Massive crowds across US demand action to stem gun violence

Developments on Day 429 of the Trump Administration:

“We Are Done Hiding”

Led by students, hundreds of thousands of people rally in marches across the US on Saturday, saying they will “stop at nothing” for action for gun control.

From Washington to Chicago to Los Angeles to New York City in front of Trump Tower to Parkland, Florida — the site of the Douglas High School mass killing on February 14 that has spurred the campaign — more than 800 “March for Our Lives” demonstrations were distinguished by dramatic, impassioned speeches from students and by crowds with raised hands and tear-streaked faces.

In the capital alone, an estimated 800,000 people — more than the audience for Donald Trump’s inauguration — gathered. Emma Gonzalez, a Parkland survivor, named her 17 classmates and teachers who were slain and then stood silent for 6 minutes and 20 seconds — the duration of the February 14 attack:

Delaney Tarr, another survivor, summarized:

If they continue to ignore us, to only pretend to listen, then we will take action where it counts. We will take action every day in every way until they simply cannot ignore us any more….

Today, we march. We fight. We roar. We prepare our signs. We raise them high. We know what we want, we know how to get it and we are not waiting any more.

Crowds chanted, “Fear has no place in our schools”, and held signs such as “Graduations, not funerals!” and “I should be learning, not protesting.”

Naomi Wadler told the Washington crowd:

People have said that I am too young to have these thoughts on my own. People have said that I am a tool of some nameless adult. It’s not true. My friends and I might still be 11, and we might still be in elementary school, but we know.

And we know that we have seven short years until we, too, have the right to vote.

“Turn This Moment Into a Movement”

Donald Trump, who was silent for a week about guns after the Douglas High School mass killing and then wavered across five different positions, had no comment on Saturday from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. On Friday, he tried to divert blame to the Obama Administration while announcing again that he will ban bump stocks, which convert semi-automatic into automatic weapons:

Colion Noir, a host on the National Rifle Association’s video channel, chided the Parkland students that “no one would know your names” if someone with a weapon had stopped the gunman: “These kids ought to be marching against their own hypocritical belief structures. The only reason we’ve ever heard of them is because the guns didn’t come soon enough.”

But the criticism was swept away by the power and passion of the rallies, which extended even into small communities in “deep red” Republican areas. “We’re going to be the generation that takes down the gun lobby,” Marisa Pyle, 20, told several hundred people in front of the Dahlonega Gold Museum in north Georgia.

In Parkland, Douglas High School student Sari Kaufman said, “Turn this moment into a movement,” and urged votes to remove NRA-backed legislators from office, “They think we’re all talk and no action.”

A White House spokeswoman said in a statement, “We applaud the many courageous young Americans exercising their First Amendment rights today.”

A time-lapse view of the march in Cleveland, Ohio: