'Fight for your lives before it's someone else's job'

At the Los Angeles March for Our Lives Allison Ross Hanna

In Washington, 800,000 witnessed as Emma Gonzalez, the Parkland, FL student, stood silently onstage to mark the amount of time it took a teenager with an assault rifle to kill 17 students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14. Tears streamed down her face during these powerful 6 minutes 20 seconds. “Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job,” she concluded. It was the largest group ever gathered in Washington for a day of protest. The 2017 Women’s March, for comparison, drew 500,000. The public has spoken, Congress: are you listening?

In New York, hundreds of thousands peacefully demonstrated for change, and Paul McCartney, wearing a t-shirt that proclaimed “We Can End Gun Violence,” remembered how his fellow Beatle died: murdered by a man with a gun. Thousands gathered in downtown Los Angeles on a gray day, while in Iowa, thousands marched in a snowstorm.

The sun shone brightly in Morristown, N.J., where 13,000 peaceful sorts marched down the well-kept Main Street and listened to stirring speeches from 7 0r 8 area teenagers. One speaker made the point that more children have been killed by gun violence since Sandy Hook than U.S. soldiers. The student-led event was capped by an a cappella rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah by a group from Montclair, N.J.

Click through below to see striking images from marches around the country, and tell us about your own experience in the comments.