A national protest calling for stricter gun control legislation has been organized for next month in the wake of the Florida school shooting, but many are not waiting for March, with hundreds of university and high school already staging demonstrations this week.
Hundreds of Florida high schoolers walked out of class Tuesday morning and headed toward Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 students and teachers were killed last Wednesday, during what was to be a short moment of silence held at noon. Students and teachers many miles from the Broward County high school instead took to the streets and marched toward the site of the shooting.
In Iowa City, over 100 high schoolers walked out of class Monday morning demanding "not one more," and two area high schools will be hosting call centers after school this Friday for students to contact their representatives and try to "say something," despite not having the right to vote.
Meanwhile, University of Chicago student clubs helped organize a large march on the city's downtown on Sunday to chants of "Thoughts and prayers are not enough," while anti-gun faculty, students, and parents at the University of Texas-Austin have pledged to meet every Monday at noon near a Martin Luther King Jr statue on campus to protest for legislative change.
These actions come ahead of March For Our Lives, a demonstration to be held March 24 in Washington, D.C., organized by student survivors of the Broward County shooting.
Two national walkouts have also been planned, including one on March 14, to mark one month since the Stoneman Douglas shooting, and another on April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting in Colorado.
Young survivors of last week's events have since organized under the umbrella of the Never Again movement, and will be meeting on Wednesday with Florida state lawmakers to discuss gun control.
The newly created activists have gained high-profile supporters like George and Amal Clooney, who on Tuesday pledged a $500,000 donation to the movement and announced they would participate in the march on the capital.
Since last week's shooting calls have been raised for the end to the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment activists have been slammed as complicit in the mass murder of school children.
Op-eds have appeared in several top university papers, with students making impassioned pleas to their peers to register to vote so they can eliminate lawmakers soft on gun control legislation.
A Harvard Law professor has dubbed the moment a "Children's Crusade," and pushed for the voting age to be lowered to give those most impacted by school shootings a legislative voice.