From Maine to Hawaii, thousands of students yesterday planned to stage walkouts to protest gun violence, one month after the deadly shooting inside a high school in Parkland, Florida.
Organizers said nearly 3,000 walkouts are set to occur in the biggest demonstration yet of the student activism that has emerged following the massacre of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Students from elementary to college level are taking up the call in a variety of ways. Some planned roadside rallies to honor shooting victims and protest violence. Others were to hold demonstrations in school gyms or on football fields. In Massachusetts and Ohio, students said they would head to the statehouse to lobby for new gun regulations.
The coordinated walkout was organized by Empower, the youth wing of the Women’s March, which brought thousands to Washington last year. The group urged students to leave class at 10am local time for 17 minutes — one minute for each victim in the Florida shooting.
Although the group wanted students to shape protests on their own, it also offered them a list of demands for lawmakers, including a ban on assault weapons and mandatory background checks for all gun sales.
“Our elected officials must do more than tweet thoughts and prayers in response to this violence,” the group said on its Web site.
It is one of several protests planned for coming weeks. The March for Our Lives rally for school safety is expected to draw hundreds of thousands to the nation’s capital on Saturday next week, its organizers said.
And another round of school walkouts is planned for April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado.
After the walkout, some students in Massachusetts said they plan to rally outside the Springfield headquarters of the gunmaker Smith and Wesson. Students and religious leaders are expected to speak at the rally and call on the gunmaker to help curb gun violence.
At Case Elementary School in Akron, Ohio, a group of fifth-graders have organized a walkout with the help of teachers after seeing parallels in a video they watched about youth marches for civil rights in 1963. Case instructors said 150 or more students would line a sidewalk along a nearby road, carrying posters with the names of Parkland victims.
The walkouts have drawn support from companies including media conglomerate Viacom Inc, which said it would pause programming on MTV, BET and all its other networks for 17 minutes during the walkouts and students would temporarily take over MTV’s social media accounts.
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