Never Again March Against Guns in Washington 3/24/18
March for Our Lives Highlights: Students Protesting Guns Say 'Enough Is Enough'
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Demonstrators flooded streets across the world in public protests on Saturday, calling for activity confronting gun violence. Hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out, in the virtually ambitious show of force yet from a educatee-driven motion that emerged later on the recent massacre at a South Florida high school.
At the principal event in Washington, survivors of mass shootings, including the ane in Florida, rallied a whooping crowd — "Welcome to the revolution," said i of the student organizers — and spoke of communities that are unduly afflicted by gun violence. "It is normal to see flowers honoring the lives of blackness and brown youth that have lost their lives to a bullet," Edna Chavez, 17, said of her Due south Los Angeles neighborhood.
• In New York, marchers arranged in brilliant orange — the official color of a gun command advocacy group — charged toward Fundamental Park. And in Parkland, Fla., less than a mile from where the shooting took identify last month, one protester's eyes brimmed with tears, surrounded past the echoing dirge, "Enough is plenty!"
• Small groups of counterprotesters supporting gun rights also marched in unlike cities. In Salt Lake City, demonstrators carried pistols and flags. One of their signs read: "What tin nosotros do to stop mass shootings? SHOOT Dorsum." In Boston, opposing groups of protesters shouted at one some other before the law intervened.
• More than 800 protests were planned in every American state, including in some gun-friendly cities, and on every continent except for Antarctica, according to a website prepare by organizers. Check out photos from effectually the earth.
• Planning for the events was spearheaded by a grouping of students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., who have emerged as national anti-gun figures in the wake of the shooting that left 17 dead.
• Abrupt-tongued and defiant, the educatee leaders hoped to elevate gun control as a cardinal issue during the upcoming midterm elections, and to inspire their peers to annals to vote en masse.
• They were building on the success of a national schoolhouse walkout this month, and gun command legislation in Florida that they helped to conductor in. Their goal remains, equally articulated online in the effect's mission statement, to "demand that a comprehensive and constructive bill exist immediately brought earlier Congress to address these gun problems."
• The White Firm responded to the demonstrations in a statement. "We applaud the many courageous young Americans exercising their Outset Amendment rights today," information technology read. On Friday, the Justice Department proposed banning so-called bump stocks, simply President Trump signed a spending pecker that included only some background check and school safe measures.
• The Times had journalists covering the marches in Washington; New York; Boston; Montpelier, Vt.; Parkland, Fla; Dahlonega, Ga.; Chicago; Common salt Lake Metropolis; Los Angeles; Seattle; Anchorage, Alaska; Rome; Berlin; and Tokyo. Follow them on Twitter.
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The student organizers want action in a midterm twelvemonth.
The student activists emphasized that they would soon have access to the ballot box equally they promise to build support for candidates who support universal background checks and bans on set on-manner weapons.
Big majorities of Americans say they support gun control measures like universal background checks. However when put directly to the people in a referendum in recent years, the results accept been mixed. Here is a look at what polling and recent referendums reveal virtually the political challenges that face the student-led activists.
At street intersections in Washington on Saturday, voter registration volunteers waved clipboards over their heads, shouting, "It takes less than three minutes!" They wore neon yellow shirts that read, "Annals to vote!"
"These Parkland students have already been able to make change that no one else could for decades," said Carol Williams, a volunteer from Due west Chester, Pa.
In Parkland on Sat, Sari Kaufman, a Stoneman Douglas sophomore, urged people to "plow this moment into a motion" that would button out of office whatsoever politician who took money from the National Rifle Association.
"They retrieve nosotros're all talk and no action," she said to loud applause and cheers, and urged the oversupply to prove politicians wrong by voting in huge numbers.
"Think that policy modify is not nearly as difficult as losing a loved one," she said. "Don't just go out and vote: Go 17 other people to become out and vote."
The crowd was peculiarly rousing in its appreciation of Casey Sherman, 17, a Douglas student and one of the Parkland rally organizers.
"My love for Parkland had taken on a whole new meaning," she said. "After all this heartbreak, we take come back stronger than ever. Those 17 people did non die in vain. We will stop at naught until nosotros make real, lasting change."
Epitome
'Welcome to the revolution,' one of the student organizers said in Washington.
