Capitol Hill

The Washington Post

staff

Mass shooting days share image

Texas Shooting

TOPSHOT-US-SCHOOL-CRIME-TEXAS

Contributor

Getty

On Monday, May 30, visitations for the first two victims of the Uvalde shooting were held.

Spain Tennis

HANDOUT on 5/24/22

other

Crosses and memorials have been set up in the City of Uvalde Town Square on Thursday, May 26, 2022. 

School shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas

Reuters

People Stand At A Memorial With At The City Of Uvalde Town Square In Uvalde

A City Mourns As Texas Shooter Kills 18 Elementary School Children, One Teacher

Bloomberg

Biden Has Few Good Options to Curb Mass Shootings That Plague US

Family Photos

HANDOUT on 5/25/22

National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas

US-SCHOOL-CRIME-TEXAS

Late Night with Seth Meyers - Season 6

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Baseball can crush rookies. Why hasn’t it crushed Trey Lipscomb?

Eddie Rosario and Co. lead the Nats to an MLB-best 12th comeback win

CJ Abrams keeps getting better. It’s time to think about an extension.

Miss Manners: Greeting a non-parent on Mother’s or Father’s Day 

Ask Amy: I’ve lied about being a Vietnam War veteran for 50 years

Carolyn Hax: Husband admits to one-night stand, wants spouse to ‘let it go’

Book excerpt: The admiral who had a mental breakdown over Fat Leonard

Under Putin, a militarized new Russia rises to challenge U.S. and the West 

A guide to the 2024 Alexandria Democratic primary election 

France tries to shed its rude reputation ahead of the Olympics

Don’t be a jerk at the airport: A guide for headphones

The new cure-all for vacation excess: the IV drip 

Middle East conflict live updates: IDF takes control of Rafah border crossing; Biden denounces Hamas, antisemitism in address

Triumphal Putin is inaugurated for fifth term as Russian president 

Ukraine arrests two colonels in protective service in plot to kill Zelensky

Postal worker finds WWII-era letters, drives 5 hours to deliver them

Strangers help Sesame Street puppeteer after heirloom necklace was stolen

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

Boeing Starliner space launch delayed at least until Friday

Indiana primary election 2024: Latest updates on governor, House races

Substack courts TikTokers with new ‘creators’ program

The next global crisis could come from the sun. We should prepare now.

Lily James shows off train at Met Gala

The crisis Biden and Trump don’t want to deal with

Russia is using toxic chemical weapons, wrecking a ban it helped create

The right’s enthusiasm for hyperbole is doing Trump no legal favors

House Republicans hold a press conference in advance of tonightÕs State of the Union, on March 01 in Washington, DC.

Amanda Andrade-Rhoades

Thousands of people in rain slickers and T-shirts gathered in Washington on Saturday to rally against gun violence, and to hear impassioned speeches from shooting survivors and relatives of the slain condemning the epidemic of gun deaths across the country.

Demonstrators assembled on an overcast day on the National Mall to join the rally staged by March for Our Lives, the organization founded by student survivors of the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla.

With the White House as a backdrop, speaker after speaker took to the stage to criticize government’s failure to stop the gun carnage that continues to afflict the country and expressed outrage at Congress. The rally was one of several held across the country to demand lawmakers do more.

“I’m sorry,” said David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and a founder of March For Our Lives. “I’m so angry.”

“As we gather here, the next shooter is plotting his attack,” he said.

The rally was marred by a panic that broke out when a man yelled something during a moment of silence, and some in the crowd said they heard the word “gun.” People fled from the stage area. It was not clear what was said, police reported. No firearms or weapons were found, police said, and the person was detained by officers.

“The area is safe,” a police spokesman said afterward. “There are no outstanding concerns.”

But the incident spooked many in the crowd, especially those with children, and they began leaving the rally.

One woman rushing off the Mall carried a small boy in her arms as he cried,  “Mommy I’m scared.”

