Advocates of stricter gun control measures protested outside the National Rifle Association’s headquarters in Northern Virginia on Saturday, pushing for, among other things, the revocation of the heavyweight group’s tax-exempt status. But when the words “enough is enough” rang out from the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, all of them members of the mass shooting generation – the millions born after Columbine in 1999, who practiced “code red” drills at school their entire lives – lawmakers started listening. Currently, the same students from Parkland who organized the march are touring the country, going into more than 50 communities to register young people to vote and advocate for more gun-control policy, including universal background checks, digitizing Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives records, and bans on semi-automatic assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. They organized protests at state capitols to push lawmakers to pass gun-control measures, and in March organized a rally, the “March for Our Lives,” where hundreds of thousands of people in Washington and at more than 800 partner rallies across the country demanded action from their elected officials.
Advocates of stricter gun control measures protest outside the NRA headquarters in Northern Virginia.