26 March 2018 - March for Our Lives protest draws hundreds of thousands of students
March for Our Lives Highlights: Students Protesting Guns Say ‘Enough Is Enough’
(The New York Times, 25/03/2018)
Demonstrators flooded streets across the globe in public protests on Saturday, calling for action against gun violence. Hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out, in the most ambitious show of force yet from a student-driven movement that emerged after the recent massacre at a South Florida high school.
At the main event in Washington, survivors of mass shootings, including the one in Florida, rallied a whooping crowd — “Welcome to the revolution,” said one of the student organizers — and spoke of communities that are disproportionately affected by gun violence. “It is normal to see flowers honoring the lives of black and brown youth that have lost their lives to a bullet,” Edna Chavez, 17, said of her South Los Angeles neighborhood.
The Extraordinary Inclusiveness of the March for Our Lives
Margaret Talbot (The New Yorker, 24/03/2018)
Maybe what was most extraordinary about the March for Our Lives, in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, was not its size, though that was impressive—likely hundreds of thousands of people in a long, dense ribbon winding down Pennsylvania Avenue. It wasn’t the consistent demand for a ban on assault-style weapons, or the focus on defeating politicians who take money from the National Rifle Association. (Time and again, the crowd broke into spontaneous chants of “Vote them out!”) What was most remarkable was the event’s inclusiveness. In the six weeks since the young survivors of Parkland, Florida, jump-started a vibrant new movement for gun control, its leadership has managed to broaden the locus of concern beyond mass shootings at comfortable suburban schools like Marjory Stoneman Douglas, to gun violence in urban neighborhoods as well.
At a Friday night interfaith prayer vigil held at the National Cathedral, one of the most powerful speakers was the gun-control activist Lucy McBath, whose seventeen-year-old son Jordan Davis—her only child—was shot to death by a white man who’d objected to the volume of music playing from Davis’s car in a gas-station parking lot. The speakers at Saturday’s rally included students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who talked about the sudden intrusion of terror into their lives on February 14th, and young black and Latino activists from Chicago and Los Angeles who talked about the threats they faced from guns every day.
Politicians React to March for Our Lives
Benjamin Hart (New York Magazine, 24/03/2018)
As hundreds of thousands of people streamed across cities worldwide to protest gun violence in America, many Democratic politicians enthusiastically embraced their cause, while most Republicans maintained conspicuous silence.
As of midafternoon on Saturday, President Trump, who is in Florida, had not weighed in on the march. His only tweet during the day focused on Friday’s terrorist attack in France. However, the White House did indicate some support for the march. White House spokesperson Lindsey Walters said, “We applaud the many courageous young Americans exercising their First Amendment rights today.”
What's Next For Gun-Control Activists After 'March For Our Lives'?
Patrick Madden (NPR, 25/03/2018)
After a day of rallies in Washington, D.C., and around the country, student leaders of the "March for Our Lives" movement are hoping to turn this energy and passion into political action.