Halea Kerr-Layton, 25, said she was near the center of the crowd when people started running in fear. “It was freaky, scary,” she said. She and her friends decided to leave on the spot.

Although the crowd seemed smaller than the 50,000 organizers estimated on a permit issued by the National Park Service, there was tension and frustration at the state of the country’s impasse over guns.

Jamie Abrams, 42, who had come with her husband and four children from Charlotte to attend the rally, said they were near the stage when she heard a muffled shout about a gun.

“Everybody just laid down on the ground,” Abrams said, as one of her children wiped away tears.

Seconds later, she recalled, a mass of the crowd began running, starting a brief stampede that lasted about 15 seconds and rippled at least two-thirds the depth of the crowd before a speaker onstage shouted to stop running.

“It was too much for the little ones,” she said.

A former teacher, Abrams home-schools her children, ages 6 to 11. She said the possibility of a mass shooting and the emotional toll of active shooter drills was “one of our major reasons” for home schooling.

Erik Abrams, 45, said the family came to the rally to show their children they can take action.

“We’re trying to fight for their lives,” he said.

Washington Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) told the crowd: “We’ve been here before, and we have been here before too many times. We don’t have to live like this.”

Across the country, rallies were held in Austin, Atlanta, New York City and other places.

In sweltering Austin, Javier and Jazmin Cazares, the father and sister of Jackie Cazares, of one of the victims of the May 24 school massacre in Uvalde, Tex., spoke.

Jazmin, 17, told the crowd through tears about how she usually said good morning to her sister while they brushed their teeth. But she didn’t get a chance to on the morning of the massacre because she woke up later than usual. “I think that’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life,” she said.

“I am unbelievably angry, but I’m not going to turn my anger into hate,” she told the crowd. “I’m going to channel that anger. I’m going to create some real change.”

“I have no way to express how I feel, how hurt I feel, and the hurt everybody in Uvalde feels,” she said. “I’m doing this for you, sister. If you can see me, I’m doing this for you. You will be remembered. I promise you.”

Hadley Green

Jonathan Baran

In New York City, more than 1,000 demonstrators marched over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan’s City Hall. They held signs announcing, “when will they love their kids more than they love guns,” and, referring to the National Rifle Association, they chanted “Hey hey, NRA, how many kids have you killed today?”

In Atlanta, thousands gathered outside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.

“Because of gun violence, our children, our beloved, they live in the ground, because they’ve been murdered,” said the Right Rev. Robert Wright, the bishop of the Episcopal Church in Atlanta.

Felicia Newberry, 55, of Atlanta, attended the march with her daughter, Alex Russo, 28, a teacher in Cobb County. She carried a sign that read “Save Our Children. Mine Are Teachers.”

“I’m over it,” she said. “Something’s gotta give.”

In Milwaukee, a few hundred people in March for Our Lives T-shirts gathered at the steps of the Milwaukee County Courthouse.

Tess Murphy, a college student and gun-control activist told the crowd she was frustrated and angry. “But one thing I’m not is hopeless,” she said. “When we fight, we win.”

Stephanie Keith

The rallies had the support of President Biden who tweeted Saturday morning: “Today, young people around the country once again march with <a href="https://twitter.com/AMarch4OurLives">@AMarch4OurLives</a> to call on Congress to pass commonsense gun safety legislation supported by the majority of Americans and gun owners,” he said. “I join them by repeating my call to Congress: do something.”

In Washington, the crowd began forming on the north side of Lincoln Memorial and mingled amid the soggy grass and light rain.

Ray Anid, 22, flew in from Orlando, and donned a bright yellow vest along with other volunteers at the day’s march.

“Hopefully we make a difference today,” Anid said. “Hopefully we push our politicians to do what they’re supposed to do, what the majority of America wants them to do when it comes to guns, and protect us.”

