Students hold March For Our Lives demonstration in McConnell’s office to call for stricter gun legislation
March For Our Lives protesters staged a demonstration in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office on Wednesday to demand stricter gun legislation.
In footage and photos of the demonstration posted by the gun control advocacy group on social media, students could be seen delivering remarks urging for gun reform and holding up coloring books they brought to explain the trauma they go “through as students in America,” the group said.
In one clip the group tweeted out on Thursday morning, the group writes: “We went to @senatemajldr Mitch McConnell’s office to call out his childish behavior, and demand that he do his job to save lives. His staff told us to stop filming, we filmed anyways.”
The brief clip starts off by showing the group of demonstrators walking down a hallway to McConnell’s Senate office. It later cuts to a clip of one student, Gracie Lee, 18, explaining art she created and brought to the senator’s office titled, “This is America.”
We went to @senatemajldr Mitch McConnell’s office to call out his childish behavior, and demand that he do his job to save lives. His staff told us to stop filming, we filmed anyways. #OccupyMcConnell #EndGunViolence
Here’s what we said: pic.twitter.com/nQyLNrCbCl— March For Our Lives (@AMarch4OurLives) February 13, 2020
“I created some coloring book pages, which are depictions of all the places where shootings continually happen in our country, along with a blank page, with a box a crayons for the senator to color in the places that are inevitably going to be struck by tragedy because the senator has not taken any action,” she could be seen saying in the office.
Several others students could also be seen delivering remarks calling on the senator to take action to end gun violence later in the clip.
“Every single time I’ve been there, I’ve been told, ‘Oh we cant do anything about it, ‘There’s nothing we can do about it,’ ‘It’s not in our hands,’” one student says. “Well, guest what, it is. You know? Mitch McConnell runs the Senate. He is the majority leader.”
“He has the ability to bring these bills to a vote, to pass these laws if he actually wanted to,” she continues.
Another could be seen talking to a person behind a desk in McConnell’s office, telling her, “Enough is enough. This is not about any partisanship, these are lives that are lost. This is my aunt. I lost my aunt to gun violence.”
“We need action,” the demonstrator adds, “the lack of action is frustrating.”
One student said that she couldn’t go to her synagogue in New York City “without worrying it’s going to be shot up.”
“We’re waiting on Mitch McConnell. We’re waiting on him to act. We’re waiting on him to be bold. We’re waiting on him to save us,” she continued. “All of us are here because we care. We could be in school, we could be doing other things, but we’re here because we have demands and we’re no gonna stop until Mitch McConnell listens.”
McConnell has faced pressure from Democrats and advocates to act on gun control legislation in recent months after several mass shootings across the United States.
Weeks after the mass shootings occurred within less than 24 hours of each other in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, last year, McConnell vowed to bring gun reform legislation to a vote in the Senate, where Republicans hold control, if the President Trump threw his support behind the effort.
At the time, Trump said his administration had thrown out “many different ideas to Republicans and Democrats,” while adding that officials were “always going to be watching extremely closely the Second Amendment,” but he does not appear to have indicated a path forward for gun violence prevention since then.
McConnell’s office did not return a request for comment from The Hill.
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