March for Our Lives: What to Watch for, and What Comes Next
The first thing 18-year-old Kelly Rogers remembers learning in her North Carolina kindergarten class is “how to hide from a bad man with a gun.” She remembers active-shooter false alarms in elementary school, and drills in which police officers would monitor how quiet the students could be. She remembers the e-mails that would go out later, bluntly telling students and parents how many children would have died, had there been a real shooter.
This was all commonplace. It was casual. And, now, as the communications director and student organizer for the New York City March for Our Lives, she is working to put an end to it.
“We all feel the same way about it, being we’re very familiar with this same kind of culture of violence,” she said this week. “And that goes all the way to elementary school, just because they’re young—they still know exactly what it’s like to be involved. It doesn’t know an age group; it doesn’t affect one more than another.”
On Saturday at noon, participants will rally on Pennsylvania Avenue at the Washington, D.C., March for Our Lives, which has the simple message of “not one more.” Planning for the march, and its more than 800 sibling marches worldwide, began after the Valentine’s Day shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Survivors of that shooting, like Emma González, used social media to galvanize their fellow students for the march. Regional leaders like Rogers, a freshman at the City College of New York, joined the Parkland students soon after, and got involved with student-led organization boards for the march. The boards are made up of high-school and college students, with guidance and support from outside groups such as Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action.
“I think about how frustrating it was for me to be young and to have people be like, ‘Well, you can’t vote yet—it doesn’t matter what you think,’” Rogers said. “And now that I can—this is the first year that I can vote, which is exciting—it makes me want to amplify their voices because those are the ones you should be listening to.”
Celebrities have also been showing their support. Days after the Parkland shooting, George and Amal Clooney and Oprah Winfrey pledged $500,000 to the March. The Clooneys also promised to join the students at the march in D.C. Julianne Moore, who has been a staunch public advocate for safer gun laws since the Sandy Hook shooting, has focused her attention on elevating the voices of students who will march on Saturday.
Other boldface names, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ariana Grande,__ and Common, are performing at the D.C. rally on Saturday.
This is the kind of support, celebrity and otherwise, that Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America founder, Shannon Watts, wants to see during such a big movement. She told V.F that the Parkland shooting, was, in a way, “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” and that the support on social media and beyond proves it.
According to Watts, in the five weeks since the Parkland shooting, her organization has welcomed over 1.2 million new members and 135,000 new volunteers. In addition, they have started Students Demand Action, which now boasts 13,000 volunteers. But what really matters, she said, is that people leave the march Saturday and keep their activism up all the way through the 2018 primaries this November.
Nza-Ari Khepra co-founded Wear Orange, a campaign in conjunction with Everytown that advocates for gun-violence awareness, after her 15-year-old friend Hadiya Pendleton was killed in Chicago in 2013. She will be speaking at Saturday’s march in New York City and, like Watts, wants those who hear her speak to walk away knowing there is so much more to do at the ballots this November.
“There’s such a variety of forms of gun violence and, at this point, we have initiated the conversation—but what we need to do is follow through,” she said. “It’s so much wider. Every instance of gun violence is so small in comparison to the broader picture of it all. We need to follow a working solution that can fit the task at hand.”
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