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March for Our Lives Highlights: Students Protesting Guns Say ‘Enough Is Enough’

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Witness the thousands who have gathered on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington to protest gun violence, in 360-degree video.CreditCredit...Erin Schaff for The New York Times

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.

• In New York, marchers bundled in bright orange — the official color of a gun control advocacy group — charged toward Central Park. And in Parkland, Fla., less than a mile from where the shooting took place last month, one protester’s eyes brimmed with tears, surrounded by the echoing chant, “Enough is enough!”

• Small groups of counterprotesters supporting gun rights also marched in different cities. In Salt Lake City, demonstrators carried pistols and flags. One of their signs read: “What can we do to stop mass shootings? SHOOT BACK.” In Boston, opposing groups of protesters shouted at one another before the police 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 set up by organizers. Check out photos from around the world.

• Planning for the events was spearheaded by a group 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.

• Sharp-tongued and defiant, the student leaders hoped to elevate gun control as a key issue during the upcoming midterm elections, and to inspire their peers to register to vote en masse.

• They were building on the success of a national school walkout this month, and gun control legislation in Florida that they helped to usher in. Their goal remains, as articulated online in the event’s mission statement, to “demand that a comprehensive and effective bill be immediately brought before Congress to address these gun issues.”

• The White House responded to the demonstrations in a statement. “We applaud the many courageous young Americans exercising their First Amendment rights today,” it read. On Friday, the Justice Department proposed banning so-called bump stocks, but President Trump signed a spending bill that included only some background check and school safety measures.

• The Times had journalists covering the marches in Washington; New York; Boston; Montpelier, Vt.; Parkland, Fla; Dahlonega, Ga.; Chicago; Salt Lake City; Los Angeles; Seattle; Anchorage, Alaska; Rome; Berlin; and Tokyo. Follow them on Twitter.

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Participants in New York City walking through Columbus Circle on Saturday.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

The student activists emphasized that they would soon have access to the ballot box as they hope to build support for candidates who support universal background checks and bans on assault-style weapons.

Large majorities of Americans say they support gun control measures like universal background checks. Yet when put directly to the people in a referendum in recent years, the results have been mixed. Here is a look at what polling and recent referendums reveal about 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, “Register 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 West Chester, Pa.

In Parkland on Saturday, Sari Kaufman, a Stoneman Douglas sophomore, urged people to “turn this moment into a movement” that would push out of office any politician who took money from the National Rifle Association.

“They think we’re all talk and no action,” she said to loud applause and cheers, and urged the crowd to prove politicians wrong by voting in huge numbers.

“Remember that policy change is not nearly as difficult as losing a loved one,” she said. “Don’t just go out and vote: Get 17 other people to go out and vote.”

The crowd was particularly 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 have come back stronger than ever. Those 17 people did not die in vain. We will stop at nothing until we make real, lasting change.”

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Jada Wright, 17, a student at Eastern Senior High School cries during the March for Our Lives rally in Washington on Saturday.Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York Times

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 stop 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 us to sit down and stay silent: Wait your turn,” Mr. Kasky said. “Welcome to the revolution.”

Another speaker, Edna Chavez, 17, a high school senior in Los Angeles, said she had lost her brother to gun violence. “Ricardo was his name. Can you all say it 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 about the need for legislative change.

“To all the politicians out there, if you take money from the N.R.A., you have chosen death,” he said. “If you have not expressed to your constituents a public stance on this issue, you have chosen death. If you do not stand with us by saying we need to pass common sense gun legislation, you have chosen death. And none of the millions of people marching in this country today will stop until they see those against us out of office, because we choose life.”

David Hogg, 17, a senior at the high school and one of the most recognizable faces of the movement, said: “Who here is going to vote in the 2018 election? If you listen real close, you can hear the people in power shaking.”

Read more about what the day was like for other Stoneman Doulgas students.

On Saturday, officials with Metro, the region’s subway system, said more than 207,000 rides had been taken on the system by 1 p.m., about half of the number by that time during the women’s march.

A team of crowd science researchers led by the professor G. Keith Still 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 estimate the crowd density in different areas of the demonstration. The number is less than half of the 470,000 that Mr. Still estimated had attended the women’s march in Washington in 2017.

Ms. González spoke for just under two minutes on Saturday at the rally in Washington, describing the effects of gun violence in emotional detail and reciting the names of classmates who had been killed.

Then she said nothing for four minutes and 26 seconds.

She stared straight ahead during her period of silence onstage, her sometimes watery eyes fixed in the distance. Then a timer went off.

“Since the time that I came out here, it has been six minutes and 20 seconds,” she said. “The shooter has ceased shooting, and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest.

“Fight for your lives, before it’s someone else’s job,” she continued, and then walked offstage.

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The March for Our Lives in New York City on Saturday.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio said early in the afternoon on Twitter that an estimated 150,000 people were marching. “You have 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 can end gun violence.”

“This is what we can do, so I’m here to do it,” 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 outside his apartment on the Upper West Side.

As the crowd thickened before a rally in front of the Trump International Hotel and Tower near 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 Hook Elementary School. She barricaded herself in the school’s library, “in a closet hidden behind file cabinets” along with 18 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.