At the rally in Washington, the first speaker was Cameron Kasky, 17, a junior at Stoneman Douglas who last month challenged Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican, to finish accepting donations from the National Rifle Association. Mr. Kasky called for universal background checks on gun sales and a ban on assault rifles.
"To the leaders, skeptics and cynics who told u.s.a. to sit down down and stay silent: Wait your plough," Mr. Kasky said. "Welcome to the revolution."
Another speaker, Edna Chavez, 17, a loftier schoolhouse senior in Los Angeles, said she had lost her brother to gun violence. "Ricardo was his proper noun. Can yous all say information technology with me?" she asked.
The crowd said his name over and over again, as Ms. Chavez smiled through tears.
Alex Wind, 17, a junior at Stoneman Douglas, spoke well-nigh the need for legislative alter.
"To all the politicians out in that location, if you have money from the Northward.R.A., you accept chosen expiry," he said. "If you have not expressed to your constituents a public stance on this issue, you accept chosen decease. If you do non stand with usa past saying we need to laissez passer common sense gun legislation, you accept chosen death. And none of the millions of people marching in this state today will end until they see those against us out of part, considering we choose life."
David Hogg, 17, a senior at the high school and ane of the most recognizable faces of the movement, said: "Who here is going to vote in the 2018 election? If you listen real shut, you can hear the people in power shaking."
Read more well-nigh what the day was like for other Stoneman Doulgas students.
On Saturday, officials with Metro, the region'south subway system, said more than 207,000 rides had been taken on the system by i p.g., about half of the number by that time during the women's march.
A team of crowd science researchers led past the professor G. Keith All the same of Manchester Metropolitan University in England estimated that about 180,000 people attended Saturday's rally in Washington. They examined photographs, video and satellite imagery of the rally to judge the crowd density in different areas of the demonstration. The number is less than half of the 470,000 that Mr. Yet estimated had attended the women's march in Washington in 2017.
Emma González, one of the pupil organizers, stood for several minutes of silence.
Ms. González spoke for simply under two minutes on Saturday at the rally in Washington, describing the furnishings of gun violence in emotional detail and reciting the names of classmates who had been killed.
Then she said cypher for 4 minutes and 26 seconds.
She stared straight alee during her menstruation of silence onstage, her sometimes watery eyes stock-still in the distance. And so a timer went off.
"Since the time that I came out here, it has been half dozen minutes and 20 seconds," she said. "The shooter has ceased shooting, and will soon abandon his rifle, alloy in with the students as they escape, and walk gratuitous for an hr earlier arrest.
"Fight for your lives, before information technology's someone else's job," she continued, and and so walked offstage.
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In New York, 150,000 people were marching, the mayor said.
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio said early in the afternoon on Twitter that an estimated 150,000 people were marching. "You accept to know when a revolution is starting," he said.
The musician Paul McCartney, speaking to CNN at the march, opened his jacket to show a T-shirt that read "We tin end gun violence."
"This is what nosotros tin do, so I'm hither to do information technology," Mr. McCartney said. "One of my best friends was killed in gun violence right around here, so it's important to me," he added, referring to his Beatles bandmate John Lennon, who was shot and killed in December 1980 exterior his flat on the Upper West Side.
Every bit the crowd thickened before a rally in forepart of the Trump International Hotel and Tower well-nigh Columbus Circle, Mary Ann Jacobs, 55, of Sandy Hook, Conn., milled in the crowd with her husband.
Ms. Jacobs was a library clerk during the massacre at Sandy Claw Unproblematic School. She barricaded herself in the school's library, "in a cupboard hidden behind file cabinets" along with eighteen 4th graders.
"In the months after the shooting information technology took 100 percent of my personal focus to become up and go to piece of work every day to take care of my surviving students," she said.
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Opponents of gun control staged their ain smaller rallies in Boston and Salt Lake City.
Tensions over guns seemed to converge in Salt Lake City, where a gun rights march kicked off merely minutes before a gun command march.
The gun rights rally drew hundreds of people, many conveying signs — "AR-15s EMPOWER the people," ane said.
Brandon McKee was ane of the many people with pistols on their hips. His daughter Kendall, xi, held a sign: "Criminals dear gun control."
Mr. McKee said of the Washington marchers: "I believe it's their goal to unarm America, and that's why we're here today. We're not going to stand idly past and let them tell us what nosotros can and cannot exercise."
