March For Our Lives tour hits St. Pete on Thursday

The students of March For Our Lives – a movement born out the February 2018 school shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people – have taken their entire summer to tour the country. The Parkland students have banded together with students of other schools and supporters to bring the March For Our Lives movement, an effort to end school shootings, around the United States.

The main goal of their tour? Registering young people to vote – and encouraging them to stand up to staunch gun rights advocates like the National Rifle Association (NRA).

On June 22, The March For Our Lives organizers kicked off their Florida tour in their hometown of Parkland. The students aim to visit all 27 congressional districts in Florida by Aug. 1.

This week, the March For Our Lives bus tour takes on Pinellas County. After visiting more than 20+ states throughout the country, March For Our Lives organizers are taking special interest in all of Florida. Following stops in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers and Sarasota, among others, the tour will visit Palm Harbor, St. Petersburg and Tampa. It will then head north to the Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and Gainesville areas.

The tour comes after more thousands gathered in St. Petersburg and Tampa on March 24 during the March For Our Lives national day of action.

According to the March For Our Lives website, the mission of the movement is to “assure that no special interest group or political agenda is more critical than the timely passage of legislation to effectively address the gun violence issues that are rampant in our country. We demand morally-just leaders to rise up from both parties in order to ensure public safety.”

Their main objectives, also posted on their website, read as follows:

• Universal, comprehensive background checks
• Bringing the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) into the 21st century with a digitized, searchable database
• Funds for the CDC (Center for Disease Control) to research the gun violence epidemic in America
• High-capacity magazine ban
• A ban on semi-automatic assault rifles

The tour will make stops in Pinellas County Tuesday July 10 and Thursday July 12.

• Tuesday, July 10, 6:30 p.m. Palm Harbor: Town Hall meeting at Dunedin Scottish Arts Foundation (1134 Douglas Avenue)
• Thursday, July 12, 11 a.m. St. Petersburg: Rally & Voter registration at Williams Park (350 Second Avenue N).