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Demonstrators at a gun rights rally in Salt Lake City on Saturday. It was one of several such counterdemonstrations across the country as hundreds of thousands marched in support of gun control.Credit...Kim Raff for The New York Times

Tensions over guns seemed to converge in Salt Lake City, where a gun rights march kicked off just minutes before a gun control march.

The gun rights rally drew hundreds of people, many carrying signs — “AR-15s EMPOWER the people,” one said.

Brandon McKee was one of the many people with pistols on their hips. His daughter Kendall, 11, held a sign: “Criminals love 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 by and let them tell us what we can and cannot do.”

As the gun rights advocates set off toward the Capitol, some began to heckle a gun control advocate, Linda Peer, 67, who had infiltrated the march line.

“She’s not a true American!” one man yelled. “Shame on you!” the group chanted at her.

In Boston, a clutch of Second Amendment supporters gathered in front of the Statehouse with signs that said, “Come and take it.”

“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 want and we’ll interpret it for what it is — that law-abiding 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 by liberal teachers.”

“They haven’t read the Constitution and they don’t know what it means,” he said.

Read more about these protests.

Gun rights organizations were mostly quiet about the demonstrations on Saturday. A spokesman for the N.R.A. did not answer 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 against their own hypocritical belief structures,” he said in the video, adding, “The only reason we’ve ever heard of them is because the guns didn’t come soon enough.”

In places where gun control is less popular, demonstrators pooled together, trying to show that support for their cause extends beyond large, predominantly liberal cities.

In Vermont, a rural state with a rich hunting culture and some of the nation’s weakest gun laws, marchers gathered at the Capitol in Montpelier. Organizers hoped that thousands would turn out by the end 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 state by state that we can make change,” said Madison Knoop, a college freshman who organized the rally.

In Dahlonega, Ga., several hundred people gathered outside a museum, a surprising show of strength for gun control in an overwhelmingly conservative region.

“We’re going to be the generation that takes down the gun lobby,” Marisa Pyle, 20, said through a megaphone.

Ms. Pyle, a student at the University of Georgia and an organizer of Saturday’s rally in Lumpkin County, challenged critics of the demonstrations across the country.

“I’m starting to think they just want to shut us up because they’re scared of what we have to say,” Ms. Pyle said.

Young 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 man in a passing vehicle yelled: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

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Elsa Hoppenworth, a 16-year-old junior at West Anchorage High School, in Anchorage, Alaska, on Saturday.Credit...Ash Adams for The New York Times

In Anchorage, the largest city in Alaska, marchers gathered in weather that peaked above freezing around noon.

Alaska has not seen a school shooting in two decades, but 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 one another in the 24-degree weather.

“Do you know how it feels to have the principal pretend over the intercom that the shooter is walking your way?” Elsa Hoppenworth, a 16-year-old junior at West Anchorage High School, asked a cheering crowd. “Those who do not contribute to change contribute to our death.”

Melanie Anderson, a 44-year-old middle school teacher, held up a sign that said “teacher, not sharp shooter.”

Keenly aware that Alaska is a pro-gun state, 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.

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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. Now, Ke’Shon is heading to Washington to march with high school students from Parkland, Fla.

