6:20 FOR 17 LIVES
Emma Gonzalez, 18, stands silent before telling an estimated 500,000 people at an anti-gun rally in Washington: ‘Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.’ In Ottawa, hundreds of supporters marched to the U.S. Embassy.
Hundreds of demonstrators joined the international March For Our Lives on Saturday, chanting antigun slogans and carrying placards from Parliament Hill to the U.S. Embassy in solidarity with student-led anti-gun protests around the world.
With the national conversation turning to gun violence following a series of deadly school shootings in the United States, it was the youth of Ottawa taking the most prominent role in Saturday’s protest.
“After seeing how many youths were affected in the United States, I don’t want to go to school in fear and I don’t want my little brothers to go to school in fear,” said 17-year-old Edna Rodriguez, one of the core organizers.
“I don’t want this to happen in Canada. And hearing it happening so close to home, it just hit everyone hard.”
Rodriguez, a senior at Colonel By Secondary School, said she had only expected herself and a few dozen friends to show up when she first started spreading the word on social media.
Instead, she found herself surrounded by about 400 demonstrators as organizers read aloud a letter to U.S. Ambassador Kelly Knight Craft, then hand-delivered the letter across the street to the U.S. Embassy.
“Nothing will be solved overnight, but we are trying to promote change by putting pressure on the U.S. government to start changing their gun legislation,” Rodriguez said. “And putting pressure on the U.S. government, it also puts pressure on our own.”
Several demonstrators expressed optimism about the Liberal government’s proposed legislation to strengthen controls on gun sales, and the licensing and tracing of firearms.
The OPP recently announced a provincewide gun amnesty program beginning April 1, inviting gun owners to turn in unwanted, unlicensed and unregistered firearms and ammunition without fear of penalty.
Hours after Saturday’s protest, Ottawa police Chief Charles Bordeleau announced the Ottawa Police Service would follow suit, with “details coming soon.”
There were others at Saturday’s demonstration, though, who focused their ire on legislators in the U.S.
Kelly Dykes, an elementary school teacher and a survivor of the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, said the fear of gun violence is not restricted to U.S. schools.
“It is affecting us whether it’s happening in schools in the U.S. or elsewhere . ... It’s an issue for everybody. To go and enjoy a concert in the United States, that’s something I enjoyed, and that’s something now I’ll have a difficult time doing. Now you have to be scared not just to go to school, but everyday life.”
Marching with a group of teachers from Blossom Park Public School, Dykes said she was dismayed at the way the gun control conversation shifted in America, from the recent call for bans and age restrictions to a proposal to instead arm teachers.
“We think it’s a joke — that’s no solution,” Dykes said. “Having a gun in our classroom is not something we could ever imagine, let alone even consider. I think we would all quit our jobs before we would carry a gun.”
Rodriguez said she feels safe in school. “However, I don’t want that to change. I don’t want to go to school and be scared, I don’t want to know that my teacher has a gun just in case someone is coming in to shoot people. Giving teachers guns is not going to be a solution. Fighting fire with fire is not going to get anything solved.”
American expatriate Sam McDargh, who grew up in “deep red” Republican Missouri and got her first gun at age nine, before burning her NRA card and eventually moving to Canada, said guns remain a significant part of American culture.
“So for people who are pro-gun, for them this is an attack on their culture and their ideology. It’s one thing to pass a law saying you have to wear your seatbelt in a car, but to take something that’s part of your culture and your ideology, people get fired up about that, whether it’s a logical argument or not.
“But I think the NRA is losing for the first time because of the generation behind us that is pushing us,” Dargh said. “Kids are fed up, and they were waiting for us as their parents to do the right thing. But we stayed with the status quo, and that’s no longer acceptable.”
At the same time anti-gun demonstrators were marching in the streets, the gun conversation took a decidedly different tone at the Lombardy Gun Show, about 70 km southwest of city limits.
Vendors and several patrons declined to speak to a reporter in the parking lot of the Lombardy Fairgrounds on Saturday, and organizers would not allow reporters or photographers inside the venue.
“We are scrutinized by the RCMP — the background checks are just unbelievable, what we (gun owners) go through, and we agree with it. We agree with the regulations,” gun show organizer Dave Jones, with the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, said Friday.
Jones, who declined an interview at the venue on Saturday, had expressed concerns over the direction the gun conversation is headed in Canada.
“We know what gun owners have to go through, but when it goes through the media and everyone says you can just walk in (and walk out with a gun), that’s just not true.”