March for Our Lives: Hundreds of thousands of students prepare for anti-gun violence demonstrations across US

Thirty-eight days after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, hundreds of thousands of students across the country will take to the streets in an anti-gun violence protest of unprecedented size for the issue.

The marches – which consist of a main event in Washington alongside sister protests in New York, Los Angeles and hundreds of communities across the country – is the culmination of weeks of planning by student survivors of the Parkland, Florida shooting in which 17 people were killed on Valentine's Day

The mass protests have been organised by a group of survivors who have forced the nation into a debate about gun control, even as the tragic cycle of gun violence has continued to repeat itself in communities across the country.

End this crisis, they have told politicians, while shootings across the country – in Chicago, in Birmingham, Alabama, in Great Mills, Maryland and elsewhere – have added to the harrowing tally of the dead. You’ve made this mess, the students have repeatedly told the adults who have failed for years to address gun violence in America, and we’re going to clean it up.

“We’ve all come together and we’ve all united which is why the march in Washington tomorrow will be so effective, Parkland student Demitri Hoth said on Friday during a press conference in Washington, with the towering Capitol building behind him. “People were hunted down in the hallways of my school, and that’s not okay.”

Parkland students are aware that the best way to see lasting change is to raise their voices and make sure they are heard.

“We’ve been silent for too long as a nation. We’ve allowed these things to continue for too long,” David Hogg, one of the more outspoken of the Parkland students, said this week during a panel at the Harvard Kennedy School.

“What’s important is that we speak up to legislators and let them know that this is what their constituents want. And if they choose not to vote on the side of human lives that are innocently taken ever year, that’s OK, because we’ll vote you out. It’s as simple as that.”

The group of students, including Mr Hogg, have seemingly been everywhere – from television to the cover of Time magazine – as they have amplified their message in the build-up to Saturday’s marches.

They have visited their peers in Chicago, and spoken in New York City. They chastised Florida Senator Marco Rubio for taking money from the National Rifle Association (NRA) during a nationally broadcast town hall meeting, and posted viral tweets, gun control statistics and support for other organisers, as well as exchanging light-hearted banter with each other, highlighting the fact that the people leading one of the most prominent political debates in the country are mostly 17 and 18 year-olds.

The movement has seen some early success, though gun laws in America remain largely the same. In the weeks after the shooting in Parkland, Florida passed gun restrictions to raise the minimum age for buying a firearm in the state, and to impose a waiting period to receive those weapons, defying the powerful NRA presence in the state even as advocates said the bill did not go nearly far enough.

On the federal level, the persistent cries for help from the Parkland teenagers forced President Donald Trump to hold a listening session with students, and to float several possible ideas to tackle gun violence – even going so far as to suggest that taking guns from potentially dangerous people should be priority, and that the constitutional right to due process could be worried about later.

But, just weeks later Mr Trump, who has received notable support from the NRA, appeared to bow to the gun lobby and back away from loftier gun control bills and his calls for raising the age to buy semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21. The NRA did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent for this story.

Andrew Patrick, the media coordinator for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told The Independent that the NRA’s hold on political leverage may change because of the momentum the Parkland students have created. The continued push to politicize gun violence and tie the deaths of students across the country to the NRA, he said, have placed a dark mark on the gun lobby.

“They’ve pretty much made the NRA politically, and culturally, toxic,” Mr Patrick said. They have really awoken the nation’s … view on this and I think we’re going to see for the first time ever – probably for the first time in a long time – where people are going to be voting on gun violence prevention and gun safety.”

With the 2018 midterms months away, Democrats have seized upon the issue, campaigning alongside the students who have repeatedly threatened to unseat politicians who do not push for gun control measures. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who is considered a potential presidential candidate in 2020, voiced his support, for instance, showing that gun violence has become a potentially potent political issue that could impact the ballot box in November and beyond.

“They’re going to win,” Mr Biden said Friday, before saying he is ready for a fight. “Watch … We can beat the NRA.”

Josh Sugarmann, the director of the Violence Policy Centre, told The Independent that he hasn’t seen youth engagement to compare to Parkland in his three and a half decades working in gun control advocacy, and that he has never seen a march of this size on gun violence. For Mr Sugarman, the question is whether they can continue the momentum beyond Saturday.

“I think the success of what comes out of Parkland is not measured in marches but will those who participated in them continue to be engaged on the issue It’s not just these students: It’s their friends, their family, their siblings,” he said. “The question is, is this one step towards helping to create and organise a working grass roots movement that will work on gun violence prevention?”

The Parkland students, for their part, say that their march in Washington is just the start.

Speaking at another press conference inside the US Capitol on Friday, Aaliyah Eastmond, one of the Parkland students visiting for the march, said that they are not going anywhere until they get what they want.

“A lot of people feel like this is the end and the march is just – that’s going to be it. The march is just the start,” Ms Eastmond said. “We will fight for this until change happens. If you guys don’t want to hear about it anymore, you fix it, so we don’t have to keep repeating ourselves.”