Marchers in Cook County symbolically joined with marchers throughout the country on Saturday, March 24 in an effort to send a message to Washington to change gun laws to make the streets and schools of the nation safer. Leading the march was Sammie Garrity who was holding the sign “Never Again” and Grace Ritchey, whose sign was soon corrected and read “Enough”.
Led by students, some 140 young and old folks took to the streets of Grand Marais on a cold, windy Saturday, March 24 afternoon to march for common sense and gun legislation reform.
“We were officially one of the 840 marches worldwide,” said one of the lead organizers, Denny FitzPatrick, of Arrowhead Indivisible.
The peaceful marchers carried signs that read: Enough! Never Again. Not one more! Disarm hate. Now is the time. Saner gun laws. Weapon reform now! March for kids that can’t.
That last sign had kids’ tennis shoes hanging from it, a stark reminder of the children killed recently in Florida at a school shooting.
With 17 pairs of shoes bearing the names of victims lined up near him, Sammy Garrity, a Cook County High School student, read the names of the 17 Stoneman Douglas High School victims.
Seventeen (17) seconds of silence and then, 17 minutes of marching followed Garrity’s reading.
When the short march was over Grand Marais Mayor Jay Arrowsmith DeCoux implored the crowd, “The kids are showing us how to do this, guys… they are telling us what they are really concerned about.”
During the march Vicki Biggs- Anderson wore a black umbrella strung with cutout figures of the Parkland victims, names, age, when killed with AR-15.
Pastor Beth Benson thanked the people for attending the march and then added, “This really matters in a world where too often we choose to use violence.”
Telling the crowd that the country doesn’t have good statistics on gun violence, Dr. Sandy Stover said the 1995 Dickey Amendment limits the amount of money the U.S. government can use to study gun violence.
According to Wikipedia, “the Dickey Amendment is a provision first inserted as a rider into the 1996 federal government omnibus spending bill which mandated that ‘none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.’”
The only way to make a change, said Stover, is to get better information that can be used to drive that change. That can come if the Dickey Amendment is reversed, she added, and funding is restored to the CDC to study the issue.
While the government doesn’t have good numbers on firearms shootings, the ones they do have are scary, noted Stover.
Somewhere around 44,000 Americans died from suicide last year, Stover said. Of those, 51 percent took their lives with guns. The best evidence shows that there were 360 mass shootings in the U.S. last year. A mass shooting is defined as four or more people that are killed at an event, she said.
Stover ended with a quote used by Ronald Reagan and Robert Kennedy.
“If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”
Cook County Sheriff Pat Eliasen thanked the people on hand for being invited to speak. He said his office and the office of Emergency Management worked together to promote responsible gun ownership. “Our primary goal is to promote public safety,” said Eliasen, who handed out flyers to the crowd advocating responsible gun ownership and gun safety.
In closing, Denny FitzPatrick said, “Only in America is the phrase ‘yet another mass shooting’ part of our vocabulary: More than 96 Americans are killed, and hundreds of others are wounded, every single day. On an average day, seven children and teens (age 19 or under) are killed with guns.
“Our nation’s gun homicide rate is 25 times higher than the average of other developed nations. This is a uniquely American crisis. There are nearly 13,000 gun homicides a year in the U.S.
Thoughts and prayers are not enough. We must demand action to end gun violence.
“It’s time to March for Our Lives. It’s time to change our country’s conversation about gun violence. Together, we will make history.”
Vicki Biggs-Anderson marches in D.C.
While the local march was going on, some from Cook County took to the streets in Washington, D.C., joining an estimated half-million marchers who gathered to demonstrate and demand action for gun reform.
Hovland resident and former Cook County News-Herald publisher Vicki Biggs-Anderson was one from the county who traveled to Washington, D.C. to join the march.
“At the March For Our Lives in D.C., we carried umbrellas hung with canvas cutouts of the boys and girls and men and women who died at Parkland and Sandy Hook, their names, ages and the dates they died, plus the names of the firearms used in their murders. It was an honor to carry these names on such a day. Words can’t express the emotion lifting all of us, and we return home filled with energy to be the change these people, we the people, want,” said Vicki.
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