Thousands of protesters rallied in Washington on Saturday (11) urging lawmakers to pass laws aimed at curbing gun violence. The protests follow last month’s massacre at a Texas school in which 19 children died.
In addition to the US capital, March for Our Lives (MFOL), a group founded by students who survived the 2018 bombing at a Parkland, Florida high school, planned more than 450 demonstrations for Saturday, including New York, Los Angeles. and Chicago.
In Washington, people gathered by the city’s great obelisk. Thousands of vases of white and orange flowers were installed on the lawn in the area, representing the increase in violence in the country since 2020, the year in which 45,222 people were killed with firearms, according to Giffords, the association that planned the memorial.
President Joe Biden, a Democrat who earlier this month called on Congress to ban assault weapons, be more thorough with criminal background checks and implement other gun control measures, said he supported the protests.
“Today, young people across the country are marching once again with @AMarch4OurLives to urge Congress to pass common sense gun safety legislation supported by most Americans and gun owners,” Biden wrote in a Twitter post. “I join them in repeating my appeal to Congress: do something.”
The Washington event has a simple message for political leaders, according to organizers: their inaction is killing Americans. “We will no longer allow you to sit around while people continue to die,” Trevon Bosley, an MFOL board member, said in an emailed statement.
In late May, an 18-year-old high school student killed 19 students and two teachers after breaking into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, near the Mexican border, with a semi-automatic assault rifle. A few days earlier, a white supremacist of the same age had murdered ten blacks in Buffalo, in the northeastern United States.
The latest attacks have put pressure on the country’s ongoing debate on gun violence, although prospects for federal legislation remain uncertain.
In recent weeks, a bipartisan group of Senate negotiators has promised to reach an agreement, although they have yet to reach consensus. Their efforts, however, are focused on relatively modest changes, such as encouraging states to pass laws allowing authorities not to release guns to individuals deemed dangerous.
The Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a comprehensive set of gun safety measures, but the legislation has no chance of advancing in the Senate, where Republicans have objected to the limits for breaching them. the right to bear arms of the Second Amendment to the country’s Constitution.
