Jacksonville Shooting: Student Activists Plan Protest Against Senators Linked To NRA
Source: The Guardian
By Lois Beckett, 3 hrs. ago.
Less than three hours after news broke of another American mass shooting, this time at a gaming tournament in Jacksonville, Florida, a group of high school students had started organizing a protest outside the DC offices of senators who receive funding from the National Rifle Association.
"The only way to take down the NRA is to keep the pressure high," 15-year-old Rebecca Heimbrock tweeted on Sunday afternoon, calling for protests Tuesday afternoon at the offices of senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rob Portman and senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, all Republicans who have received significant support from the NRA.
For years, the response to American mass shootings was a numbing ritual: intensive media coverage of the carnage, "thoughts and prayers" from politicians, and the continued refusal of Republican members of Congress to pass any gun control laws.
But a new wave of student activism after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, this February has unsettled this routine. Now, along with responses from the usual advocacy groups, new attacks prompt an outpouring of responses from school shooting survivors and their teenage activists. Calls for new protests, like Heimbrock's, can be quickly shared and amplified on social media...More...
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/jacksonville-shooting-student-activists-plan-protest-against-senators-linked-to-nra/ar-BBMurNR
Teenage gun control activists are not just holding die-ins and marches: they are focused on registering other young people to vote, with the goal of pushing lawmakers who are blocking new gun control legislation out of office at the midterms.
Survivors of the school shooting in Parkland spent the summer on a national "Road to Change" bus tour, working to register young people to vote at dozens of stops across the country. https://marchforourlives.com/road-to-change/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/16/parkland-school-shooting-bus-tour-gun-violence-race
Heimbrock, a 15-year-old from Middletown, Md., about an hour outside of DC, is one of thousands of American teenagers who were galvanized by the Parkland shooting to fight for stricter gun control laws, and who have spent the last six months organizing protests. Heimbrock has participated in two previous sit-ins on Capitol Hill in Washington, and helped to organize an August 4 protest outside the NRA's headquarters in Northern Virginia.
"I want to believe that people are hearing student voices," she said, "but I'm also worried that people are going to assume that there's this big blue wave, and they're not going to bother to go out to the polls."
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