“Ain’t no justice.” “Ain’t no justice.” “We are the change.” “We are the change.” “I am exasperated by what the Parkland students had to endure. I am agitated that this is what had to be done to unite us.“ “I think you should arm us with books, instead of arming us with weapons.“ “I’m angry that I have to worry about losing another brother to gun violence. I’m angry that as we walk down the street, we talk about it as if it’s a regular thing, but it’s not.“ “Every one of us in here has experienced violence in our community. So how has this affected us and our goals and our hopes and our dreams.” “I lost my brother to a shootout. And I’ve been in countless occasions of just violence about trying to be robbed. Or just trying to get away from a dangerous situation.” “I know it’s different for me. I come in here as your teacher, but I’ve lost three students over the past years.” “You can go outside one day and not know what’s going to happen to you. Like you could be innocent and all that other stuff. You could be in the middle of something and just get shot.” “Thank you for engaging it. This is a hard conversation. I’m really proud of you.” He’s just 15 years old, but Ke’Shon Newman has had to grow up fast. Two years ago, his brother was shot and killed around the corner from his house. “He was walking back from taking his girlfriend to the bus 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 hospital.” His brother Randall was 16 years old when he was killed. “He didn’t even deserve to have his life taken away. I thought I would have 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 South Side of Chicago is a world away from Parkland, Fla., where 17 people were killed in a mass school shooting. But young people here say that the country is finally waking up to a reality they face every day: Gun violence. “In my school, I don’t really think of it as a place for a mass shooting cause most — most stuff, that happens outside of school. But what I have in common with the kids in Parkland is that I know how it feels to lose someone that’s close to you.” Ke’Shon lives in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. It’s one of the city’s most dangerous areas, but there’s a strong sense of community 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 will not hear about a kid going into a Chicago high school and shooting up a school. That’s not our reality of gun violence. But they can leave school and on the block where they live, and they can get caught in the crossfire between rival gangs.” Lamar Johnson mentors Ke’Shon and other kids at a violence prevention program he runs at St. Sabina, a church in the area. “It’s a jungle. You have to be alert. You have to be aware, because there’s a lot going on. It’s a lot of good people here. But at the same time, it’s a lot of dangers as well.” “I have to make sure that I’m not in the wrong place at the wrong time because a situation can come out of nowhere just from the wrong person, having the — a terrible mindset to actually want to kill someone or to shoot down a block.” Lamar took some kids from the South Side of Chicago to Florida to meet with the Parkland survivors. They went to share their stories and their collective grief. “We was talking about the differences between how gun violence has affected them that day versus the everyday reality. So I was sitting there 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 because I understand the reason why we have this platform is because we’re privileged.’” “So y’all, I can tell y’all alright, y’all good?” Ever since the Florida shooting, he’s led his youth group through some difficult conversations. “First of all, let’s name some of the similarities and differences, we have apart. Yeah.” “To the Parkland kids this happened one time. But to the people of Chicago, here, this happens a lot.” “So if somebody you know got shot, and somebody they know got shot, the feeling’s going to be the same.” “Regardless of how many times you experience it, if they experienced it one, two times they still going to feel traumatized because that was a moment that happened.” “So let me ask, do you feel we get the same attention?” “No. Not at all.” “So you think Chicago doesn’t get attention for its gun violence?” “That area was nice and had, like, wealthy — it was nice. It was suburban.” “You wouldn’t have expected it.” “You’re not — you’re not angry at Parkland. You want to know why? Parkland is with us.” Young people like Rie’onna Holmon say that the threat of violence is always around them. “What happened in Florida happens here every day 17, more than 17 people die a year here. More 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 up on the South Side of Chicago is really fearful. We can’t go outside and just sit 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 take part in the national march against gun violence. “It’s probably going to choke me up. I’m probably going to cry mostly because it’s a bunch of youth all working together to achieve one goal. And that’s never happened before.” Just a week before the march, a conversation born out of tragedy between young people more than a thousand miles apart came to life. Survivors from the Parkland shooting traveled to Chicago for a chance to see firsthand what life is like on the 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 be no fear inside someone’s heart just for them to live their life every day.” “Pain is pain. It doesn’t matter what ethnicity you are, where you come from, where you live, how much money you make. What happened in Parkland, was injustice, and injustice there is injustice here.”

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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.

Thousands of demonstrators came together at Chicago’s Union Park, where speaker after speaker rattled off grim statistics about the city’s endemic violence.

“Chicago has been plagued with gun violence way before the Parkland shooting,” said Juan Reyes, a high school student. “Suddenly, people are talking about students not feeling safe in schools. But in reality, students in our city’s South and West Sides have never felt safe.”

Speaking at the rally in Washington, Trevon Bosley, a 19-year-old Chicago resident whose older brother Terrell died of a gunshot wound in 2006, said, “We deserve the right to have a life without fear of being gunned down.”

Mya Middleton, 16, also traveled to speak in Washington, where she recalled an encounter 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 give me nightmares. He said, ‘If you say anything, I will find you.’ And yet I’m still saying something today,” she said, to loud cheers.

Read more about how students from Chicago and Baltimore, which set a per capita record for homicides in 2017, experienced Saturday’s events.

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Protesters in Sydney, Australia, on Saturday.Credit...Danny Casey/EPA, via Shutterstock

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 have been killed by gun violence. Participants, many of them American, took turns reading poems or sharing memories of family members or friends killed in shootings.

“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,” said Linda Gould, an American in Japan who organized the vigil.

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 earlier in the week, “I just wanted to convey our message: We support you from Japan.”

In Rome on Saturday, demonstrators at the American Embassy chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, the N.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 as well as Valentina and Gabriela Zuniga, a freshman and junior at Stoneman Douglas, who were on spring break.

“We knew there were rallies all over the world, and we looked for one in Rome,” said Gabriela, 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.”

Near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, 150 to 200 people, most 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 School in Berlin, said, “Our generation can be very apathetic — myself included — so I think it’s important to support those things you really believe in.”

In Madrid, a small crowd — almost all of them Americans — braved a cold Saturday to gather 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 up in Chicago but has lived in Madrid for more than 10 years.

“It’s perhaps hard for people here to relate to what unfortunately is a uniquely American issue,” she said.

Reporting was contributed by Annie Correal, Caitlin Dickerson, Jacey Fortin, Jonathan Wolfe and Louis Lucero II from New York; Emily Baumgaertner, Emily Cochrane, Patricia Mazzei, Sabrina Tavernise and Michael D. Shear from Washington; Nick Madigan from Parkland, Fla.; Julie Turkewitz from Salt Lake City and Denver; Mitch Smith from Chicago; Katharine Q. Seelye from Boston; Jess Bidgood from Montpelier, Vt.; Alan Blinder from Dahlonega, Ga.; Jose A. Del Real from Los Angeles; Jill Burke from Anchorage, Alaska; Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome; Christopher Schuetze from Berlin; Raphael Minder from Madrid; and Hisako Ueno from Tokyo.

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