Tens of thousands of people, outraged by a recent massacre at a South Florida school and energized by the students who survived, are spilling out in public protest in Washington and communities across the world on Saturday as they call for an end to gun violence.
The student activists, many of them sharp-tongued and defiant in the face of politicians and gun lobbyists, have kept attention on the issue in a time of renewed political activism on the left, as they helped lead a national school walkout and pushed state officials in Florida to enact gun legislation.
The effectiveness of the students’ efforts will be measured, in part, on the success of Saturday’s events — their most ambitious show of force yet.
Here’s what we’re watching as protests unfurl around the globe:
• More than 800 protests are planned in every American state and on every continent except for Antarctica, according to a website set up by organizers. Here’s a map of planned protests.
• The National Park Service has approved a permit for the Washington march that estimates 500,000 people could attend. Called March for Our Lives, the main event there kicks off around midday, and some of the most prominent student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where a shooting left 17 dead last month, will speak.
• Counterprotests in support of gun rights were planned in cities including Salt Lake City, Greenville, S.C., and Helena, Mont.
• The Times has journalists covering the marches in Washington; New York; Boston; Montpelier, Vt.; Parkland, Fla; Dahlonega, Ga.; Chicago; Salt Lake City; Los Angeles; Anchorage, Alaska; Rome; Berlin; and Tokyo. Follow them on Twitter.
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March for Our Lives: Maps of the 836 Protests Around the World
Just over a month after the Parkland mass school shooting, organizers have planned hundreds of demonstrations calling for stricter gun laws.
‘We don’t have an election to lose,’ one of the student leaders said.
The mission statement on the organizers’ website calls for “a comprehensive and effective bill be immediately brought before Congress to address these gun issues.”
Ilan Alhadeff, who lost his 14-year-old daughter, Alyssa, in the Parkland shooting and traveled to Washington with his wife and four family members, said that while gun policy is “polarizing,” measures like putting bulletproof glass in classroom doors are not. “She would have wanted this,” he said. “My beautiful princess: We are giving them all a voice.”
Several of the Stoneman Douglas students have spent the last few days meeting with political leaders.
Jaclyn Corin, 17, a junior and lead organizer, compared the march to protests against the Vietnam War and rallies for civil rights. She recently spoke with Representative John Lewis, a key player during the civil rights era. “He said he saw himself and his friends and his movement in us, in our movement,” she said.
The event will be a show of strength for a group that will soon have access to the ballot box — something marchers plan to emphasize.
“What we’re doing is because we’re not scared of these adults,” Ms. Corin said, “because we have nothing to lose, we don’t have an election to lose, we don’t have a job to lose — we just have our lives to lose.”
A group called HeadCount is sending roughly 5,000 volunteers to register people at 30 marches across the country.
The student activists also hope to elevate gun control as a key issue in the coming midterm elections, and to build support for candidates with whom they are aligned on issues such as universal background checks and bans on assault-style weapons.
In Florida, a state that is notoriously stubborn on guns, the students’ activism helped spur a newly passed law that raises the minimum age for gun purchases and creates a waiting period for buying guns, among other things, but does not ban assault weapons or strengthen background checks.
The Washington march will draw many survivors of mass shootings. It will also draw people like Dantrell Blake, 21, and his cousin Deshon Hannah, 20. Both were shot as teenagers in Chicago, and they said they hoped their visit to Washington would bring attention to the plight of their city’s many shooting victims.
“When something like that happens,” Mr. Blake said of Parkland, “it’s like, ‘It’s a massacre.’ But it’s a massacre in Chicago every day — and this definitely can be talked about.”
His Brother Was Shot in Chicago. He’s Marching With Students From Parkland.
Ke’Shon Newman’s brother was shot nine times on Chicago’s South Side, where gun violence is a daily threat. Now, Ke’Shon is heading to Washington to march with high school students from Parkland, Fla.
By SAMEEN AMIN and YOUSUR AL-HLOU on Publish Date March 22, 2018.
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Watch in Times Video »
Beth Kurtz, 33, a lawyer who works with kids in foster care in Washington, was waiting for the bus on 16th Street and carrying a large yellow sign that said, “Kids Deserve to Feel Safe.”
Ms. Kurtz said she had come with specific demands: a ban on assault rifles and much more rigorous background checks, possibly carried out entirely by the federal government.
“There’s no reason why a civilian needs a weapon of war,” Ms. Kurtz said.
By 9:30 a.m., downtown streets were coming alive with people carrying signs and holding children’s hands.
In the lobby of a Marriott hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, blocks from the rally, Emily Weingarten, 19, was midsentence, describing her hometown of Parkland, Fla., when she saw a teacher from Stoneman Douglas walk through the lobby.
It was the first time Ms. Weingarten had seen her former history teacher, Ivy Schamis, in person since the shooting.
She ran to her, joining three other students in an emotional hug.
“I’m so happy to see you,” Ms. Schamis said. “Look at my shirt,” she added, proudly stretching a gray March for Our Lives shirt.
“Her strength being here, laughing with us, is incredible,” Ms. Weingarten said later. “It’s such a horrible reason to reunite but it’s beautiful.”
Some demonstrators were traveling far to participate.
Sayem Hussein, an 18-year-old high school senior, said that he had woken up at 2 a.m. and traveled an hour and a half by subway and Uber to get to East Harlem, where he was waiting on a street corner for his classmates and a bus that would drive them to Washington.
“I am a firm believer of constitutional rights,” said Mr. Hussein, who had a small copy of the Constitution in his jacket pocket. “I completely understand the Second Amendment and why people are so defensive about it, but gun regulation is totally different from taking away someone’s gun. If you want to talk about it in a constitutional sense, our founding fathers never thought of assault rifles and, really, war machines and killing machines.”
