Signs of the times
Signs of the times
On Saturday, protesters flooded the streets of Washington, D.C. for the March For Our Lives. Signs bobbed above the crowd, calling for an end to the gun violence that has permeated the United States as of recent. While slogans ranged in delivery from playful to somber, the message was united: enough is enough.
“Sometimes when somebody’s holding a gun up to you and you put your hands up in a don’t shoot position they don’t always listen and they don’t always put their guns down. So I feel like it’s a good thing to stand up for yourself and actually say something when they don’t put them down.”
– Lily Bonilla
Maryland 6th grader
“We work with an artist
named Penelope Dullaghan, and her and I were talking, and we knew we wanted to do something in black, and we knew we wanted to do something that communicated the volume of mass killings that happen in our country, and then we also drew on the inspiration of
a chalkboard. Something that felt very educational. And she had this idea of them sort of come to an end, hopefully, and then saying enough. And hopefully we move on to a time when there’s no more shootings like this.”
– Nate Stevens
Ann Arbor, Michigan, marcher
“I grew up in Virginia, and I was a Virginia Tech student. My campus went on lockdown, my friends were murdered, and my friends were shot and injured when I was young enough to be a speaker at this rally. And so I think that many Americans have felt absolutely negative and sad about the ability to create change here in America and to end this gun violence, (you know we’re the only developed country in the world that has this problem) really until after Marjory Stoneman Douglas. And the students there extending hands to student anti-gun violence activists from across the country, from urban areas and other communities, have created hope for me for the first time.”
– Miranda Peterson
Washington, D.C., marcher
“So I started doing with the gun shootings after Orlando, and uh, I’ve been doing those in Las
Vegas an Aurora and all those. But when this happened I was like I’m gonna print out just the school shootings and I’m gonna go there and support those kids. And they’re gonna make
change. They have energized this nation. And it’s like, we have to be their voice and we have to make change, and weapons of war do not belong in our streets. And it’s not just the schools it’s in our inner cities kids die every day and no attention gets called
for them. It needs to stop, and I think these kids are gonna make a change. And I think what’s gonna make the change is, historically young kids don’t vote. Young people don’t go to the ballot box. These kids are gonna.”
– Maureen Glover
Asbury Park, N.J., marcher
“We are old enough to know what’s right and wrong and we think that guns are one of the things that’s wrong with this country, one of the things that costs many kids our own age their lives, and that shouldn’t happen.”
– Poojah
Norfolk, Virginia, high school student
is a contributor to The NewsHouse at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
