Students and teachers at more than 2,000 schools across the country staged a national walkout to call for an end to gun violence on Wednesday, one month after 17 people were killed in a mass shooting at a Florida high school.
At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the scene of
the Feb. 14 massacre, hundreds of students and administrators streamed out of the school and onto the football field, where they held a moment of silence in honor of the shooting victims. The Parkland students were then joined by students from nearby schools as they marched to Pine Trails Park, the site of several memorials for victims since last month’s killings.
The walkout in Parkland came a day after Broward County prosecutor Michael Satz
said he would seek the death penalty against Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old gunman accused of carrying out the rampage at Stoneman Douglas.
At Newtown High School in Connecticut, hundreds of students gathered in the parking lot, holding signs and chanting, “We want change.” Several students climbed atop a Jeep Wrangler covered in “End Gun Violence” placards to deliver speeches to the crowd.
The school is located less than two miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School,
where 20 children and six adults were killed on Dec. 14, 2012, in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
In Littleton, Colo., some parents of the victims of the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School planned to join students in their walkout to protest gun violence.
The nationwide walkouts were supposed to last 17 minutes in honor of the Parkland victims. But many of them lasted much longer.
In New York City, more than 1,000 students descended on Brooklyn Borough Hall, where they stayed for more than two hours, delivering speeches from a bullhorn and chanting anti-gun-violence slogans. Among them: “Rise up, guns down!”
