WASHINGTON — By bus and train, hundreds of Vermonters traveled to the capital to take part in a demonstration calling on Congress to reform gun laws.
The March for Our Lives was organized by students at the Parkland, Florida, high school where a gunman killed 17 people last month. In the aftermath of the shooting, students across the country have joined the Florida teenagers’ calls for changing gun policies.
Student groups from Champlain Valley Union High School, Harwood Union, Burr and Burton Academy, and more joined the throngs stretching down Pennsylvania Avenue on the bright spring day.
Organizers of the march estimated 800,000 people took part in the event in Washington. Hundreds of other protests were held in cities across the country, including Montpelier.
A few hours before the demonstration began, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and his wife Marcelle offered Vermonters a pre-march spread of doughnuts and coffee at a hearing room in a Senate office building. A steady stream of guests arrived throughout the morning, some directly from buses that had driven from Vermont overnight.
Many Vermont students said in interviews that they support policy changes called for by the students from Parkland, such as raising the age for purchasing guns to 21, banning assault weapons, and requiring background checks for all gun sales.
Jeremy Segal, 18, a senior at Stowe High School, who traveled to the capital with his parents, said that while proposals to change gun laws have advanced in Vermont, he sees a need for action in Washington, D.C.
“For our country to actually move in the right direction, we need it to happen at Congress and not just in Montpelier,” Segal said.
However, others voiced hesitation about the policy proposals.
“Personally I don’t see a problem with a lot of the gun laws,” Hunter Brassard, a senior at Randolph Union High School, said.
Brassard said he owns a gun, and believes that the laws currently in place in Vermont work. However, he said he favors restricting bump stock devices, which are used to increase the rate of fire of semi-automatic guns. The Trump administration is moving to implement a ban of the devices.
For some Vermont students, the trip to Washington followed weeks of participating in protests in their communities and in Montpelier.
Willoughby Carlo, a senior at Mount Mansfield Union High School, said growing up hearing about school shootings across the country has made her reflect on how it could happen to her, and the effect it would have on her life.
“It’s not a political issue, it’s a human issue,” Carlo said, as she walked from the Senate office building toward the march, the Capitol dome visible behind her. “There’s not two sides to having gun violence at school. You can’t be on the side of pro-gun violence in school.”
The march on Washington and other protests preceding it have been an opportunity for young people who are not yet old enough to cast a ballot to speak out on an issue that affects them profoundly, said Carlo, who recently turned 18 and voted for the first time on Town Meeting Day.
Carlo attended a rally at the Statehouse in Montpelier last month, skipping an AP Spanish class to do so, and helped organize a walkout at her school.
After watching a YouTube video of the Parkland students on the “Ellen DeGeneres Show,” Carlo decided she wanted to be a part of the march in Washington. She said she reached out to the Peace and Justice Center about organizing buses, and secured a $5,800 grant from the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation that provided the means for the Vermont students in the group to travel free of charge.
Dina and Sonia John, 17 and 18, were among the students who joined the overnight bus trip from Vermont for the march.
The sisters were motivated to make the trip to D.C. in part because their school, Rice Memorial High School, discouraged students from taking part in a nationwide walkout earlier this month.
Attending the rally, Sonia John said, may seem like a relatively small action in itself, but she believes there is a “big ripple effect.” Gun violence goes beyond school shootings, she said.
“This is a mental health issue, this is a race issue, this really is a human problem,” she said. “And the school shootings — it’s just this shock to the world that it’s enough.”
Shortly before noon, the sisters and a few students from other Vermont schools weaved through the gathering crowd, about a block and a half away from the main stage.
The rally was organized by students from Parkland, Florida, but the focus was broader than the issue of school shootings. Speakers — all of whom were of school age — came from across the country, sharing their perspectives on the many different ways gun violence has affected young people.
Young people from Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago shared stories of siblings and classmates killed by guns. One 11-year-old from Virginia said she’d come to the march to represent “the African-American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper.”
The small band of Vermont students snapped pictures of other demonstrators’ signs, and took video clips through the demonstration. When singer Miley Cyrus performed, the students mouthed the words along with her.
Students said they were particularly affected by the younger speakers, including one of the youngest to take the stage, 9-year-old Yolanda Renee King, granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., who said to the cheering crowd, “I have a dream that enough is enough.”
