WASHINGTON – After Uvalde, after Buffalo, after Parkland and Newtown and El Paso and hundreds of other mass shootings over the past two decades, thousands of protesters rallied against gun violence on Saturday in Washington, DC and in cities around the country.
With their signs, chants, and mere presence, they condemned the mass shootings in the United States and renewed a call – so far, a futile appeal – to Federal laws to limit the use of military weapons have made many of them possible. Many have vowed to resist inaction at the polls.
“I will send your thoughts and prayers to the ballot box,” reads a sign posted by Maria Vorel, 67, who demonstrated at the Washington Monument.
Protests in Washington briefly descended into panic when, after a moment of silence over the victims of the Uvalde shooting, a man threw an unidentified object into the crowd. Hundreds of people rushed off the protest stage after the man appeared to shout, “I am the gun”, locals TV station WUSA reported.
One speaker quickly appeased the crowd by shouting into the microphone, “Please don’t run! No problem here at all! US Park Police officers arrested the man, who the station identified as a gun rights protester. A Park Police spokesman said no weapons were found.
The protests, organized by March for our liveswas a protest sponsored by that student group that attracted hundreds of thousands of people in 2018, following the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
This time, the protest in Washington follows a shooting last month that left 10 Blacks dead in a Buffalo supermarket and killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Saturday’s protests took place in hundreds of cities around the country and in several locations in Europe.
Here are a few scenes from rallies around the country.
Washington DC
They dress up for the occasion.
Thousands of people rallied on a rare cool, wet June day carrying their message on T-shirts: “Disarm Hate”; “Actually, guns do kill people”; “According to the mother’s request”.
Jeremy Brandt-Vorel, a 32-year-old marketing professional from Alexandria, Va., and son of Maria Vorel, remembers hiding in the bushes at his bus stop in 2002, when two men terrorizing Washington The area has a series of deadly sniper attacks.
“I think most Americans want conventional gun control, but they have no representation in Congress,” he said.
Sarah Kirkland, 17, a 12th grader at John R. Lewis High School in Springfield, Va. And she was tired of it.
“When the Sandy Hook shooting happened,” in 2012, “I was the same age as the victims,” she said. Now, she said exasperatedly, she was a few months younger than the Uvalde gunman.
About a thousand people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge from Cadman Plaza to an area between the towers of New York’s Financial District, the site of the Occupy Wall Street protests a decade ago.
The protesters, including a marching band wearing white hats, said their goal was to turn a movement into a power block that could achieve a reasonable limit of arms.
“Enough is enough,” they chanted, interrupting speeches that included a nine-year-old’s one-line praise: “Please don’t shoot while I’m studying.”
Roxand Tucker, 48, and Angelina Tucker, 52, sisters, marched before, in Central Park, after the Parkland school shooting. “It’s outrageous that we’re still doing this,” said Roxand Tucker, a 14-year teacher at Ditmas Park Middle School in Brooklyn. “It’s really hard to understand.”
Julvonnia McDowell, 43, lost her 14-year-old son in 2016, after he was shot “by a 13-year-old who had access to an unsafe firearm.”
Ms. McDowell joined hundreds of others to Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Father Dr. Martin Luther King once led the church, to ask for weapons limits to prevent others from experiencing the pain she feels.
“People can imagine it, but they don’t live with it,” she said.
Joe Scott, 37, a social worker and former US Army soldier, and Caylynn Scott, a 34-year-old educator, came to protest Tyrone, Ga., about an hour outside of Atlanta, with their son 3 their age and 18. – old daughter. Ms Scott, who is pregnant with another child, said each shooting at school made going to class even scarier.
Pushing a double stroller with tiny legs dangling out front, the Scotts held a sign that read, “We march for THEIR life.”
San Antonio
When Frank Ruiz, 41, watched news accounts of the shootings in nearby Uvalde, he said his 8-year-old daughter asked him questions: “How could this have happened? out?” “Has it ever happened?” And finally: “What can we do about it?”
That prompted Ruiz, a financial services worker and father of three, to join hundreds of others in a march from San Antonio’s Milam Park to City Hall. He also speaks in front of a crowd.
“I am one of you,” he said. “I’m a dad and I’m frustrated, scared, and tired of guns.”
Danna Halff, whose family owns a farm not far from Uvalde, said her husband gave her a rifle for their anniversary. However, she urged the crowd to urge state leaders to back away from new limits on who can buy and use offensive weapons.
“It happened again,” she said of the Uvalde tragedy, “and it keeps happening.”
Other Cities
