Thousands of people rallied on the National Mall and across the United States on Saturday in a renewed push for gun control measures after recent deadly mass shootings from Uvalde, Texas, to Buffalo, New York, that activists say should compel Congress to act.
“Enough is enough,” District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser told the second March for Our Lives rally in her city. “I speak as a mayor, a mom, and I speak for millions of Americans and America’s mayors who are demanding that Congress do its job. And its job is to protect us, to protect our children from gun violence.”
Speaker after speaker in Washington called on senators, who are seen as a major impediment to legislation, to act or face being voted out of office, especially given the shock to the nation’s conscience after 19 children and two teachers were killed May 24 at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
“If our government can’t do anything to stop 19 kids from being killed and slaughtered in their own school, and decapitated, it’s time to change who is in government,” said David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 shooting that killed 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
A co-founder of the March For Our Lives organization that was created after that shooting and held its first rally in Washington not long afterward, Hogg led the crowd in chants of “Vote them out.”
Another Parkland survivor and group co-founder, X Gonzalez, delivered an impassioned, profanity-laced plea to Congress for change. “We are being murdered,” they screamed and implored Congress to “act your age, not your shoe size.”
Added Yolanda King, granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr.: “This time is different because this isn’t about politics. It’s about morality. Not right and left, but right and wrong, and that doesn’t just mean thoughts and prayers. That means courage and action.”
Manuel Oliver, whose son, Joaquin, was killed in the Parkland shooting, called on students “to avoid going back to school until our elected leaders stop avoiding the crisis of gun violence in America and start acting to save our lives.
Hundreds gathered at an amphitheater in Parkland, where Debra Hixon, whose husband, high school athletic director Chris Hixon, died in the shooting, said it is “all too easy” for young men to walk into stores and buy weapons.
“Going home to an empty bed and an empty seat at the table is a constant reminder that he is gone,” said Hixon, who now serves as a school board member. “We weren’t done making memories, sharing dreams and living life together. Gun violence ripped that away from my family.”
In San Antonio, about 85 miles east of Uvalde, marchers chanted “Hey, hey, ho, ho, the NRA has got to go.” A man who said he helped to organize the rally, Frank Ruiz, called for gun reform laws similar to those enacted in Florida after the Parkland shooting that focused on raising the age for purchasing certain firearms and flagging those with mental health issues.
The U.S. House has passed bills to raise the age limit to buy semi-automatic weapons and establish federal “red flag” laws. A bipartisan group of senators had hoped to reach agreement this week on a framework for addressing the issue and held talks Friday, but no deal was announced.
President Joe Biden, who was in California when the Washington rally began, said his message to demonstrators was “keep marching” and added that he is “mildly optimistic” about legislative negotiations to address gun violence. Biden recently delivered an impassioned address to the nation in which he called for several steps, including raising the age limit for buying assault-style weapons.
In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams, who campaigned on reining in violence in the nation’s largest city, joined state Attorney General Letitia James, who is suing the National Rifle Association, in leading activists across the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Nothing happens in this country until young people stand up — not politicians,” James said.
Joining the call for change were hundreds of people who rallied in a park outside the courthouse in Portland, Maine, before they marched through the Old Port and gathered outside of City Hall. At one point, they chanted, “Hey, hey, hey, NRA. How many kids did you kill today.”
John Wuesthoff, a retired lawyer in Portland, said he was waving an American flag during the rally as a reminder that gun control is “not un-American.”
“It’s very American to have reasonable regulations to save the lives of our children,” he said.
Hundreds of protesters in Milwaukee marched from the county courthouse to the city’s Deer District, where last month 21 people were injured in shootings on the night of an NBA playoff game. Organizer Tatiana Washington, whose aunt was killed by gun violence in 2017, said this year’s march is particularly significant to Milwaukee residents.
“A lot of us are still very heavily thinking about the mass shooting that occurred after the Bucks game,” Washington said. “We shouldn’t be scared to go watch our team in the playoffs and live in fear that we’re going to be shot at.”
The passion that the issue stirs was clear in Washington when a young man jumped the barricade and tried to rush the stage before being intercepted by security. The incident caused a brief panic as people began to scatter.
Organizers hoped the second March for Our Lives rally would draw as many as 50,000 people to the Washington Monument, though the crowd seemed closer to 30,000. The 2018 event attracted more than 200,000 people, but the focus this time was on smaller marches at an estimated 300 locations.
The youth-led movement created after the Parkland shooting successfully pressured the Republican-dominated Florida state government to enact sweeping gun control changes. The group did not match that at the national level, but has persisted in advocating for gun restrictions since then, as well as participating in voter registration drives.
Survivors of mass shootings and other incidents of gun violence have lobbied legislators and testified on Capitol Hill this week. Among them was Miah Cerrillo, an 11-year-old girl who survived the shooting at Robb Elementary. She described for lawmakers how she covered herself with a dead classmate’s blood to avoid being shot.
(AP)
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6 Responses
First of all, David Hogg is exactly what his name says — he is a pig. A chazer. A disgusting piece of garbage. And an enemy of the US constitution.
An angry and profane mob gathering to destroy our freedom is nothing new. The Ku Klux Klan, back when it existed as a real organization, used to routinely gather many more people. But it doesn’t matter how many people demand unconstitutional laws, even if they are a majority of the population, which these people are not, it doesn’t matter. They have NO RIGHT to make such laws, and even attempting to do so is an attack on the USA. If Congress were ever to pass the laws they demand, and the government tried to implement them, all faithful Americans would rise up in arms and kill them all.
The NRA is nothing more or less than a civil rights organization, just like the ACLU used to be, from about 1950 to 2000. It doesn’t kill anyone. It doesn’t make any political donations. Its only power comes from the fact that it represents its millions of members, all of whom vote. That’s the only reason politicians pay it attention. And they would have to pay the same attention to those members whether or not the NRA existed.
How about enforcing existing gun laws? In Democrat controlled areas there are those criminals who have been charged by police over a dozen times for gun infractions (like illegally possessing a weapon), but the leftist courts sets the offender free without bail to go and re-offend.
All of the existing laws are so effective in the big (democrat) cities. Clearly we just need more.
Milhouse, what’s your problem? Why can’t you disagree with their political ideas without calling them all pigs and enemies of the constitution? How do you know they are coming from a place of hate and not from valid concerns for the safety of school kids? Just because you disagree with their solutions doesn’t make them pigs. When you can’t construct a coherent argument, you resort to name calling. And your reasons for why politicians take the NRA seriously is very ignorant and based on wishful thinking.
Square, your thinking is very crooked. Hogg is a hog. That is a fact. He has made a career out of his having happened to have been somewhere in the vague general vicinity of a crime, though not at all close and never in any danger. Thousands of others have the same dubious distinction and have not turned themselves into celebrities for it. And he uses that celebrity status to wage war on our fundamental liberties.
Waging war on the Bill of Rights is not “disagreeing with their political ideas”. If they were calling for censorship, or for abolishing fair trials, or for letting police search anyone without a warrant, you would not say that is a mere political disagreement. if they were calling for banning our religion you would say they are enemies who must be fought. So how is this different? Our predecessors fought and killed in order to establish and defend our liberties; we must be ready to do the same. And we must never allow Marxist ideas to become acceptable positions for debate.