Saturday’s “March for Our Lives” rally in the nation's capital will try to move a reluctant Congress to tighten the nation’s gun laws, but hundreds of smaller protests in cities nationwide will push for gun control measures at the state level where progress is proving easier to secure.
In the aftermath of the mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fl., student survivors launched a statewide protest that prompted Florida lawmakers to impose a three-day waiting period on gun purchases and raise the minimum age for buying a rifle from 18 to 21.
Young people in Georgia and other states are trying to duplicate that success with hundreds of their own protests. On Saturday, when 500,000 people are expected at the national “March for Our Lives” rally in D.C., Georgia students will host rallies in cities such as Athens, Atlanta, Clarkesville, Covington, Savannah and Watkinsville.
The events will keep the pressure on Georgia lawmakers working to close a loophole that requires the state, after five years, to purge a person’s mental health treatment records from a national database used by gun dealers to identify people who are legally prohibited from buying or possessing firearms. Georgia is the only state that removes the information about people who were involuntarily committed for mental health reasons.
“It should never have been in their law in the first place,” said Ari Freilich, a staff attorney at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Keeping firearms out of the hands of people with past mental problems is one of the few policies that gun-control and gun-rights activists agree on. But closing Georgia’s peculiar loophole won’t happen without a fight in the state legislature where the National Rifle Association’s positions enjoy strong support from Republican lawmakers.
But students like Gwyn Rush, a 17-year-old senior at Columbus High School in Columbus, Ga., are confident.
“We’re seeing so much momentum. If we keep this up, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for the younger generation to create change,” said Rush, who’ll speak at a “March for Our Lives” rally in Columbus on Saturday.
Fallout from the Parkland shooting is also causing lawmakers in other states to revisit gun laws:
- One day after the Parkland shooting, the Senate in Iowa advanced legislation requiring school districts to establish safety plans for active shooters.
- In Kentucky, lawmakers introduced a bill to allow teachers or staff with concealed-carry permits to be “school marshals” who carry guns on school grounds but can only use them in case of an active shooter.
- In Illinois, legislation was introduced to close a “ghost guns loophole” that allows online buyers of unassembled firearms in the state to avoid federal background checks.
While scrapping Georgia's purge requirement would be a significant achievement, Freilich said, the state’s lack of universal background checks for all gun purchases remains problematic.
Georgia only requires full background checks on gun buyers when firearms are purchased from authorized gun dealers. But “no questions are asked,” when firearms are purchased from gun shows, through online ads, at yard sales or from a stranger on the street, Freilich said.
“This Georgia legislature has been very, very pro-NRA and has not even taken up a vote on a universal background check bill,” Freilich said. “It’s probably more likely than not that it will require new leadership in Georgia to make that happen.”
The Georgia chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and the Everytown Survivor Network have called on state lawmakers to oppose a trio of “permitless-carry” bills — SB177, HB 156 andHB286 — and any proposals to expand laws that allow guns on college campuses. The groups also support proposals to bar gun ownership for people convicted of domestic abuse.
Achieving those legislative goals may be difficult in gun-loving Georgia, where Republican lawmakers killed a $50 million tax break for Delta Airlines in retaliation for the company scrapping a discount-fare promotion with the National Rifle Association following the Parkland shooting.
The legislation was signed by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican and longtime favorite of the NRA, which spent nearly $614,000 to help re-elect Deal in 2014. The NRA did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Rush will discuss the NRA’s outsized influence on the nation’s gun culture when she speaks at the Columbus rally on Saturday. She said it’s important to keep pressuring for change after the mourning over student gun victims has waned.
“After the vigils and the ‘thoughts and prayers’ are over, a lot of people kind of have a defeatist attitude,” Rush said. “Like, ‘The NRA and gun lobby are just going to continue to be successful and we can’t do anything.’ But that’s not necessarily true. And believing that is giving them more power.”
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