On Saturday morning, demonstrators in front of Plant City High School held up signs for oncoming traffic with hopes of getting one message across: “end gun violence."
More than 60 local students, teachers and parents assembled on the Alexander Street sidewalk for the “March for Our Lives” rally, a Washington, D.C.-based movement that has picked up steam in recent weeks and hit streets and sidewalks across the nation Saturday morning. The goal of the student-driven movement is to promote "gun sense" to help prevent school shootings.
“We are not anti-gun,” PCHS student Lexi Knotts said. “We are anti-guns in schools. We are anti-children being able to acquire guns. This is not about taking people’s guns away — this is about making it harder for people who don’t need them to get them, for making it harder for people to kill people with them.”
Plant City’s rally was organized by two PCHS students, Knotts and Dalton Vanderford, who have spent the last month planning it. In addition to holding up signs, waving at cars and walking along the Alexander Street sidewalk, the group also sold t-shirts honoring victims of the Feb. 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. Vanderford said $6 from every $10 shirt sale would be donated to the families of victims and those injured in the shooting, and the remaining $4 from each sale would be paid to the shirts’ manufacturer.
The group took to the sidewalk to promote stricter regulations for purchasing guns and voting for elected officials who support the enforcement of those regulations. Knotts and the demonstrators also believe AR-15 assault rifles, some of the most popular guns in America, “don’t deserve a place” in civilian society and should not be available for the general public to purchase.
“Those are weapons of war. They’re meant to kill,” Keith Jackson, a social studies teacher at Plant City High School and parent of two, said. “They are not meant to stop somebody in their tracks and slow them down.”
Knotts, Vanderford and their classmates don’t want what happened at Stoneman Douglas last month to happen to them. Knotts said the group will stay active in spreading its message beyond Saturday’s demonstration. Though there aren’t currently any plans set for future events, the students were surprised to see so many people come out to join them.
“It’s good,” Knotts said. “It makes it feel like there’s a chance that even in our community, which is very pro-gun, that we have a say.”