March for Our Lives: hundreds of thousands demand end to gun violence – as it happened

Here’s our report from Oliver Laughland and Lois Beckett in Washington:

• Hundreds of thousands of people have gathered in Washington to call for tighter gun laws following the massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, last month.
  
• The rally was led by young activists from Parkland and across the country, in an array of powerful and composed speeches from young people from diverse backgrounds.
  
• The White House praised the demonstrators for exercising their right to free speech, but Donald Trump himself was silent at the time of writing, seeming to spend much of the day at his golf club in Florida.
  
• Barack Obama tweeted: “Michelle and I are so inspired by all the young people who made today’s marches happen. Keep at it. You’re leading us forward.”
  
• Protesters in Washington formed a sea of people along Pennsylvania Avenue, while demonstrators also gathered in Parkland, New York City, San Francisco, and in cities around the world.
  
• Students from the school newspaper at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, where the February massacre took place, attended the march as special correspondents for the Guardian and have been guest-editing the Guardian US website since yesterday.
  
• The rallies are aiming to persuade Congress to tighten the US’s notoriously lax firearm laws, which have made gun massacres a regular part of American life.
  
• Emma Gonzalez, one of the best-known Parkland student activists, led the crowd in 6min 20secs of silence to symbolise the amount of time it took the gunman, Nikolas Cruz, to commit the 17 murders.
  

7:04

• “We are done hiding,” said her fellow student Ryan Deitsch. “We are done being full of fear. This is the beginning of the end. From here, we fight.”
  
• Another student, David Hogg, brought up a major theme of the rally when he urged protesters to register to vote. “When politicians send thoughts and prayers we say no more!” he said. “I say to politicians : get your resumes ready!” Chants of “vote them out” punctuated the event.
  
• Seventeen-year-old Edna Chavez, from Manual Arts High in Los Angeles entered the stage with a raised fist and spoke powerfully about losing her brother to gun violence when she was a young child. “I have learned to duck from bullets before I learned to read,” she told the crowd.
  
• Eleven-year-old Christopher Underwood, who lost his brother age five to a shooting, said: “I would like to not worry about dying. But worry about math and play basketball with my friends.”
  
• Martin Luther King Jr’s granddaughter, Yolanda Renee King, said: “I have a dream that enough is enough. And that this should be a gun free world, period.”

1:35

• “This is a moment of history that I want to be part of,” pop star Miley Cyrus, who sang onstage earlier, told one of our Parkland special correspondents.
  
• In New York City, Paul McCartney joined the marchers. “One of my best friends was killed in gun violence right around here, so it’s important to me,” he said.
  
• In Parkland, tens of thousands of marchers passed Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in respectful silence. “Enough really is enough,” Rebecca Price-Taylor told the Guardian. “No more of these weapons of war.”
  
• Organizers want the US Congress to ban the sale of assault weapons like the one used in the Florida rampage and to tighten background checks for gun buyers.
  
• On Friday, Trump signed a $1.3 trillion spending bill that includes modest improvements to background checks for gun sales and grants to help schools prevent gun violence, and the Justice Department proposed rule changes that would effectively ban “bump stock” devices that let semi-automatic weapons fire like a machine gun.
  
• Protesters consider these measures insufficient. “When you give us an inch, that bump stocks ban, we will take a mile,” said student Delaney Tarr. “We are not here for breadcrumbs, we are here to lead.”

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Out west, where it is about 1pm PT, demonstrations continue. More from The Guardian’s Sam Levin:

Huge crowds have gathered in San Francisco for one of the biggest marches of the day in California.

Sara Butorac, 15, stood outside San Francisco city hall carrying an anti-NRA poster.

“We need this to stop,” Butorac said. “Everyone needs to come together and have that support for everyone that has been losing their lives and their loved ones.”

She said her school regularly does active shooter drills where they discuss whether to run or hide. Some teachers have instructed them to throw objects at a gunman as a last resort: “We are being trained.”

Her older sister, Amanda, 24, is studying to become a teacher and said it was depressing that students had to spend so much time thinking about a possible killer in their schools.

“I feel as a future educator that students across the nation shouldn’t be afraid to come to school. Their education should be their most important time. You should be finding out who you are in high school, not worrying and being afraid.”

Manon Starring, 17, said she was tired of reading so many terrible stories: “We need change. We are definitely overdue. This is a big step today. We need to get our voices heard.”

In 2018, a protest tradition in Washington DC is dropping placards off in front of a hotel owned by the president.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas students were on Twitter during and immediately after the school’s shooting on 14 Feb. They are back there again to post some early reactions to today’s rally in Washington DC.

24 Mar 201815.19 EDT

Sam Levin

More from the Guardian’s Sam Levin in Oakland.

There was a huge crowd of protesters outside city hall in Oakland, considered one of the most liberal cities in the country.

A lone pro-gun protester showed up with a large “SUPPORT THE NRA” sign that towered above the crowd.