Many in the crowd wore bright blue shirts emblazoned with words “March for Our Lives.” Most appeared young — college and high school students, along with a few parents with younger children. They spoke with excitement as hit songs blared from the staging area — Harry Styles’s “As It Was” and Ed Sheeran’s “Shivers.”

Near the National Museum of African American History and Culture, demonstrators were greeted by a huge field of orange and white artificial flowers that represent gun violence deaths. “Around 5,000 more people died in 2020 than 2019,” a nearby sign read. “The orange flowers symbolize the increase in lost lives.”

The event came four years after the organization held a huge rally in Washington to plead for action in the wake of the Parkland shooting that killed 17 people.

“Never again!” the crowd had chanted then.

But seven months later, a heavily armed gunman killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Two weeks after that a gunman killed 11 people at a bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif. And seven months after that a disgruntled employee killed 12 people at a municipal building in Virginia Beach.

 A march surrounded by reminders of why this time needs to be different

Calls for change again were heightened <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-victims/?itid=lk_inline_manual_5">after last month’s killing of 19 children and two teachers</a> at the elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., and the killings of 10 African Americans at a Buffalo grocery 10 days earlier. Locally, three workers were fatally shot by a fellow employee Thursday in a concrete molding company near Hagerstown, Md.

Some protesters came with friends or tagged along with their parents.

Mother-daughter duo Carly and Lisa Aughenbaugh came from Carroll County, Md., an hour and a half north of Washington.

“This country is in — emergency seems like such a lame word to use — we’re in a national crisis,” said Lisa Aughenbaugh, 56. “We’re approaching the time when there will be no one left in the country who hasn’t been affected by gun violence.”

For Carly, 24, a substitute teacher studying at Hood College in Frederick to become a school counselor, the threat of gun violence follows her into every new classroom, she said.

She said she is constantly making sure the doors in each room can lock. “If I ever die in my school, I need you to make sure this never happens again,” she remembers telling her mom after the Uvalde shooting. Now, she wants lawmakers to clamp down on assault weapons.

“We need to make it harder for the bad guys to get guns,” she said.

Katie Holloway, 41, an elementary teacher, drove from New Jersey with her mother Gretchen Showell, 63, and her aunt Liz Brophy, 59.

Holloway said she had not attended a political rally or march since she was a college student.

In her hand, she held a sign saying: “...This teacher has had ENOUGH!”

Shortly after the school shooting in Texas, Holloway said, her mother called her and told her how she couldn’t stop worrying about Holloway’s kids — two 12-year-old boys, and Holloway herself, who is a 2nd grade teacher.

They decided to book a hotel in D.C. and attend the rally.

“I teach my kids that you can do anything and change anything in the world if you try,” Holloway said. “So this is me and us doing something, because this whole situation needs to change. The fact that we can’t send our kids to school without worrying what might happen to them is crazy. This doesn’t happen in any other country in the world.”

After the Parkland shooting, the teenage survivors sparked a political movement to demand an end to school shootings and everyday gun violence. Students became activists and parents launched nonprofit organizations, lobbied lawmakers and ran for local school boards.

Still, since the Parkland shooting, more than 115,000 students have been exposed to gun violence on K-12 campuses during regular hours, according to a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/school-shootings-database/?itid=lk_inline_manual_7&itid=lk_inline_manual_24">Washington Post</a> database.

Blair Guild

Leaders of March for Our Lives have spent the days leading up to the rally in more than 60 meetings on Capitol Hill, talking with lawmakers and their staffs to advocate for gun-control measures.

The House on Wednesday <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/08/house-gun-legislation/?itid=lk_inline_manual_17">passed legislation</a> that would raise the minimum age for the purchase of most semiautomatic rifles to 21 and ban high-capacity ammunition magazines, among other gun-control measures, just <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/08/miah-cerillo-uvalde-hearing/?itid=lk_inline_manual_17">hours after a committee heard testimony</a> from a young survivor of the Uvalde shooting. However, that vote is unlikely to amount to much because of Senate Republican opposition to substantial new gun restrictions.

