Students at Gunn High School in Palo Alto and their supporters teamed up with a widely known activist organization to call for national gun law reform at a protest near their campus this morning.
The protest began at 7:30 a.m. in front of the school bus stop at Gunn High School, located at 780 Arastradero Road, and involved about 150 people, according to Raging Grannies spokeswoman Ruth Robertson.
The Raging Grannies, an organization that was founded in British Columbia in the late 1980s and established the San Francisco Peninsula chapter just before Sept. 11, 2001, found out about the protest just 36 hours beforehand, Robertson said.
The Raging Grannies knew they wanted to help, so they started to put together a game plan of how to get as many members there as they could and selected which chants and songs to use, Robertson said.
The five present Raging Grannies changed the words to one song, set to the beat of the nursery song Frere Jacques, which was inspired by students, according to the spokeswoman. “We call BS, we call BS, on DC, on DC,” the song rang out. “Congress doing nothing, Congress doing nothing, gun safety, gun safety.”
The grannies also led chants of “No more silence, end gun violence” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho, the NRA has got to go.” Robertson said protesters were spread all down the sidewalk, which made chants hard to coordinate, but everyone present was ready and willing to pitch in for the volume.
“We passed out lyrics and the kids loved it,” Robertson said.
Robertson said that many of the women in the Raging Grannies organization were teachers at one time, so the group has always stood behind the protection of students and staff, particularly in the wake of the latest deadly school shooting in Florida earlier this month that has President Trump expressing support for arming teachers in schools.
“Trump’s ridiculous proposal that teachers be armed is just beyond the pale,” Robertson said. The San Jose gaggle of the Raging Grannies is currently in the works with city leaders to try and get gun safety legislation passed, according to Robertson. Robertson said the big day for the cause will be March 24, when the March for Our Lives nationwide protest will take place locally in both San Jose and San Francisco.
Robertson said the group learned of the Gunn High School protest from the Facebook event page set up by student Elizabeth Salwitz titled “#NeverAgain Gunn High School.”
The description of the event reads, “Come join your fellow students in saying ‘never again’ to mass shootings and limited gun control. This is an issue that affects everyone, and it is up to us, the next generation of voters, to take action.” According to Robertson, there were no opposing protesters and the efforts continued past the high school’s 8:25 a.m. start. — Bay City News
These kids are too young to remember this, but do you recall 40, 50, 60 years ago when we didn’t have many of these shootings? We also didn’t have any restrictions on buying guns. Now it’s hard to get a gun and we have shootings all the time. Wonder if there is a coincidence there?
How many shootings do we have to have before we ban assault weapons like the AR-15 and AR-16? These attacks aren’t being carried out by guys with revolvers. They’re using assault style rifles that have no purpose in legitimate hunting. Time to change the Constitution to eliminate these threats to our safety.
This is all the fault of the NRA and Trump! Time to impeach! Let’s silence the NRA!
Before school? I thought Ken Dauber and Max McGee banned zero period?
They should be protesting against the FBI which didn’t even investigate the reports about this shooter and the deputies who wouldn’t go into the school to stop this shooting.
The Broward County sheriff got 18 calls about this shooter and they weren’t able to prevent this. How many calls would it have taken? The sheriff was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper about the calls warning them that the shooter had said he was going to attack the school and that he had a gun. The sheriff said he couldn’t do anything about it. That’s outrageous.
OK, what is their solution? I’ve got to tell you that I rarely ask my teenager for advice on complex public policy issues, but I guess that is what’s happening now. So what do they suggest? Repeal the Second Amendment and have local police confiscate everyone’s guns? I’d like to hear their solution to these shootings. Not something that will have no impact, like raising the buying age to 21. Ever hear of straw purchasers? Banning assault weapons? What do you do about the millions of assault weapons already in people’s hands? Every solution that’s proposed needs to be evaluated in terms of its effectiveness. If it doesn’t move toward solving the problem, then you should skip it.
This is one occasion when the police, specifically the Broward County Sheriff Dept., deserve all the criticism in the world. Funny how the one time when the police obviously failed (or worse), instead of ripping them like they do every other time, the left goes into full on gun-grabbing mode, as if disarming law-abiding, predominantly Trump voters, will make them safer LOL.
Guess the reports of the second shooter are down the memory hole, and the “tape delay” on the security cameras, and the plan to demolish the school destroying any evidence, and the girl who was exiting the school alongside Nikolas Cruz (who was purportedly decked out in black combat gear during the shooting) moments after hearing shots from the opposite side of the building, or the Secret Service (supposedly) visiting the school weeks earlier for active shooter training.