More than 200 students, teachers and parents from Susan E. Wagner High School in Staten Island packed into four buses headed for Washington.
John Papanier, 17, a senior and student organizer, said that his school had a gun scare a week after the Parkland shooting. “We had a hard lockdown and I was hiding under a desk,” he said. “Nobody should have to go through that.”
Mr. Papanier said he supported raising the gun-buying age to at least 21, from 18.
Students from gun-owning families brought unique perspectives. In Maineville, Ohio, Grace Mason, 16, who planned to march in a nearby town, said that coming from a gun-owning family and having experience shooting at a range gave her credibility.
“I think there’s a difference between going to a shooting range and having it on your person all the time,” she said. “I don’t agree with the idea of having a gun on your person at all times.”
In New York, demonstrators mobilized.
As the crowd thickened before a rally in front of Trump International Hotel and Tower near Columbus Circle in Manhattan, 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 Hook Elementary School. She barricaded herself in the school’s library, “in a closet hidden behind file cabinets” along with “18 nine-year-old fourth graders.”
“In the months after the shooting it took 100 percent of my personal focus to get up and go to work every day to take care of my surviving students,” she said, adding, “One of the things that happens in our communities is that the survivors of gun violence have zero help.”
She called on communities and medical professionals to be better informed about how to treat victims of gun violence.
In the days after the shooting in Parkland, some student activists began drawing national attention with impassioned speeches at rallies, television appearances and pointed responses to critics on social media.
They have accepted financial support from adults. Oprah Winfrey and the couple George and Amal Clooney each donated $500,000 to the cause, and other celebrities such as Steven Spielberg have followed suit. Big political names in the anti-gun movement, such as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Everytown for Gun Safety, have contributed help.
The activists themselves have raised several million dollars on crowdfunding websites. And Deena Katz, an organizer of the Los Angeles Women’s March, is pitching in as an adviser.
Perhaps the most formidable political foe the students face? The N.R.A.
The leaders of the National Rifle Association have questioned whether the students were mature enough to lead a discussion about national policy, and representatives have also accused the movement of being backed by “radicals with a history of violent threats,” a claim that the fact-checking website PolitiFact deemed untrue.
Some supporters of gun rights will protest. But not all.
In Salt Lake City, a rally for gun rights will begin just before the rally for gun control. Both marches will follow a similar route, from a high school to the Utah Capitol.
The gun rights rally there is led by Bryan Melchior, 45, a co-owner of a website that sells firearms and firearm accessories. Mr. Melchior said he had recently been contacted by many young people who felt that the calls for stricter gun laws did not represent their views.
“We’re marching for the safety, security and protection of the children,” he said, adding that he supports arming teachers and fortifying schools.
Some supporters of gun rights in Vermont said they were not planning to hold counterdemonstrations during Saturday’s march.
“Most times counterprotesting looks bad, especially counterprotesting kids that want to feel safe in school,” said Jace Laquerre, a student at the University of Vermont who has spoken in support of gun rights. “We agree with their message to feel safe in school, we just have different solutions is all.”
The president has grappled publicly with how to respond after the Parkland shooting.
A week after the Parkland shooting, President Trump emerged from an emotionally raw meeting with students, as well as parents of those who were killed, appearing moved. Days later, he declared: “We have to have action. We don’t have any action.”
But in March, he quickly abandoned a brief promise to work for gun control measures opposed by the N.R.A. He has also discussed measures such as arming teachers and reopening mental institutions to prevent school shootings.
On Friday, he criticized Mr. Obama over bump stocks, an accessory that can make a semiautomatic weapon fire more rapidly, in tweeting about the Justice Department’s move.
Americans in cities overseas showed support.
Among the demonstrations planned were small events in Hong Kong and Tokyo, where guns are highly restricted and shootings are rare.
Americans living there said they wanted to express solidarity with those in the United States demonstrating for stronger gun laws.
On Saturday in Tokyo, dozens of protesters gathered with signs bearing the names of people who have been killed by gun violence. Participants, many of them American, took turns reading poems or sharing their memories of family members or friends killed in shootings.
“Even though I cannot physically be there, I want to support and to be able to help to start a dialogue,” said Mallory Walker, who is from Arkansas and has lived in Tokyo for eight months.
Linda Gould, an American in Japan who organized the Tokyo vigil, said, “I think it is important not just to call for changes to our gun laws, not just to debate the subtleties of the Second Amendment, but to remember that it is people who have died because of our gun laws.”
And in Nagoya, Japan, Mieko Hattori, the mother of Yoshihiro Hattori, a Japanese exchange student who was shot and killed in Baton Rouge, La., in the early 1990s, said that the students had inspired her.
“I just wanted to convey our message: We support you from Japan,” Ms. Hattori said.
In Rome, demonstrators jammed the sidewalk across from the American Embassy, raising their voice in chants of “hey hey, ho ho, the N.R.A. has got to go” and waving signs that read, “A Gun Is Not Fun” and “Am I Next?”
“We’re following in the footsteps of those who fought for civil rights, for women’s rights,” Carla Wiegers, an administrator at St. John’s University in Rome, bellowed into a microphone, leading the crowd of around 150 in a chant: “Enough is enough.”
The speakers at the rally, spearheaded by the local branch of American Expats for Positive Change, included local students but also Valentina and Gabriella Zuniga, a freshman and junior at Stoneman Douglas, who were in Rome for spring break.
“We knew there were rallies all over the world, and we looked for one in Rome,” said Gabriella, 16, adding that her life had changed drastically since the shooting. “You go into class and see empty desks. It’s different for everyone now.”
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