March for Our Lives: hundreds of thousands demand end to gun violence – as it happened

Our special correspondents from Parkland will be interviewed on MSNBC shortly talking about their collaboration with the Guardian and the anti-gun march today.

You can listen to it live here.

24 Mar 201810.13 EDT

Nicola Slawson

Outside the brand new US embassy in London, hundreds of expats, study abroad students and allies stood in solidarity with today’s march.

Holding placards painted with phrases such as “I’d rather my teachers had pencils,” the protestors chanted “Books not Bullets” and “Never again” while gathered on a grass embankment outside the embassy as police looked on.

A minutes silence was held in honour of the victims of mass shootings.

The solidarity rally was organised by three American students, Stephanie Thompson, Stephen Paduano and David Scollan, who are studying at the London School of Economics.

In an interview for Mashable, Thompson said that her home state of Colorado has seen some of the most infamous mass shootings including the Aurora theatre shooting and the Columbine School shooting, adding that “most Americans have similar stories of their communities and lives being affected by this senseless violence”.

“My frustration with inaction has just increased since being abroad,” said Thompson. “Since arriving in London six months ago there have been three mass shootings – Las Vegas, NV, Sutherland Springs, TX, and Parkland, FL.”

This left her feeling “hopeless being far from home and not being able to change anything” but since Parkland things had shifted.

Elsewhere in the UK, similar rallies are taking place in Edinburgh, Belfast and Newcastle. And protesters are turning out in Dublin and Cork in Ireland.

• This post was amended on 26 March to make clear that Dublin and Cork are in Ireland.
  

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Our special correspondents from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school newspaper have been speaking to Robert Runcie, school superintendent of their local area, Broward County.

“I think the most important piece is how Stoneman Douglas students have driven and impacted a dawn of a national movement,” Runcie said. “I think this generation may prove to be the greatest generation.”

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Others have been explaining to the students why they are marching today.

“It’s important for people to realize that we are all affected, our whole community was affected,” said 18-year-old Emily Malcom. “I’m marching for change, i’m marching for my whole community. Hopefully people will see that we won’t stop anytime soon.”

“I think that legislatures should be aware that the next generation of voters is right in front of them so if they don’t want to promote change then we will vote for change,” said 15-year-old Jordan Khayyami, a student at MSD.

“I am here to respect the 17 lives that were lost at my school on 14 February,” said Helena Denny. “I am here to fight in the name of the 100,000 victims, including students, parents, and teachers who die every year due to gun violence.”

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“They wanted to come to the march and make the signs so we worked hard to come here,” said Kelly Recker of West Hartford, Connecticut, of his children. “Hopefully this is something they are going to look back on and this is going to be a moment of change.”

Parkland special correspondents Rebecca Schneid and Leni Steinhardt have been speaking to marchers in Washington.

“My friends were murdered in school,” said Joey Mondelli, a senior in high school. “I have to be here for them. This can never happen.”

“People underestimate our ability to organize as teenagers,” said 17-year-old Tyah Roberts. “We aren’t to be taken likely. We are a force to be reckoned with.”

“What inspired me to make this poster was actually being angry at the world and then I realized that being angry at everyone isn’t going to change anything so I decided to go a different route,” said Taylor Allen, 20, from Parkland.

“If you don’t think gun control will make a difference I’ll still give you a hug but hopefully we can come to an agreement.”

The staff of the student newspaper of Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida, where a massacre last month led to today’s marches, are covering the Washington march as special correspondents for the Guardian.

Here are the Eagle Eye staff planning for the march from their hotel room on Friday night:

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Today, they huddled for a group hug before the march:

At protests across the country, volunteers have set up voter registration booths.

Many of these efforts are backed by HeadCount, a non-partisan voter registration group that installs voter registration drives at music festivals and concerts in the US.

The group’s executive director, Andy Bernstein, told Billboard it was the first time the group has partnered with a march.

“Hearing [student activist] Cameron Kasky and the powerful speech from [student activist] Emma Gonzalez on CNN, where she ended with a call for people to register to vote, made it obvious that it was time for HeadCount to engage,” Bernstein said.

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If marchers are hoping to take their message of gun reform directly to Donald Trump, they will be disappointed.

The president has headed down to his Florida bolthole, Mar-a-Lago, for the weekend. He has no public events on his schedule and seems to be at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.

Trump has flip-flopped on gun control, proposing arming teachers while backing away from earlier support for raising age limits after meeting with senior figures from the National Rifle Association, the powerful US pro-gun lobby group.

On Friday, however, the US justice department proposed rule changes that would effectively ban bump stocks, devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like a machinegun. Bump stocks were used by Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock to kill 58 people in the deadliest mass shooting in recent US history.

Trump has also proposed extreme risk protection orders, which would provide law enforcement and family members with a legal way to petition a court to temporarily remove an unstable person’s guns, and block them from buying new ones.

In backing away from the proposal to raise the legal age to buy certain guns, Trump said part of the reason was that there was “not much political support (to put it mildly)” for the policy.

That may be true in Congress, but recent polls of US adults have found that more than two-thirds of respondents favor raising the legal age to buy guns.

Comprehensive background checks, which Trump is not backing despite earlier promising to do so, are even more popular.

A recent Monmouth University poll found that 83% of Americans support requiring comprehensive background checks for all gun purchasers, including private sales between two individuals.

Even among NRA members, 69% support comprehensive background checks, the poll found.

That indicates opposition is largely confined to the leadership of the NRA and the Republican party.

It might seem strange for March For Our Lives protests to take place abroad, particularly in countries with much stricter gun control laws, but there are protests planned in at least 37 other countries.

Those protests were organized by Americans based in those countries or by locals with connections to the US.

Three Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school students attended the demonstration in Tel Aviv, where they were on spring break, according to the Times of Israel.

One of the students, Eden Hebron, told the rally about seeing her close friend killed when her English classroom was attacked.

“I am still in disbelief but I will not allow anyone else to see the things I saw, to prepare for your final seconds of life like I did,” Hebron told the rally.

The Guardian has been collaborating with the staff of the Eagle Eye, the school newspaper of Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida, where a massacre last month led to today’s marches.

On Friday, student editors took control of the Guardian’s website and published a series of articles, including their manifesto of demands, with a call to ban the sale of high velocity semi-automatic weapons, expand background checks, and raise the minimum purchase age of rifles to 21 high on the list.

Members of the Eagle Eye’s editorial staff have travelled to Washington and will cover the march as special correspondents for the Guardian.

They are already in place and tweeting pictures and messages.

Today in Washington DC and more than 830 places worldwide, people of all ages will come together to demand solutions to gun violence in America.

Students who survived the school shooting last month in Parkland, Florida, sparked the event after 17 of their teachers and classmates were killed last month by a former student armed with an AR-15 rifle he had legally purchased.

Parkland survivors will be at the vanguard of the demonstration in Washington, where more than 500,000 people are expected to protest, starting at noon.

This week over a dozen journalism students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school, where the massacre took place, took over the Guardian US website, commissioning and writing pieces about the gun debate. They will be reporting live for us from Washington today.

Guardian reporters Lois Beckett and Oliver Laughland will also be sending dispatches from DC. And Richard Luscombe in Florida and Sam Levin in Oakland will be reporting from the marches there.

Stay tuned here for live coverage of the marches in Washington and elsewhere throughout the day.