If you listen real close you can hear the people in power shaking,” said David Hogg, a Stoneman Douglas student. “We’re going to make this a voting issue. We will get rid of these public servants that only serve the gun lobby. And we will save lives.”
Recalling a dark day
When it was their turn, Mittelman and fellow co-chairman Tommy Murray recalled being in lockdown in sixth grade on Dec.14, 2012, the day Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 20 children and six adult staff members with a Bushmaster AR-15 variant, before killing himself.
“It was one of the worst days of my life,” said Murray, whose mother, Po Murray, is the chairwoman of the Newtown Action Alliance.
While there were rallies Saturday in Hartford, Stamford and elsewhere in Connecticut, Newtown students made their case on the day’s biggest stage, in Washington. The demonstration appeared likely to draw 500,000 participants — a massive outpouring by D.C. standards.
Sandy Hook was not the nation’s first mass shooting at a school. But it has stuck in the nation’s collective consciousness because the 20 childhood victims were ages 6 and 7. Similarly, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting stimulated a movement among teenagers that is widely seen as rejuvenating the push for greater regulation and restriction of guns.
The Newtown group chartered eight buses that left before dawn and arrived in downtown Washington just in time for the noon rally on the Mall, four blocks west of the U.S. Capitol.
Virtually all of the speakers were high school students whose calls for action guns were punctuated by performances of stars including Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Inaction by Congress was a common theme, even though the just-passed Omnibus spending bill included Fix NICS, co-authored by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and language clarifying authority for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct research on gun violence.
“Together, our stories will create the change we need,” Tommy Murray told the cheering crowd, which chanted “never again, never again.”
“If these shootings can happen in Parkland and Newtown, they can happen anywhere,” he said.
‘Never again’
The first wave of D.C. arrivals from Newtown was greeted by Avery Gardiner, co-director of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which sponsored the Washington march.
Among those in the Newtown contingent was Sue Lach, who stepped off the bus holding a Sandy Hook Promise sign and shouting, “Never again, never again!”
Sandy Hook Promise co-founder Nicole Hockley, whose son, Dylan, was killed in the 2012 shooting, reflected on how far the movement for more gun control has come.
“I’m just excited that all these people are here,” she said. “We haven’t had a march like this for this issue. It’s good to know so many people are here demanding change.”
Hockley noted a “sea change” in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas High shooting.
“Sandy Hook started this (movement) and it’s been growing ever since, but now the kids are raising their voices,” she said.
Three busloads of students came from the University of Connecticut, Portland resident Isabelle Guilmett among them. “I want people to stop dying,” she said. “It’s time something happened.”
Guilmett pointed to the failed 2001 shoe bomb attempt that occurred on an American Airlines flight. Security procedures at U.S. airports have since asked people to remove their shoes before proceeding through scanners. But nothing has happened similarly in the wake of mass shootings in schools, Guilmett said.
Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Murphy have credited youthful vigor for re-stimulating the movement for gun-violence prevention, which has most often faded away after galvanizing in the wake of mass shooting incidents.
The National Rifle Association was mostly silent leading up to Saturday’s rallies. But some counter-demonstrators were in Washington. A group wearing militarystyle camouflage and calling themselves the Patriot Picket stood about a block from the main demonstration, holding signs that said, among other things, “good guys with guns stand by you.”
“No matter what you want to do, American freedoms are not the enemy,” said Jeff Hulbert, founder of the group based in Annapolis, Md., that brought about 45 people. The group’s website says it mounts protests to counter anti-gun demonstrators. “Looney lefties everywhere,” said a posting on its Facebook page Saturday.
Since the Florida shooting, President Donald Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill have called for greater focus on mental health and early pinpointing of troubled students. And they coalesced with Democrats around Fix NICS.
But Murphy and other Democrats have insisted that tougher restrictions on guns must be part of any effort to reduce gun violence. At a meeting with lawmakers from both parties last month, Trump appeared to embrace much of the Democratic agenda, only to back off after subsequent a subsequent meeting with NRA leaders.