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In the weeks following the deadly Uvalde, Texas, mass school shooting, the March For Our Lives takes on new urgency. The organization is marching June 11 in DC, and there are purportedly as many as 450 local marches worldwide, all with the same goal: to demand gun safety in an era of increasing gun violence in churches, schools, grocery stores, and myriad other public places.
Major cities hosting marches include New York City, which will start Saturday at 11:30 a.m. at Cadman Park Plaza in Brooklyn. The DC march will begin at the Washington Monument at noon, while the Los Angeles march will begin at Grand Park in downtown L.A — though there are also marches in outlying Culver City, Burbank, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Ventura County, Long Beach, and more. Marches have also been organized as far away as Geneva, Switzerland, and Munich, Germany. In other words, if the issue is important to you, you’re likely to be able to find a march near you; you can locate one by doing a simple search here.
“Right now we are angry,” said March For Our Lives board member Mariah Cooley, per NBC New York. “This will be a demonstration to show that us as Americans, we’re not stopping anytime soon until Congress does their jobs. And if not, we’ll be voting them out.”
The marches, and the powerful statement that comes along with them, come on the heels of the May 24 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 young students and two teachers dead, shot by 18-year-old Salvador Ramos in a horrifying killing spree at Robb Elementary. Since then, celebrities have spoken out en masse, visiting Uvalde to pay their respects, and even, in the case of Uvalde native Matthew McConaughey, spoken at the White House in an effort to push meaningful change.
“As Americans, Texans, mothers and fathers, it’s time we re-evaluate and renegotiate our wants and our needs,” Matthew wrote in part via Instagram on May We have to rearrange our values and find a common ground above this devastating American reality that has tragically become our children’s issue. This is an epidemic we can control, and whichever side of the aisle we may stand on, we all know we can do better. We must do better. Action must be taken so that no parent has to experience what the parents in Uvalde and the others before them have endured.”