TALLAHASEE, Fla. — When Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School senior Kirsten McConnell was last in Tallahassee, she and her fellow students did something rarely seen in Florida politics: They successfully pushed for limits on guns in a state where Republican lawmakers have refused to restrict the Second Amendment.
But she had a message for those lawmakers Saturday afternoon, just blocks from the state Capitol where she had protested half a year before: “We are still here,” she said to a crowd of about a hundred demonstrators. “We are still angry, and we are not going to shut up anytime soon.”
Half a year ago, busloads of Parkland students made Tallahassee the site of their first major political battle, persuading lawmakers to impose limits on gun purchases and to budget hundreds of millions of dollars to increase school security and mental health resources. But those student activists, who have gone on to build the national March For Our Lives movement, are still pushing for stronger measures to curb gun violence on a national scale.
For the past several weeks, they have undertaken a two-pronged “Road to Change” bus tour crisscrossing the nation and Florida to register voters and encourage them to cast ballots in November. When both buses reunited in the state capital Saturday, they brought some of those student activists back to Tallahassee for the first time since they had urged lawmakers to take action on stopping gun violence.
About a dozen speakers urged attendees to stay invested in their political system. Organizers registered people to vote and dozens of attendees waved signs reading “grab them by their midterms” and depicting Xs over the NRA.
“Coming back just seeing how
