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The main mobilization took place in Washington, where some 40,000 people gathered. Thousands of others across the country held rallies to demand from the US Congress a law that curbs armed violence. Biden supported the claims of the protesters.
Courtney Haggerty, a 41-year-old librarian, traveled with her two children to Washington from New Jersey to demand greater control over the carrying and sale of guns. Haggerty still has in her memory what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut, almost 10 years ago, when a man killed 26 people, including children between the ages of six and seven.
One of her children was about to turn their first year, so that fact left her “raw”. “I can’t believe my daughter is turning 11 and we’re still doing this,” she laments.
Like Courtney, thousands of people demonstrated throughout the country against the free carrying of weapons allowed by the second amendment to the United States Constitution, after the most recent massacre that left 19 children and two teachers dead in the town of Uvalde, Texas.
Ten days earlier, another gunman killed 10 black people at a store in Buffalo, New York.
And it is that this type of shooting has become a scourge to fight in a country in which the free carrying and acquisition of weapons is legal, so the organizers of the marches try to draw attention to the most recent events, to try to stop the violence from the legislative institutions.
At the Washington rally, which took place around the homonymous monument, signs such as “it doesn’t have to be that way” could be read. Let’s stop gun violence” or “Congress, legislate now, do it for our future”.
Biden sent a message of support to the protesters
The mobilizations that took place from New York, Los Angeles, to rural areas of Iowa and Wisconsin, had the support of President Joe Biden, who on his Twitter account joined the call of the protesters.
“I join them in repeating my call to Congress: do something,” he said.
Today, young people around the country once again march with @AMarch4OurLives to call on Congress to pass commonsense gun safety legislation supported by the majority of Americans and gun owners.
I join them by repeating my call to Congress: do something.
— President Biden (@POTUS) June 11, 2022
The Democratic-majority House of Representatives this week approved a bill to regulate the use of weapons, with no hope of advancing in the Senate, where Republicans consider that limits on weapons violate the right outlined in the Second amendment to the United States Constitution.
Among the protesters who spoke at the Washington event were one of the Parkland shooting survivors and president of the two largest teachers’ unions in the country, the mayor of the Capital District, and two teenagers who expressed their fear for the recent events.
“I’m terrified that there’s a chance that could happen at my own school,” Phillip said. “A lot of kids are becoming desensitized to this to the point of hopelessness,” he stressed.
The demonstration was called by the March for Our Lives youth group, created in 2018 by students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Institute in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people died.
Latest Gun Incidents in the United States
This week, the Governor of Maryland reported that at least three people were killed in a mass shooting in Smithsburg, a rural area of the state on the Atlantic coast, and in Florida, a young man was arrested for allegedly murdering his father with an assault rifle. .
On June 5, at least three people died and 11 were injured as a result of another similar event on a street in Philadelphia, in the state of Pennsylvania. According to local media, several attackers fired into a crowd in a central nightclub area.
Another report came from the city of Tusla, Oklahoma, where five people died and several were injured at a local hospital. The assailant, who was carrying a rifle and a pistol, was shot and killed at the scene.
This year in the United States this type of event has exceeded 200 reports. The most recent events did not prevent the annual convention of the largest weapons lobby in the country, the National Rifle Association (NRA), from being held in Houston, Texas, days after the Uvalde massacre.
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