WASHINGTON – After Uvalde, after Buffalo, after Parkland and Newtown and El Paso and hundreds of other mass shootings over the past two decades, thousands of protesters gathered Saturday in Washington, DC and cities across the country to protest against armed violence.
With their signals, chants, and mere presence, they condemned the drum of mass shootings in the United States and renewed a hitherto useless call for federal legislation to limit the use of military-style weapons that they have done many of the possible.
The protests, organized by March for Our Lives, were a repeat of student-sponsored rallies that brought together hundreds of thousands in 2018 after a 19-year-old gunman opened fire on Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. , Florida, killing 17 and injuring 17 more.
This time, the demonstration continued after the shootings last month that left 10 black people dead in a Buffalo supermarket and killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
“No more,” David Hogg, co-founder of March for Our Lives and a survivor of the Parkland shooting, said on Twitter. “It’s time for Democrats, Republicans, gun owners and non-gun owners to come together” and begin to focus on what they can agree on.
Saturday’s protests took place in hundreds of cities across the country and in various parts of Europe. At the main site of the protest, the Washington Monument in the country’s capital, survivors of mass shootings, representatives of teachers, civil rights defenders and elected officials addressed the crowd.
Bipartisan negotiations on legislation to curb mass shootings are underway in the Senate, but Republicans who have blocked these laws for years continue to say the killings are the result of other problems, such as mental illness or school safety defects. , not weapons. themselves. Senate talks are said to focus on these claims, as well as background checks for the purchase of weapons.
Here are some scenes from protests across the country.