Gun Control Marchers Make Strong Statement

Aerial photo by Digital Globe showing at center about half of the gun control protesters from Third to Sixth Streets on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, DC, with the main sound stage shown as a white rectangle on the Avenue at photo’s bottom center near Third Street.

Led by schoolmates of shooting victims, hundreds of thousands of gun protesters packed Pennsylvania Avenue facing the Capitol Building in downtown Washington, DC March 24 during the March for Our Lives, a powerful, well-planned and otherwise impressive challenge to the nation’s political establishment.

Extensive news coverage (excerpted in an appendix below) showed how huge attendance, enthusiasm and eloquent speakers created strong momentum for gun control and other political activism.

This commentator will leave those overviews to others, aside from the excerpts below.

My focus will be to draw on experience organizing many annual trade association conventions and other events, including some in the nation’s capital, to focus more narrowly on the exceptional logistics that contributed to the march’s success.

I observed a number of these factors also as a participant. My office at Seventh and Pennsylvania Avenue NW was almost at the center of the parade route. I had planned merely sample the street scene, much like almost innumerable other parades and protests on that route (including the presidential Inaugural every four years).

But by the end, I found myself inspired to retrieve a discarded sign from a sidewalk near the Trump International Hotel at 11th Street and talk to passersby for more than two hours about the relevant issues, as indicated at right.

The sign that I was holding at left says “When the kids act like leaders and the leaders act like kids, you know change is coming.”

Most striking on the scene was the eloquence of the event speakers and the enthusiasm of the large crowd. Not every advocate in life is going to be a strong public speaker. But these young speakers were either exceptionally inspired to rise to the occasion or somehow vetted in advance by the organizers.

Even more remarkable for a civic gathering, the talks were brief and the overall program actually ended about five minutes earlier than the scheduled end at 3 p.m. (following a noon start).