March For Our Lives, Michigan students rally for gun control at Capitol

LANSING — Later this month, Rose Jones’ 5-year-old starts kindergarten.

Naturally, there’s some nervousness with the big day approaching. What’s not normal, Jones said, is how she’s been researching bulletproof backpacks to prepare.

“It just breaks my heart that this is America right now, and this is what, as a parent, I have to do to protect my child,” Jones said outside the Michigan State Capitol. “And there’s people here that can do something about it, yet they just sit back and don’t do anything.”

Jones, of Midland, was one of about three dozen people who attended a youth-led gun control rally on the Capitol lawn Friday afternoon in Lansing, advocating for state lawmakers — currently on a summer vacation — to pass gun control legislation.

Claire Robinson of Ann Arbor, left, a sophomore at Tufts University in Boston, and Oliva Morelli, a freshman at Indiana University, demonstrate Friday, Aug. 12, 2022, during the "No Guns at Recess" rally at the state Capitol in Lansing. The event was organized by March for Our Lives Michigan.
Claire Robinson of Ann Arbor, left, a sophomore at Tufts University in Boston, and Oliva Morelli, a freshman at Indiana University, demonstrate Friday, Aug. 12, 2022, during the "No Guns at Recess" rally at the state Capitol in Lansing. The event was organized by March for Our Lives Michigan.

The rally was organized by March For Our Lives Michigan, part of the national nonprofit borne from survivors of the deadly 2018 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Friday’s rally featured multiple speakers who survived another mass shooting on a high school campus closer to home: the Oxford High School shooting last November in Oxford Township.

For about seven months after the shooting, Zoe Touray couldn’t sleep.

“I relived the nightmare of the shooting and ended up feeling unsafe at school. I still can’t stomach loud noises and sudden movements,” said the 18-year-old, who wore a black sweatshirt bearing the names of her four classmates who died that day. “I am and always will be on guard.”

More: Hundreds rally at Michigan Capitol for stricter gun laws in wake of recent school shootings

Multiple speakers expressed anger, mounting after years of political inaction and in some cases, seeing their loved ones killed. They said they’ve channeled that emotion into organizing, and they touted the federal government’s recent passage of Bipartisan Safer Communities Act as a small but valuable victory.

But in Michigan, some gun control bills lie dormant in the state's Republican-controlled bicameral legislature. Aubrey Greenfield, another Oxford survivor, urged politicians to act.

"People will continue to be violently executed by guns until the Michigan GOP does their damn job and decides that working across the aisle is worth saving the lives of the people they are elected and paid to represent," Greenfield said.

After a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas earlier this year, Michigan Democratic lawmakers tried to take up measures that would increase gun storage regulations and cut taxes on locks, safes and similar measures.

"It's happened to my peers, and it keeps happening.  It's come down to this: We have to take action now because this needs to stop," Sarah Sevener, a senior at Spring Lake High School says holding a sign she made with pictures of students killed in school shootings since Columbine. She was one of a few dozen students demonstrating Friday, Aug. 12, 2022, at  the "No Guns at Recess" rally at the state Capitol in Lansing.

Republicans in both legislative chambers squashed both efforts.

However, the state's K-12 budget passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer calls for $168 million in school safety grants — up from $10 million this year — which would be awarded to both public and private schools on a per-pupil basis, according to a House Fiscal Agency analysis. The funding can be used for coordination with law enforcement, training on threat assessment and threat response, crisis communication, responsible gun ownership, safety infrastructure, and professional development for school resource officers, among other purposes. Separately, the budget provides an additional $25 million for school resource officers, with the state money to be matched by school districts.

In other new funding, the budget provides $150 million in per-pupil grants to school districts for activities to improve mental health, including the hiring of support staff, and $50 million in federal funding for intermediate school districts to implement a TRAILS (Transforming Research into Action to Improve the Lives of Students) program to improve mental health services.

There have been 407 mass shootings nationwide so far this year, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.

According to a June poll gathered by Morning Consult and Politico, 68% of voters are in favor of stricter gun control laws, including 44% of Republicans. The poll was conducted as gun violence was on the minds of many Americans in the aftermath of mass shootings at a Buffalo, New York grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and Uvalde.

In front of the podium, there was a pile of toys representing children who have died by gun violence. Organizers lifted the pile to reveal six body bags. Afterward, they held a 2-minute die-in demonstration, in which protestors laid on the ground to “show elected officials that (they) are dying because they won’t do their jobs.”

The Legislature is in summer recess.

As the midterm elections approach, the group is turning its focus towards mobilizing voters in a Get Out the Vote campaign, said organizer Mikah Rector-Brooks of Howell.

Detroit Free Press reporters Paul Egan and Dave Boucher contributed.

Contact reporter Jared Weber at 517-582-3937 or jtweber@lsj.com.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Youth-led gun control rally at Michigan Capitol calls for gun control