As the gun rights advocates set off toward the Capitol, some began to heckle a gun command advocate, Linda Peer, 67, who had infiltrated the march line.
"She's non a true American!" one human yelled. "Shame on you lot!" the group chanted at her.
In Boston, a clutch of 2nd Amendment supporters gathered in front of the Statehouse with signs that said, "Come and have information technology."
"We believe in the Second Amendment," said Paul Allen, 62, a retired construction worker who lives in Salisbury, Mass. "You people will interpret it the way you desire and we'll interpret it for what it is — that law-constant citizens who are true patriots have the right to bear arms."
Mr. Allen described supporters of gun control as "ignorant sheep who are being spoon-fed past liberal teachers."
"They haven't read the Constitution and they don't know what it means," he said.
Read more than about these protests.
Gun rights organizations were more often than not quiet nearly the demonstrations on Saturday. A spokesman for the North.R.A. did not reply several emails requesting comment.
On the eve of the march, Colion Noir, a host on NRATV, an online video channel produced by the gun group, lashed out at the Parkland students, saying that "no one would know your names" if someone with a weapon had stopped the gunman at their school.
"These kids ought to be marching confronting their ain hypocritical belief structures," he said in the video, adding, "The only reason we've ever heard of them is considering the guns didn't come soon plenty."
Demonstrators gathered in gun-friendly states.
In places where gun command is less popular, demonstrators pooled together, trying to show that support for their crusade extends across large, predominantly liberal cities.
In Vermont, a rural state with a rich hunting culture and some of the nation'due south weakest gun laws, marchers gathered at the Capitol in Montpelier. Organizers hoped that thousands would turn out past the finish of the day — an ambitious goal in a city of 7,500 people.
"I hope the national march is going to be impactful, but at least we know land past country that we can make change," said Madison Knoop, a higher freshman who organized the rally.
In Dahlonega, Ga., several hundred people gathered outside a museum, a surprising bear witness of strength for gun control in an overwhelmingly conservative region.
"Nosotros're going to exist the generation that takes downwardly the gun entrance hall," Marisa Pyle, 20, said through a megaphone.
Ms. Pyle, a educatee at the Academy of Georgia and an organizer of Saturday'southward rally in Lumpkin County, challenged critics of the demonstrations beyond the country.
"I'm starting to think they only want to shut us upward because they're scared of what we take to say," Ms. Pyle said.
Immature people were scattered in a crowd dominated by people in middle age and older. There were few signs of counterprotesters. But as Ms. Pyle led a roll call of the Stoneman Douglas victims, a human in a passing vehicle yelled: "Trump! Trump! Trump!"
Paradigm
In Anchorage, the largest urban center in Alaska, marchers gathered in conditions that peaked to a higher place freezing effectually noon.
Alaska has non seen a school shooting in 2 decades, simply it has the highest rates of both gun-related deaths and suicides in the nation.
High schoolers turned out in jean jackets and hoodies, and shoveled snow to clear paths for ane another in the 24-degree weather.
"Exercise y'all know how it feels to take the chief pretend over the intercom that the shooter is walking your manner?" Elsa Hoppenworth, a 16-twelvemonth-old junior at West Anchorage High Schoolhouse, asked a cheering crowd. "Those who do not contribute to change contribute to our death."
Melanie Anderson, a 44-year-old middle school instructor, held up a sign that said "teacher, non precipitous shooter."
Keenly aware that Alaska is a pro-gun land, the students who marched and made speeches were careful to make clear that they were seeking modest reinforcements on existing gun laws, rather than all-out bans.
The bulletin resonated for Chicago residents all besides familiar with gun violence.
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transcript
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How Teens From Chicago's South Side Are Standing With Parkland Survivors
Ke'Shon Newman's brother was shot nine times on Chicago's South Side, where gun violence is a daily threat. At present, Ke'Shon is heading to Washington to march with high school students from Parkland, Fla.
