After school shooting, thousands of US students in Nashville rally for tougher gun laws
A week after the mass shooting at a private school in the US city of Nashville, thousands of students in the city on Monday assembled outside the State Capitol to demand tougher gun laws.
High school and college students marched towards Tennessee State Capitol to demand an end to gun violence and called for tougher gun laws, chanting slogans such as "Hey hey, ho ho, the NRA (National Rifle Association) has got to go!" and "Stop the silence, end gun violence!".
Eyewitness Andrew Maraniss said the number of participants in the protest impressed him, noting that thousands of Vanderbilt University students walked out of class in the morning to join the demonstration.
The US is "relying on young people to lead the way" on issues such as gun reform, racial justice, and climate change, he asserted.
It came exactly a week after a female shooter wielding two “assault-style” rifles and a handgun opened fire at the Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville, on March 27, killing three children and three staff members.
The deadly shooting marked the country’s 90th school shooting this year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.
Tennessee is one of the US states with lax gun control laws, with a permitless carry for handguns and limited background checks.
Democrats and gun safety activists have argued that passing stricter laws would reduce the violence, whereas Republicans and gun rights advocates maintain that arming teachers would act as a deterrent.
With around 330 million population, the US is awash with some 400 million guns. Efforts to ban assault rifles have faced opposition from Republicans who are staunch supporters of the constitutional right to bear arms.
A Gallup poll from October 2022 showed a majority of Americans are in favor of gun control, with a 57% majority of all Americans saying they want stricter laws covering the sale of firearms.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootings in the US, 647 mass shootings were recorded in 2022, killing 44,287 people.
The 2022 figure was slightly less than in 2021 when 692 mass shootings resulted in the death of 45,010 people across the country.
The US is the only country with more civilian guns than the population – 120 guns for every one hundred Americans – as per the Small Arms Survey (SAS), a Swiss research project.
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