Hey, NRA: The Kids Have Some Thoughts And Prayers For You Too
Gillian Beard holds a phone with a photo of her friend, Nicholas Dworet, who'd accepted a U of Indianapolis swimming scholarship. He was killed last Wednesday.
The kids are not all right with being shot at anymore, so they're heading for the streets. This weekend saw protests outside the National Rifle Association's headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, and inside a Paul Ryan fundraiser in Florida. And coming up next, plans for marches in Washington and across the country to protest gun violence, as well as a national school walkout to mark the anniversary of the Columbine massacre. It's almost as if they're tired of waiting for the alleged grown-ups to do something.
Friday night, some 300 protesters gathered outside NRA headquarters to say they've had enough. Or rather, to shout it. Among them were family members of some of the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, as well as friends of victims in Florida. Gillian Beard, pictured up top, is a college freshman from Coral Gables, Florida, who was in Washington for a planned trip to celebrate her 19th birthday with her family. But instead, she was at the protest, because her best friend, Nicholas Dworet, 17, was shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida. Beard wasn't one of the featured speakers, but ended up addressing the crowd anyway:
“I am burying my best friend next week. . . . I grew up with him. I flew in last night, crying on the plane,” Beard told the crowd, who huddled along the sidewalk outside the building. “This is my birthday. I can’t even celebrate that I am 19 today. I lost one of my best friends because of something that could have been stopped.”
Closer to the site of last week's murders, Paul Ryan went ahead with a planned GOP fundraiser in Key Biscayne, because he'd already gotten his thoughts and prayers out of the way, tweeted that the shooting was "pure evil," and sent the House on its Presidents Day recess without so much as a perfunctory moment of silence for the 17 dead (they'll take care of that next week). But the fundraiser sure seemed like a nice party:
This is @SpeakerRyan's version of Thoughts and Prayers. Odd, it looks like a donor event in the tropics. #Parkland #GunReformNow #Resist pic.twitter.com/JTQtRiNMMl
— PerSisters (@PERSlSTERS) February 17, 2018