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"Ain't no justice." "Ain't no justice." "Nosotros are the modify." "We are the change." "I am exasperated by what the Parkland students had to suffer. I am agitated that this is what had to be done to unite us." "I call up you should arm the states with books, instead of arming u.s. with weapons." "I'thou angry that I have to worry virtually losing another blood brother to gun violence. I'k angry that every bit we walk downwards the street, nosotros talk about it as if information technology'south a regular thing, just it'southward non." "Every one of us in here has experienced violence in our community. So how has this afflicted the states and our goals and our hopes and our dreams." "I lost my blood brother to a shootout. And I've been in countless occasions of only violence about trying to be robbed. Or merely trying to go away from a dangerous situation." "I know it'south different for me. I come in here as your teacher, just I've lost three students over the past years." "You can go outside one day and non know what's going to happen to you lot. Similar you could be innocent and all that other stuff. You could be in the eye of something and just become shot." "Thank you for engaging it. This is a hard conversation. I'one thousand really proud of yous." He's just fifteen years old, simply Ke'Shon Newman has had to grow upwards fast. Two years agone, his brother was shot and killed effectually the corner from his house. "He was walking dorsum from taking his girlfriend to the jitney stop. And he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And there was a shootout down the block. And he was shot. He was shot nine times, and was killed at the infirmary." His brother Randall was sixteen years old when he was killed. "He didn't even deserve to accept his life taken away. I thought I would take had enough time to still hang out with him, still just have fun, just grow up with him. To have it cut so short is a tragic thing." The S Side of Chicago is a world abroad from Parkland, Fla., where 17 people were killed in a mass school shooting. Simply young people here say that the country is finally waking upwardly to a reality they face up every day: Gun violence. "In my schoolhouse, I don't really think of information technology as a place for a mass shooting cause well-nigh — about stuff, that happens outside of school. Just what I have in common with the kids in Parkland is that I know how it feels to lose someone that's close to yous." Ke'Shon lives in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood of Chicago'southward South Side. It's one of the city's most dangerous areas, merely at that place'south a strong sense of customs here. The homicide rate in this area is 10 times that of the national average. And gun violence in this community is mostly gang related. "You volition not hear near a kid going into a Chicago high school and shooting up a schoolhouse. That's not our reality of gun violence. But they tin exit schoolhouse and on the block where they live, and they can get defenseless in the crossfire betwixt rival gangs." Lamar Johnson mentors Ke'Shon and other kids at a violence prevention program he runs at St. Sabina, a church in the surface area. "It's a jungle. You take to exist alert. Y'all have to be aware, considering at that place'due south a lot going on. It's a lot of practiced people here. Just at the same time, information technology'south a lot of dangers likewise." "I have to make sure that I'm not in the wrong place at the wrong fourth dimension because a situation tin can come up out of nowhere just from the wrong person, having the — a terrible mindset to really desire to impale someone or to shoot down a block." Lamar took some kids from the South Side of Chicago to Florida to run into with the Parkland survivors. They went to share their stories and their collective grief. "Nosotros was talking about the differences between how gun violence has afflicted them that day versus the everyday reality. Then I was sitting at that place with a smirk on my face like, well, I was — I basically told them I said, 'Well, no disrespect. Welcome to our world. And I mean this with true sincerity.' And when I said that one of the students was like, 'Well, I want to apologize to you considering I understand the reason why we accept this platform is considering we're privileged.'" "And so y'all, I can tell y'all alright, y'all good?" E'er since the Florida shooting, he's led his youth group through some difficult conversations. "First of all, allow'south proper name some of the similarities and differences, we have apart. Yeah." "To the Parkland kids this happened in one case. Only to the people of Chicago, here, this happens a lot." "And so if somebody you know got shot, and somebody they know got shot, the feeling's going to be the aforementioned." "Regardless of how many times you feel information technology, if they experienced it one, two times they still going to feel traumatized considering that was a moment that happened." "So permit me ask, do y'all feel nosotros become the same attention?" "No. Not at all." "Then you call back Chicago doesn't get attention for its gun violence?" "That surface area was nice and had, like, wealthy — information technology was nice. It was suburban." "Yous wouldn't have expected it." "You lot're not — you lot're not angry at Parkland. Yous want to know why? Parkland is with us." Immature people like Rie'onna Holmon say that the threat of violence is always around them. "What happened in Florida happens here every solar day 17, more than than 17 people dice a yr here. More than than 17 people die a week here. And I think now they understand that connection is going on." She's 15 years old and says the dangers in her community marked her entire childhood. "Growing upward on the South Side of Chicago is really fearful. Nosotros can't become outside and just sit down on our porch, or just ride around our neighborhoods on our bikes like they can in different neighborhoods." Rie'onna, Ke'Shon and others are all heading to Washington to accept part in the national march against gun violence. "It's probably going to choke me up. I'm probably going to weep mostly because it'due south a bunch of youth all working together to achieve 1 goal. And that's never happened earlier." Only a week before the march, a conversation built-in out of tragedy between immature people more than a grand miles apart came to life. Survivors from the Parkland shooting traveled to Chicago for a gamble to encounter firsthand what life is similar on the Due south Side. "When I'm with these other students and people from Chicago, I feel their pain." "This isn't just in schools. This is anywhere and everywhere." "There shouldn't exist no fear within someone's middle just for them to alive their life every twenty-four hour period." "Pain is hurting. It doesn't matter what ethnicity you are, where you come from, where you alive, how much money you make. What happened in Parkland, was injustice, and injustice there is injustice here."
