Activists Handed Out Mass Shooting Coloring Books To Senators In D.C.

Helisa Cruz is frustrated.


Two years back, on February 14, 2018, a perpetrator carried out an attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; he killed 17 people and injured 17 others. It wasn’t the initial time mass violence has upended lives, and it also wouldn’t be the last: In 2019, there were more mass shootings than days. Even so, little has been done legislatively to fight gun violence.


That inaction has only gotten starker in the past few months, because the impeachment controversy ravaged Washington, D.C. By the time the Residence of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump, the Residence had sent over 400 expenditures to the Senate reaching all areas of law — from gun violence to election security — only for them to be stalled by a legislative body that seemed more concerned with confirming judges and blocking an impeachment conviction than with passing expenditures, Vox reported.


Yet the Senate officially determined to acquit Trump on February 5, and the inaction stuck around. Activists were getting tired: They compiled a faux graveyard all of the charges McConnell “killed,” and so they contained protests. And, on Wednesday (February 12), Helisa and other young activists from March for Our Lives D.C. Flooded Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel’s office. She headed over soon after school — it was three helps stop on the train — and helped pass out coloring books to senators that depicted places where shootings had already taken place and one empty page for future shootings, unless something is done.


“That statement was just a reminder that while folks are dying, the members of Congress — and especially Mitch McConnell — continue to be childish on just not taking action on this epidemic,” Helisa told MTV News. Immediately following the activists settled into McConnell’s office, they sat in silence for 21 minutes, one minute for each young person who will perish due to gun violence day-to-day, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.


and then the speeches came. Any time it was her time to speak, Helisa noted that once people think about Washington, D.C., They imagine the Hill, the Supreme Court, the monuments, and the museums, “but they don't know that there's a whole other culture of what D.C. Really is.” The district has seen more killings every year since 2017, peaking with 166 homicides in 2019, according to intelligence released by D.C. Police. The most typical factor in all of these killings? Against the law firearms.


“Far also often we have seen the irreversible damage that unlawful guns in the hands of violent offenders does to the lives and fabric of our community,” Police Chief Peter Newsham mentioned in a news conference, according to WTOP. “So our primary concentrate on combating crime has routinely been and will continue to be removing unlawful firearms from our neighborhoods.”


However Helisa and her fellow activists know the distribute extends far in back of their own backyard — and that the lack of action by lawmakers has real-world repercussions. “We have all of those national elected officials and lawmakers five minutes away from my day-to-day life,” she told MTV News. “The fact that we're dying not far away from [lawmakers] and that they're not doing anything, it's just astonishing.”


That’s why March For Our Lives D.C. Have taken action into their own hands. A local chapter of the national movement founded by MSD survivors and allies, the order operates by holding workshops and training, planning for advocacy days, hosting film viewings, and, naturally, staging protests. At each of those protests, activists give speeches.


Helisa didn’t anticipate raising her voice on Wednesday, nevertheless she at least hopes the group’s pleas aren’t ignored: “To a certain extent, it's like, what do you mention to someone who doesn't care about your existence?”