Teenagers in Newtown, Connecticut, lived through being locked down in fear as children at a nearby school were massacred. Lived through their younger sisters and brothers being killed. Through their town becoming a synonym for mass shootings. Through the United States Congress doing not a thing about it. So, yes, they’re going to march:
Garrett Marino was in sixth grade when a gunman attacked a nearby school—Sandy Hook Elementary. “It was a Friday, I remember it, and we had a lockdown,” he said. “And we were all just scared for our lives because we didn’t know what was happening. They told us it was a drill, but we were there for hours and hours, and it seemed like it would never end.” [...]
Now 16 years old, Marino and a cadre of classmates from Newtown High School are about to pull off an impressive logistical feat: organizing eight coaches to ferry hundreds of local students and supporters to Washington D.C., where they will join an anticipated 500,000 demonstrators at the March For Our Lives, the historic student-led gun reform rally organized in the wake of the Parkland school shooting last month.
“We’re full-up,” Marino tells Mother Jones, in a hot basement room in the Edmond Town Hall on Newtown’s historic main street. “We have a long waitlist because a lot of people want to go.”
Not marching with them, of course, are those 20 little children or their teachers killed that day. Not marching with them are all the kids killed since then who might not have been had Congress taken action. Not marching … but not absent, either.