Protesters, including many high school students, repeatedly shouted him down, some linking hands and forming a circle around him.

“Talk to the kids! Talk to the kids!” they shouted.

There was also a strong showing of teachers at the Oakland rally, which took off just before a sister protest in San Francisco across the bay.

24 Mar 201814.58 EDT

Sam Levin

Many families showed up to the march in Oakland, with some of the youngest protesters making their own signs:

Jennifer Hudson concluded the rally’s musical performances, with student activists joining her on stage.

Hudson’s mother, brother, and nephew were killed in a shooting in 2008.

View image in fullscreen

It’s a sunny, crisp day at the main March For Our Lives in Washington DC, but the same can’t be said for demonstrations in other parts of the US.

Protestors have braved freezing temperatures in Bethel, Alaska, where a high school student killed two classmates and wounded two others in 1997.

(24 degrees Fahrenheit is about -4 degrees Celsius).

Emma Gonzalez, one of the best-known Parkland student activists, speaks next.

Speaking rapidly, she says everyone in the “Douglas community” was for ever altered by the shooting last month.

“No one could comprehend the devastating aftermath or how far this would reach.”

She lists the 17 people killed, humanizing them by specifying details about their personalities before suddenly falling into a long period of silence, tears rolling down her face.

It’s another amazingly powerful, self-confident and composed appearance from a young person flung into the public eye just a short time ago.

The crowd begins to chant “Never again!”

Emma remains silent.

An alarm beeps. Emma announces that 6min 20secs have passed. At that point during the Parkland shooting, she says, “the shooter has ceased shooting and will soon walk free” and blend in with the crowd, not being apprehended for another hour.

The crowd chants “Emma, Emma” as she leaves the stage.

View image in fullscreen

Matthew Soto, 19, just spoke about the impact of gun violence.

His sister, Vicki Soto, was gunned down in the shooting at Newtown’s Sandy Hook elementary, where she taught first grade.

“Get involved in your community, because change no matter how small, is change.”

Soto said he was on stage because there were no significant changes to US gun laws after 20 students between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members, were killed at Newtown’s Sandy Hook elementary school.

“Five years ago and no change has come,” Soto said.

A Sandy Hook elementary graduate, Tommy Murray, followed Soto.

Murray said he was in sixth grade at the school when the shooting occurred. The gunman was his neighbor.

“I have attended vigils, I have protested in front of the gun lobby in our town,” Murray said.

“They didn’t ban assault weapons, they didn’t pass background check bills.”

Another Newtown student, Jackson Mittleman, talked about how he became an anti-gun violence organizer when he was 11-years-old.

“Long after the media trucks leave, we will stand by you in your healing and recovery,” he said.

“Mr Trump, senate and all elected members of Congress, you have failed us. We have had enough of your NRA agenda.”

“We are going to vote you out.”

There’s a lot of support for Black Lives Matter in Oakland, a city that helped give rise to the national movement against police brutality, writes Sam Levin.

Some protesters here have argued that the discussion about gun policy must include conversations about police violence.

Earlier this week, police in nearby Sacramento shot and killed 22-year-old Stephon Clark, an unarmed black father of two who was standing in his grandmother’s backyard. The killing had sparked protests across the California capital, and many mentioned Clark’s name at the Oakland rally.

Jamie Thrower, 30, who wore a Black Lives Matter shirt to the rally, said, “How do we make sure we’re protecting children of color from police violence? ... If you’re not talking about that, you’re missing a huge narrative.”

She said she was frustrated some were criticizing Black Lives Matter protesters for shutting down freeways earlier in the week to raise awareness about Clark’s killing.

Jonathan, a 39-year-old protester, wore a shirt that said, “Stephon Clark got shot too. End police violence.”

He declined to give his last name, but said: “Police shoot people at a far greater rate than mass shootings. ... Police disproportionately target people of color.”

He added of Clark, “He’s a victim of gun violence just as much as all these other people ... Disarmament has to include police.”

Police in Oakland also killed unarmed Oscar Grant in 2009, one of the high-profile killings of black men by law enforcement that helped spark national protests and Black a Lives Matter.

24 Mar 201814.20 EDT

Lois Beckett

The March for our Lives organizers are weaponizing the NRA’s fear-mongering political videos, playing them before speeches as a sign of what they’re fighting against.

Before rally organizer and Parkland student Sarah Chadwick spoke earlier in the rally, she was introduced with a video that juxtaposed clips of NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch’s “Your Time is Up” video, an attack on entertainers, media outlets, and the athletes taking a knee to protest police violence, with Chadwick’s parody of that same video.

The cuts back and forth, between the high school activists who just survived a school shooting, and Loesch, a longtime conservative radio host and Fox News commenter, could not be sharper, and the high school students seem to relish juxtaposing their passionate, goofy activism agains the apocalyptic rhetoric the National Rifle Association has used for decades.