STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK
PHOTO BY CAROL WALLER
About 50 Wood River Valley residents joined the millions of people participating in March for Our Lives demonstrations across the country on Saturday.
They marched from King’s down Hailey’s Main Street and back, boasting a plethora of homemade signs:
“Hug Children. Not Guns.”
“No More Silence. End Gun Violence.”
“Stop the Bullets with Ballots. Vote them Out!”
“Brain Power. Not Gun Powder.”
Hailey residents Ben Schepps and Helen Stone initiated the protest, reaching out to Indivisible leader Molly Page. The word went out on Facebook and more than 50 men, women and children gathered with hardly any advance notice.
“Lindy (Cogan) and I were so grateful to join the march,” said Laura Hubbard Fish. “Joining in community is the key to sanity.”
“We need common sense gun legislation,” added Ben Schepps. “Enough of the National Rifle Association controlling our legislators with suspiciously sourced funding. Our young people are not only our future but have become moral and political motivators. We stand in support with them and our common goals.
Nationwide a sea of people stretched from the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., to the White House, with people calling for stricter gun laws in the wake of the shooting that took 17 lives in February at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
Organizers estimated 800,000 people turned out in what could be the largest single-day protest in the history of the nation’s Capitol—bigger even than the half-million people who turned up for the inaugural Women’s March.
It would also be bigger than the 500,000 to 600,000 people who demonstrated against the Vietnam War in 1969, the 250,000 people who showed up for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom rally in 1963 where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” and the Million Man March in 1995, which drew more than 450,000.
Even Paul McCartney showed up at a march in New York City, reminding people that it was a gun that killed John Lennon.
Boise Police estimated that 5,000 people participated in a march and rally in Boise, which featured music and speeches given by local students.