To some at the Washington rally, the moments of panic over a possible threat demonstrated the underlying fear among those attending public events in these times.

Killian Goodale-Porter, 18, and her parents ran with the crowd. She saw teenagers crying and heard the voice of a young child screaming “what’s happening?”

“I don’t know how to feel because I think it’s important to come here and be a part of why things change, but I don’t want to have to put my life on my line like that,” said Goodale-Porter, a rising sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University studying communication arts. “I know this is most likely a scare but we live in a country where people can just get guns and we don’t address it.”

Mark Shavin in Atlanta, Richard Webner in Austin, Trevor Bach in Los Angeles, Jack Wright in New York City, Dan Simmons in Milwaukee and Peter Hermann in Washington contributed to this report.

A previous version of this story misspelled the last name of Carly and Lisa Aughenbaugh. This story has been corrected.

University of Maryland, College Park

Ellie Silverman covers protest movements, activism and local news. At The Post, she has also covered local crime and courts. She previously reported on retail, breaking news and general assignment stories for the Philadelphia Inquirer, her hometown paper. She graduated from the University of Maryland, where she reported for the Diamondback.

Ellie Silverman

2023 SPJ Ethics in Journalism Award

2021 NIHCM Health Care Journalism Award for stories on pandemic mental health

2021 Public Service Award from the American Association of Suicidology

2021 National Headliner Award for pandemic coverage

2021 Katherine Schneider Award for Reporting on Disability

2015 National Headliner Award for international news for exposing corruption among China’s cops and courts

2015 Livingston Award finalist for International Reporting

2014 & 2015 Human Rights Press Award from Amnesty International and Foreign Correspondents’ Club

2014 Boston University's Hugo Shong Asia Reporting Award for stories of government abuses on Chinese families

2011 American Society of News Editors Diversity Writing Award for uncovering religious discrimination in the U.S. Army

2010 & 2011 Religion Writer of the Year

2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist team for breaking news on Fort Hood shooting

William Wan is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. He often writes about people suffering on the margins of society. He previously served as a national health reporter, China correspondent, roving U.S. correspondent, national security reporter and religion reporter.

William Wan

First Place, Best College Feature Writing, Ohio Society of Professional Journalists

Ohio State University, BA in journalism

Jasmine Hilton is a reporter covering crime and courts on the Metro desk at The Washington Post.

Jasmine Hilton

American University, MA journalism and public affairs

American University, BA public relations and strategic communication 

Lauren Lumpkin is a reporter at The Washington Post covering local schools. 

Lauren Lumpkin

University of Colorado, BS in journalism

University of Colorado, BA in biochemistry

Erin Cox is a politics reporter covering Maryland. She joined The Washington Post in 2018 and has written about Maryland since 2007.

Erin Cox

Part of the Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for coverage of the January 6 riot. 

Part of the Washington Post team that won he Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. 

Finalist for the Ernie Pyle award in 1988 at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

With Sari Horwitz: Sniper: Inside the Hunt for the Killers Who Terrorized the Nation. 

Villanova University, BA and MA in history

Nieman fellow, Harvard University

Michael E. Ruane is a general assignment reporter who also covers Washington institutions and historical topics. He has been a general assignment reporter at the Philadelphia Bulletin, an urban affairs and state feature writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and a Pentagon correspondent at Knight Ridder newspapers.

Michael Ruane

National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award 2022

National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award 2021

Roosevelt University, BA in Journalism

Indiana University, MS in Journalism

Samantha Latson is an intern on The Washington Post's Metro desk covering crime and is a Bradlee Fellow.  In 2022, she was a Ida B. Wells Fellow on the Investigative Team at The Post. She was also a reporter for the Unforgotten 51 project that examined the largely unsolved cases of 51 mostly African American women murdered in Chicago since 2001.