Shooting survivors march to protest gun violence

The Saturday rally comes after last month’s killing of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and the murder of 10 African Americans at a Buffalo grocery 10 days earlier.

WASHINGTON » Thousands of people in rain slickers and T-shirts poured into Washington Saturday to rally against the nation’s epidemic of gun violence and to demand that Congress take steps to end it.

They gathered on a gray morning on the Mall to join the rally staged by March for Our Lives, the organization founded by student survivors of the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla.

“Enough is ENOUGH,” the group said in a Facebook post.

People carried placards reading: “School Should Not be a War Zone” and “Thoughts and Prayers are Not Bulletproof.”

The National Park Service said organizers planned for as many as 50,000 people in Washington, but the crowd on a dreary Saturday was in the low thousands. Other rallies were scheduled in towns and cities across the country.

As demonstrators arrived, President Joe Biden voiced his support in a tweet Saturday morning:

“Today, young people around the country once again march with @AMarch4OurLives to call on Congress to pass commonsense gun safety legislation supported by the majority of Americans and gun owners,” he said. “I join them by repeating my call to Congress: do something.”

In Washington, the crowd began forming on the north side of Lincoln Memorial, and mingled amid the soggy grass and light rain.

Ray Anid, 22, flew in from Orlando, and turned up wearing a bright yellow vest to help prepare for the day’s march.

“Hopefully we make a difference today,” he said. “Hopefully we push our politicians to do what they’re supposed to do, what the majority of America wants them to do when it comes to guns, and protect us.”

Many in the crowd wore bright blue shirts emblazoned with words” “March for Our Lives.”

Most appeared young college and high school students, along with a few parents with younger children. They spoke with excitement as hit songs blared from the staging area _ Harry Styles’ “As It Was” and Ed Sheeran’s “Shivers.”

Near the National Museum of African American History and Culture, demonstrators were greeted by a huge field of of orange and white artificial flowers that represent gun violence deaths. “Around 5,000 more people died in 2020 than 2019,” a nearby sign read. “The orange flowers symbolize the increase in lost lives.”

Authorities appeared prepared for the day as well, with several ambulances idling along the street corners at edge of monument and a dozen Washington D.C. police squad cars packed together a block away at Virginia and Constitution avenues.

The event comes four years after the organization held a huge rally in Washington to plead for action in the wake of the Parkland shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

“Never again!” the crowd had chanted then.

But seven months later, a heavily-armed gunman killed eleven people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Two weeks after that a gunman killed eleven people at a bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif. And seven months after that a disgruntled employee killed twelve people at a municipal building in Virginia Beach.

The Saturday rally comes after last month’s killing of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and the murder of 10 African Americans at a Buffalo grocery 10 days earlier. Locally, three workers were killed by a fellow employee Thursday in a concrete molding company near Hagerstown, Md.

And a mentally disturbed man with a hand gun was arrested and charged with attempted murder near the suburban Washington home of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Officials said the man wanted to kill a Supreme Court justice he thought would join opinions easing gun restrictions.

Some protesters came with friends or tagged along with their parents.

Mother-daughter duo Carly and Lisa Augenbaugh came from Carroll County, Md., an hour-anda-half north of Washington.

“This country is in emergency seems like such a lame word to use we’re in a national crisis,” said Lisa Augenbaugh, 56. “We’re approaching the time when there will be no one left in the country who hasn’t been affected by gun violence.”

For Carly, 24, a substitute teacher studying at Hood College, in Frederick, to become a school counselor, the threat of gun violence follows her into every new classroom, she said

She said she is constantly making sure the doors in each room can lock. “If I ever die in my school, I need you to make sure this never happens again,” she remembers telling her mom after the Uvalde shooting. Now, she wants lawmakers to clamp down on assault weapons.

“We need to make it harder for the bad guys to get guns,” she said.

Katie Holloway, 41, an elementary teacher drove from New Jersey with her mother Gretchen Showell, 63, and her aunt Liz Brophy, 59.

Holloway said she had not attended a political rally or march since she was a college student.

In her hand, she held a sign saying: “...This teacher has had ENOUGH!”

Shortly after the school shooting in Texas, Holloway said, her mother called her and told her how she couldn’t stop worrying about Holloway’s kids - two 12-year-old boys, and Holloway herself, who is a 2nd grade teacher.

They decided to book a hotel in D.C. and attend the rally.

“I teach my kids that you can do anything and change anything in the world if you try,” Holloway said. “So this is me and us doing something, because this whole situation needs to change. The fact that we can’t send our kids to school without worrying what might happen to them is crazy. This doesn’t happen in any other country in the world.”