Beginning Thursday, a group of students will march westward a quarter of the way across Massachusetts in the latest act of a national, youth-led campaign to save lives and change the conversation about gun violence[1].
Roughly 45 students are expected to make the 50-mile trek under the banner of “50 Miles More,”[2] an organization that coordinated a similar march to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s house in Wisconsin[3] earlier this year to demand congressional action on gun reform.
The Massachusetts event will begin in Worcester and end Sunday in Springfield outside the headquarters of Smith & Wesson, where the students say they’ll challenge the firearms manufacturer to do its part to prevent mass shootings and other routine gun violence.
The organizers say they were inspired by civil rights activists who marched from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery in 1965 to pressure lawmakers to enact new national voting rights legislation.
“That 54-mile march was an inspiration for this one,” said organizer Vikiana Petit-Homme, a 17-year-old high school student from the Boston area. “They fought for their freedoms, so we’re doing the same here.”
The activists have two main goals. The first is to get Smith & Wesson to agree to stop manufacturing military-style weapons like the M&P 15, an AR-15-style rifle that has been used in a number of recent high-profile shootings, including in Parkland, Florida, in February, in San Bernardino, California, in 2015, and in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012.
The second is for Smith & Wesson to donate $5 million to study gun violence and other crimes involving the company’s firearms.
Considering the M&P 15 is already restricted in Massachusetts under the state’s assault weapons ban, the
