Joseph Huff-Hannon, Senior Campaigner of AVAZ, is a U.S.-based online site launched in January 2007 that promotes global activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, animal rights, corruption, poverty, and conflict.
The UK-based newspaper The Guardian considers it “the globe’s largest and most powerful online activist network.”
Joseph says that it’s about moving pass this awful cycle where mass shooting happens. Congress since has tweeted out their thoughts and prayers, and maybe even floats some kind of idea of a gun regulation and then quickly backs off and does nothing.
We’re saying that it’s not acceptable and we are not going to allow it. These kids, these students around the country are saying we are not going to live like this. “No more.” We are not going to stand by and let another 5 years go by and have another 7,000 children lose their lives because of Congress. Trump says things every day, words that just float in the wind, as the Parkland School student has already called him out on that.
As the elections are coming up, Congress should be aware that the people are going to be voting on this issue and in a couple months, we hope that there will be a Congress that will take this more seriously and pass laws that we know that will save lives.
The 7,000 shoes represent those who can’t ask for gun reform because they are no longer with us since the Sandy Hook school shooting, and the group said this was a way to bring Congress face-to-face with the heart-breaking gun violence since the 2012 Newtown shooting and the Sandy Hook school shooting of 2012 and a call to demand lawmakers to enact gun reform.
Tom Mauser, whose son was killed in the Columbine school shooting, attended the event. Wearing his son’s shoes, he traveled to DC to seek change so no other parent would suffer.
Their shoes covered more than 10,000 square feet of the Capitol Hill lawn. Kids lead the March for Our Lives with signs that say, “I’m not bulletproof,” “Will I live to cast my ballot?” and “Am I next?”
www.cnn.com
March for Our Lives could be the biggest single-day protest in D.C.’s history.
March for Our Lives organizers estimate 800,000 protesters attended the gun control demonstration in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. If they’re correct, the event would be the largest single-day protest in the history of the nation’s capital. The total is bigger than the inaugural Women’s March, which brought 500,000 to D.C., according to the Washington Post.
The number doesn’t include large rallies in cities such as Boston, Houston, Minneapolis, and Parkland, FL, the site of the Valentine’s Day attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 souls dead.
On Sunday, another crowd estimate came in much smaller for the D.C. march. About 200,000 people attended the rally, according to Digital Design & Imaging Service Inc., a Virginia-based company that calculates crowd size.
There have been no official police estimates. Organizers of the March for Our Lives rally had hoped to exceed the half million protesters mark. The Women’s March, which took place the day after Trump’s inauguration, is considered the biggest one-day protest in recorded history, according to the Washington Post.