Thousands ‘March for Our Lives’ in Manhattan and Hermosa Beach
More than 5,000 residents massed at the foot of the Manhattan Beach Pier Saturday morning before walking along The Strand to the Hermosa Pier, rallying for gun safety. Photos
Catherine Tippett, a senior at Peninsula High School, had heard the snide comments about her generation and how they were too self-absorbed to make a difference. She even cracked a joke about the recent social-media driven trend of teens popping pods of Tide detergent in their mouths.
But Saturday, as she stood on a temporary stage on Hermosa Beach’s Pier Plaza in front of thousands of spectators, she asked the generation lobbing these insults to take a look in the mirror.
“I’d rather be known as the generation that eats laundry detergent than the generation that sells AR-15s,” Tippett said, alluding to the assault rifle used in mass shootings in Las Vegas, Orlando, Newtown, Conn. and, most recently, Parkland, Fla.
Tippett was one of about a dozen speakers and thousands of people who massed at the base of the Manhattan Beach Pier Saturday morning before marching along The Strand to the Hermosa Pier, where they held a rally calling for a variety of reforms in the nation’s gun laws. The march was organized by the South Bay Coalition for a Safer Tomorrow, and participants carried homemade signs demanding changes to gun laws and expressing outrage at opponents of reform. As they marched, they put their own spin on traditional protest chants, including “Hey, Hey, NRA, how many kids did you kill today?”
Students and parents from the area were joined by elected officials representing the South Bay, including Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Torrance). Taking his turn at the podium after more than an hour of speeches from emotional high schoolers and frustrated parents, Lieu surveyed the crowd and said it called to mind a phrase that Abraham Lincoln used in one of his famous debates with Stephen Douglas. “Public sentiment is everything: with it, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
Many marchers got creative with homemade signs displaying their anger.
The comment keyed on the remarkable display of support that the nationwide March for Our Lives produced. Since the election of President Donald Trump in Nov. 2016, the South Bay has hosted local rallies and protests mirroring those taking place in major cities throughout the country, including Women’s Marches on the day after Trump’s inauguration and again this year on Jan. 20. Saturday’s event was arguably larger than all of these: counts from area police departments put the total at between 5,000 and 6,000 participants. An Easy Reader reporter got ahead of the marchers on The Strand Saturday morning, and observed that it took nearly 45 minutes for the entire crowd that had assembled in Manhattan to file past.
There were no arrests, said HBPD Sgt. Robert Higgins. At one point, a small contingent of counter-protesters appeared during a speech by a student and massed near the alleyway in front of Playa Hermosa Fish and Oyster Co. Speakers urged the crowd to drown them out, and the two groups avoided the physical confrontations that have marked political gatherings elsewhere in the past year.
Saturday’s demonstrations followed local school walkouts, during which hundreds of pupils at Mira Costa and Redondo Union high schools joined students throughout the country in calling for improvements to student safety. Participants in those events stressed the way that the outspoken students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the Parkland school where 17 people were killed in February, had led the way in calling for change.
State senator Ben Allen, who represents the South Bay, said that today’s high school students were uniquely positioned to change things. The students at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, he said, drew attention because of their innocence, but were too young to articulate their grief and frustration for a national audience. Students like those at Stoneman Douglas and the South Bay high schoolers who spoke Saturday were able communicators who still had the idealism of youth.
“Experience can jade you. You remember all these times when people said ‘Never again,’ and nothing happened. So you start to focus on the environment, or transportation or some other issue…until these young people start to push back,” Allen said.
Faculty from area schools also joined the students in describing the urgent need for reform. Janet Barker, a teacher at Redondo Union, shared the story of one of her students who recently formed his fist into the shape of a pistol and pantomimed shooting her during class. Solutions like arming teachers, pushed in the days following Parkland, embodied the way both parents and students had “iphoned away” their responsibility to address much larger issues, she said.
“Giving me or any teacher a gun is a simplistic, reactionary and diversionary response to a societal problem,” Barker said.