Halfway through their national tour of registering young people to vote and raising awareness about gun violence, survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting will step off their bus Saturday at the Virginia headquarters of the National Rifle Association.
The teens will be joined by activists, protesters and survivors of gun violence to protest the NRA’s role in blocking gun-control laws and defending sales of guns like the AR-15, the semiautomatic rifle used in the Parkland, Florida, massacre.
The protest, dubbed the “National March on the NRA,” will begin at noon. It is expected to last three hours.
Demonstrators say they will come with a number of demands and policy proposals.
Among them: A ban on high-capacity magazines and “any weapon of a caliber higher than .30 caliber or more and any rifle, long gun, or short-barreled rifle that fires in semiautomatic and takes self-loading magazines,” and the institution of universal background checks through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. They also want a searchable database of gun owners run through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Protesters say they will demand that the Internal Revenue Service revoke the nonprofit status of the NRA and that the House Appropriations Committee approve funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research gun violence and its impact on public health and safety.
“They’re in this little corner of Virginia and when we march in D.C., they don’t have to see us,” said Lawrence Nathaniel, 25, executive director of the National Organization for Change. “So we wanted to go out there to them and shut down the road and say, ‘Look, we’re here now. You have
