By Mason Soto
On March 24 thousands of citizens young and old moved onto the Capitol grounds from all around the state, coming together on the steps of the legislative building with colorful signs bouncing through the spring air. The crowd was not like at other protests in town— there were just as many kids as adults, if not more, waiving their own signs in their own small groups or standing by their parents, some so young their protest signs were finger-painted. This was Olympia’s part in the series of nationwide marches that have been named March For Our Lives, dedicated to addressing issues of gun violence stirred by school shootings. “It’s amazing how many school shootings have happened and nothing has been done about it,” said Olympia High School student Tamuno-Ibelema Stahmer who was there with her mom. “Now’s the time to end it- it should have been ended before this.” The march followed a walk-out ten days earlier in honor of the seventeen school-goers who lost their lives in Parkland, Florida this Valentine’s Day, and comes after a year of intensifying school precautions to gun violence.
Lisa Hall, grandmother to a kindergartener at East Olympia Elementary, said that she came to march to make schools safer. She shared that the issue became real for her when her grandson, “came home and said ‘My teacher has a plan for if a bad guy comes in to shoot us,’ and it’s heartbreaking at six years old to hear that.” Outside the legislative building, as people came together to prepare for the march, many local students and teachers gave speeches about their experiences with guns, violence, and education, and there were countless calls for restrictions on the sale and access of guns. Lisa shared that sentiment for gun policy action, calling it “common sense” that “weapons of war should not be in the hands of citizens.”
Tamuno Ibelema Stahmer’s mother said she was proud of her daughter but emphasized the need for action by adults alongside the kids, saying, “I just can’t stand those adults who are watching these things happening and don’t do anything- I don’t know whether they can go to bed and sleep comfortably…. If these are their children going through this could they go to bed and sleep? I don’t think so.”
High school senior Madelyn Olson was facilitating the speeches on the Capitol steps, recognizing a need for action from her own family’s experiences. Her father, Brady Olson, was the teacher who tackled and stopped a student who was shooting a gun at North Thurston High School in 2015, and the family has been organizing around the issue of guns in school since then. As the speeches wrapped up, the younger Olson asked the crowd, “Is this a moment or a movement?” The response was a resounding “movement”, and things got moving from there.
The crowd poured past the angels of the memorial statue, heading for Capitol Way, but first they met counter-protestors. The dozen or so counter-protesters waved an American flag and touted signs for “gun rights” as they called out their problems with the action. One woman in the group yelled at the crowd of parents that they were brainwashing their children by bringing them to the march. Still, things stayed calm, and conversations began to manifest between the two sides. From one confrontation, a counter-protester was overheard saying, “I agree with you, Wal-Mart shouldn’t sell guns,” exemplifying how the wide net of issues and proposed solutions that the march brought to attention can break from simple party lines that intensely divide people.
There was nonetheless power in numbers on the marching side. “They didn’t seem like they were all that energized,” said John Warren, father of two kids at Kalles Jr High in Puyallup, when asked about the counterprotest. “They knew they really couldn’t compare.” Indeed, the handful of people countering were lost to the thousands that continued the march from the Capitol to Sylvester Park, where tents for local organizations were set up in front of the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. Warren said his eighth grade son’s biggest problem at school is that his friends aren’t as politically aware. “He may end up at Evergreen like my sister did,” the dad sad. Their family held a sign that referenced Black Lives Matter and other ongoing protest movements, and he said that as he saw it, this generation and student movement was unique because, “They have so much more connective ability than there was even twenty years ago… these guys can kind of connect themselves without anybody and go directly to funding sources. It makes it more hopeful.”
People seemed to feel the connections Warren talked about either among their peers or with the wider world, and many folks there had recently been to other local protests. Lisa Hall who makes signs for many actions in town said, “I’m really disheartened by this current administration… I’ve recently been at the actions at Planned Parenthood, obviously the Women’s March… and I just feel like the country’s going in the wrong direction right now but there are more of us then there are of them and if we rise together, we can make some changes.”
Tamuno Ibelema offered a different perspective, as she felt like this was a universal issue, saying, “It deals with the whole entire human population, its not just one group, it affects everyone, so I think that’s how it connects everyone.”
There were calls for diversifying the narrative and broadening the conversation, and a seminar held after the march by some Evergreen students engaged with the issue of gun violence as related to police violence and both state and corporate power.
