Students in the D.C. area plan to bring their voices to Capitol Hill to send a message about gun control on Thursday morning. Teens have scheduled the protest on the one-year anniversary of a nationwide walkout to protest gun violence, which was prompted by the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Student-led groups “MoCo Students For Change” and “Pathways 2 Power” will lead approximately 21 local schools in a walkout. Starting at 10 a.m. on March 14, students will meet at the White House and march on to Capitol Hill, where student speakers and members of Congress are slated to make speeches about gun violence reduction and legislation.
While MoCo Students For Change is a conglomerate of Maryland students that started individual organizations focused on mass shootings and gun violence in schools, Pathways 2 Power was founded by Thurgood Marshall Academy students after the fatal shootings of two peers, and looks specifically at the impact of everyday violence in their community.
MoCo Students For Change led a number of Maryland schools to participate in the nation’s largest student-led walkout last year. But the group didn’t stop after the walkout, Washington City Paper reports. MoCo Students For Change lobbied on Capitol Hill, hosted voter registration drives in all 25 Montgomery County public high schools, and mounted multiple protests, including two sit-ins in front of then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s office, which led to members being arrested, per WCP. They also partnered with the organization Change the Ref to open an art exhibition featuring art from Manuel Oliver, a father of one of the victims from the 2018 Parkland shooting, in D.C.’s Chinatown.
Dani Miller, student organizer and president of MoCo Students For Change, tells DCist that this year’s walkout will have a different tone than last year’s. Rather than conveying a heightened sense of anger at legislators, this protest is targeting specific bills that strengthened background checks for those attempting to purchase firearms.
“We’re not going to stop,” Miller says. “This is a movement, not a moment. We have specific demands and we won’t stop until these demands are met.”
Plus, Miller says that this year, schools are offering more help by providing some bussing for teens.
Pathways 2 Power is also helping to organize the protest. The group began as a direct response to the loss of two students at D.C.’s Thurgood Marshall Academy—Zaire Kelly and Paris Brown—and plans to participate and speak to their peers about their experience with gun violence in their school’s community.
“We want to drive home the point that while we agree with the national attention on mass shooting, every day shootings happen all the time and that’s what we’re fighting against in our community,” says Pathways 2 Power member Jayla Holdip. “It deserves the same attention.”
Holdip, 17, plans on walking out with about 40 others students and is set to speak alongside fellow P2PDC member Trinity Brown on Thursday.
“I think our experiences and living in different sections in D.C. make our perspectives different,” Brown said about the two groups’ partnership. “We live with the everyday trauma and the effects of gun violence and poverty whereas those students, they don’t live with the everyday fear.”
Alongside the student activists scheduled to speak on the Hill, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin and Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida are also slated to give their remarks at the rally. Senator Cory Booker and Rep. Ayanna Pressley have been sent invitations to speak as well.
“When you look at it in an intersectional light, [gun violence] affects people in different ways in all communities,” Miller says. “If you don’t take into account gun violence that people like Zion [Kelly, the twin brother who survives slain student Zaire] and people at Thurgood Marshall experience, you’re not actually making steps to solve this problem.”
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