Thousands of demonstrators came together at Chicago'south Spousal relationship Park, where speaker after speaker rattled off grim statistics most the city'south endemic violence.
"Chicago has been plagued with gun violence way earlier the Parkland shooting," said Juan Reyes, a high school student. "Suddenly, people are talking about students not feeling rubber in schools. Simply in reality, students in our city's South and Westward Sides accept never felt condom."
Speaking at the rally in Washington, Trevon Bosley, a 19-year-sometime Chicago resident whose older brother Terrell died of a gunshot wound in 2006, said, "Nosotros deserve the right to accept a life without fear of being gunned down."
Mya Middleton, 16, also traveled to speak in Washington, where she recalled an meet with an armed man who was stealing from a store when she was a high school freshman.
"He pulls out this silver pistol and points it in my face and said these words that to this day haunt me and requite me nightmares. He said, 'If you lot say anything, I will detect you.' And even so I'grand still saying something today," she said, to loud cheers.
Read more about how students from Chicago and Baltimore, which set up a per capita record for homicides in 2017, experienced Sabbatum's events.
Paradigm
Americans in Tokyo, Rome, Madrid and Berlin showed support.
On Saturday in Tokyo, where guns are highly restricted and shootings are rare, dozens of protesters gathered with signs bearing the names of people who accept been killed past gun violence. Participants, many of them American, took turns reading poems or sharing memories of family unit members or friends killed in shootings.
"I think information technology is of import not merely to call for changes to our gun laws, not just to debate the subtleties of the 2nd Subpoena, merely to remember that it is people who have died because of our gun laws," said Linda Gould, an American in Nippon who organized the acuity.
And in Nagoya, Nippon, Mieko Hattori, the mother of Yoshihiro Hattori, a Japanese exchange educatee who was shot and killed in Billy Rouge, La., in the early on 1990s, said earlier in the week, "I but wanted to convey our message: We back up you lot from Japan."
In Rome on Sat, demonstrators at the American Embassy chanted, "Hey hey, ho ho, the North.R.A. has got to go" and waved signs that read, "A Gun Is Not Fun" and "Am I Next?" The speakers at the rally included local students too equally Valentina and Gabriela Zuniga, a freshman and junior at Stoneman Douglas, who were on spring interruption.
"We knew there were rallies all over the world, and we looked for one in Rome," said Gabriela, 16, adding that her life had inverse drastically since the shooting. "You go into class and come across empty desks. It'due south different for everyone now."
About the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, 150 to 200 people, virtually of them Americans, held signs saying "bullets aren't school supplies" and "Waffeln statt Waffen" (Waffles Instead of Weapons).
Dylan von Felbert, 16, an 11th grader at the John F. Kennedy Schoolhouse in Berlin, said, "Our generation can exist very blah — myself included — then I think it'due south important to support those things you really believe in."
In Madrid, a modest crowd — well-nigh all of them Americans — braved a cold Sat to assemble in front of the American embassy. An American student read out a list of all the American school shootings since the Columbine massacre.
Fiona Maharg Bravo attended with her 13-year-old daughter, Elena. Ms. Maharg Bravo grew upwards in Chicago merely has lived in Madrid for more than than 10 years.
"It'southward maybe difficult for people here to chronicle to what unfortunately is a uniquely American effect," she said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/us/march-for-our-lives.html
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