MORRISTOWN — Estimated 13,000 people chant ‘Enough is Enough’ during March for Our Lives held in Morristown on Saturday, March 24.
The local event was organized by Bella Bhimani, a sophomore at West Morris Mendham High School, the walk was a non-partisan, student-led march against gun violence.
Morristown Mayor Tim Dougherty addressed the crowd at the beginning of the March starting Morristown Town Hall. Dougherty said “Get behind people that will support the right to protect our children in schools and on the street, enough is enough. Protect our kids, not guns, enough is enough. Let me hear it. Enough is enough, Who do we care about? Our children. Enough is Enough. And that let echo in every town and every city and every state in these United States of America. God Bless you all for coming out here and protesting and standing up for your rights and trying to protect the people who need protecting from the people that won’t protect us. So keep it up, I will stand with you, I will walk with you. God bless and Keep it Up.”
According to the March for Our Lives website “Weapons of war have no place in our communities. Our nation requires a comprehensive assault weapons ban that prohibits the future production and sale of these weapons and provides a solution for dealing with those assault weapons that are already owned, such as a buyback program or registration. Limiting high-powered weapons to the military has worked elsewhere to eliminate the opportunity for mass shootings.”
The student activists emphasized that they would soon have access to the ballot box as they hope to build support for candidates who support universal background checks and bans on assault-style weapons.
Large majorities of Americans say they support gun control measures like universal background checks. Yet when put directly to the people in a referendum in recent years, the results have been mixed.
Morristown police, the Morris County Sheriff’s Office and other agencies provided security. There were so many participants that lead marchers returning to Town Hall passed marchers at the end of the line still completing the loop.
Marchers flooded streets across the globe in public protests on Saturday, calling for action against gun violence. Hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out, in the most ambitious show of force yet from a student-driven movement that emerged after the recent massacre at a South Florida high school.
At the main event in Washington, survivors of mass shootings, including the one in Florida, rallied a whooping crowd — “Welcome to the revolution,” said one of the student organizers — and spoke of communities that are disproportionately affected by gun violence. “It is normal to see flowers honoring the lives of black and brown youth that have lost their lives to a bullet,” Edna Chavez, 17, said of her South Los Angeles neighborhood.
In New York, marchers bundled in bright orange — the official color of a gun control advocacy group — charged toward Central Park. And in Parkland, Fla., less than a mile from where the shooting took place last month, one protester’s eyes brimmed with tears, surrounded by the echoing chant, “Enough is enough!”
For more information on “March for Our Lives” click here.
