Huge crowds of Americans took to the streets from coast to coast on Saturday to demand gun control at emotional protests fueled by teenagers who survived a mass shooting last month at a Florida high school.
Bundled against the cold but fired up with passion, hundreds of thousands gathered in Washington for the biggest US rally for gun reform in a generation.
“Stand for us or beware the voters are coming,” Cameron Kasky, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — where 14 students and three adults died last month — told the crowd packing the streets of the capital.
“We are going to make this a voting issue. We are going to take this to every election, to every state, and every city,” said another Stoneman Douglas student leader, David Hogg.
“We can and we will change the world!”
Large crowds turned out in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, Seattle and other cities.
In New York, former Beatle Paul McCartney showed up at a march wearing a shirt reading “We Can End Gun Violence” and spoke of bandmate John Lennon, who was shot dead in the city in December 1980.
Thousands gathered in a park in Parkland, Florida, to pay tribute to the 14 students and three adults killed by a troubled 19-year-old gunman on February 14 at Stoneman Douglas.
“I March Because I Was Almost Silenced,” read a sign carried by Samantha Mayor, 17, who was shot in the knee and wears a heavy brace on her leg as she recovers.
Samantha’s mother, Ellyn, held a sign reading “I’m Marching So No Other Parent Has to Hear ‘Mom, I’ve Been Shot.’”
Hundreds of thousands were attending the student-led “March For Our Lives” in Washington within sight of the US Capitol — whose lawmakers the protesters hope to influence.
“This is an historic event,” said Elijah Schneider, 15, who came to the nation’s capital from Long Island, New York, with his mother, Giokazta.
“I want to be here for this new thing that’s going to happen, this change that I hope to make,” said the high school freshman, who came bearing a sign that read “Protect Kids, Not Guns.”
