T
wo days before the march for our lives drew as many as
800,000 demonstrators to Pennsylvania Avenue, students at
Thurgood Marshall Academy in southeast Washington held
their own rally in the school gymnasium. “Living in DC, it’s
easy to be in a bubble. We live in the nation’s capital. There’s
the monuments, the statues, the memorials, and all of that,”
Jayla Holdip told her classmates. “But we need our stories to
be heard. It should not be normal for everybody in this room to be affected
by gun violence.”
In 2016, 77 percent of all homicides in Washington, DC, were committed
with a gun, and Thurgood Marshall is located in one of the most dangerous
zip codes in the city. In the past two years, the Sixth and Seventh Police Dis-
tricts, which cover the neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River, recorded
154 homicides and 829 assaults with a deadly weapon in which a gun was used.
By comparison, the Second Police District, which encompasses a geographi-violence are black, most mainstream gun-control advocacy
is conducted by white people, and the subjects of race and
racial inequality have, for the most part, gone unbroached.T
he contemporary gun-control movement
was essentially born again after the shooting at
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Connecticut, in late 2012. Until that point,
politicians very rarely talked about new gun laws.
Even when a gunman killed 12 people and injured 70 in
a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, right in the middle
of the 2012 presidential campaign, then–President Barack
Obama refused to call for any new legislation.
Then Newtown happened. Six adults and 20 children,
all between 6 and 7 years old, were massacred in 11 min-
utes by a 20-year-old shooter wielding a semiautomatic
rifle and two handguns. In the shock and outrage that
followed, several new gun-control groups were born:
Americans for Responsible Solutions, now called Gif-
fords after its founder, Gabrielle Giffords, the former
congresswoman who was shot in 2011, and Everytown
for Gun Safety, which is funded by Michael Bloomberg,
the billionaire businessman and former New York City
mayor, and which absorbed Mayors Against Illegal Guns
and Moms Demand Action. The first real gun-control
push in decades revolved around the 2013 bill proposed
by Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-
PA), which would have expanded background checks for
gun purchases and heightened gun-trafficking penalties.
It failed to get the necessary 60 votes in the Senate.
These post-Newtown groups genuinely care about gun
violence in the inner city, and the policies they’re advocat-
ing really would help: Background checks and tighter en-
forcement against so-called straw purchasers would stem
the flow of handguns into big cities, where they are over-
whelmingly responsible for most of the violence. (In Chi-
cago, for example, over 90 percent of the guns recovered
at crime scenes were handguns, and in 95 percent of the
cases where police could identify the possessor, that person
was not the first purchaser of the gun.) But in the same way
that the opioid epidemic suddenly focused national atten-
tion on the pointless, punitive nature of the War on Drugs
only after the crack-cocaine epidemic had ravaged citiesILLUSTRATION BY LOUISA BERTMANREUTERS / AARON P. BERNSTEIN
cal area about as large as the Sixth and Seventh combined
but also has a richer and whiter population, saw just five
homicides and 37 gun assaults over the same period.
“Gun violence is an issue that our DC community and
other cities have experienced for generations. Although
we personally have not experienced a school shooting, we
know the destruction of guns all so well,” said Zion Kelly
when it was his turn to speak. At the beginning of the school
year, Kelly’s twin brother Zaire, also a Thurgood Marshall
student, had been shot and killed on the way home from
a college-prep class. He was 16. In January, Paris Brown,
a junior, was shot to death less than two miles away—the
second person in a school of fewer than 400 students to be
killed with a gun since the school year began.
Murders in this part of the city, much less meetings
of student activists, aren’t normally headline news. But
that day, two risers full of news cameras were on hand to
record the rally. “To these cameras,” said one of the stu-
dents, Aaron Woods, staring directly at the camera to the
laughter of his classmates, “and these government officials
who we’re trying to reach—yeah, we’re looking for y’all.”
The cameras were there because some of the now-
famous students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High
in Parkland, Florida, had come to join the rally. They
didn’t waste any time noting the irony. “We’ve seen
again and again the media focus on school shootings,
and oftentimes be biased towards white, privileged
students,” said David Hogg, one of the most visible
Parkland survivors. “Many of these communities are
disproportionately affected by gun violence, but they
don’t get the same share of media attention that we do.”
Hogg’s admonition wasn’t immediately absorbed by at
least some of the media people present that day—when
Hogg had to depart early, a good number of the camera
crews followed him into the hallway, even as the Thur-
good Marshall students were still speaking. But the Park-
land survivors and other youth leaders of #NeverAgain
have made it clear that they’re aiming to build a move-
ment that’s multiracial and inclusive—one that addresses
gun violence everywhere, not just in suburban schools and
movie theaters. In so doing, they are trying to eliminate
one of the central paradoxes of our gun-control debate:
While a disproportionate number of the victims of gun“It should
not be
normal for
everybody in
this room to
be affected
by gun
violence.”
— Jayla Holdip,
student at Thurgood
Marshall AcademyMarch for Our Lives
speakers included
Alex King and
D’Angelo McDade
from Chicago.