March 25, 2018 10:01 AM UTC

Massive #MarchForOurLives Completes Full Circle From 2013

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post reports, though plenty of our readers are still unwinding and resting their feet:

Thousands of protesters filled Civic Center park Saturday afternoon for Denver’s rally and march against gun violence, one among hundreds taking place across America and around the world following last month’s Florida high school shooting that claimed 17 lives…

Demonstrators — their ranks punctuated by schoolchildren and parents and many carrying signs denouncing gun violence in schools — began marching through downtown Denver after a nearly two-hour rally, during which many were crowded shoulder to shoulder.

CBS Denver:

James McDermott, a senior at Jefferson County Open High School, said Saturday’s rally and march is part of a larger movement for student safety. He told CBS4 he got involved in the organization of the event because he believes a change in laws to protect students like him is long overdue.

“Quite frankly I’d like to just see some action and some legislation. It’s been 20 years without much legislation and with the dogs that died on airlines — a tragedy in itself — it took days for Congressmen to say enough is enough with that, and how many school shootings does there have to be before they realize that student lives are important,” McDermott said.

We haven’t seen an estimate of the crowd that turned out yesterday to march in support of stronger gun control laws, but from the aerial video you can see above the crowd was quite massive–easily the biggest such event since the Women’s March in January. Since the school shooting in Parkland, Florida in February, the movement for stronger gun laws in America has exploded into the popular consciousness in much the same way the treatment of women in the workplace was catalyzed into a broadly unifying issue by President Donald Trump’s election. The public is speaking out en masse to create space for change that the politicians heretofore have not shown the courage to get behind.

Except in Colorado. In 2013, following another terrible mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora the previous year, Colorado’s Democratic-controlled legislature took the lead on this issue with new laws addressing background checks as well as the magazine capacity of semiautomatic weapons–both key to reducing the number and severity of mass shootings.

Democrats in Colorado paid a heavy price for their foresight, with two state senators recalled before 2013 ended and a third who chose to resign rather than suffer the same fate. For a little while, before Democrats retook all of those seats in the next two elections, it seemed like Colorado’s experience with gun control might be a cautionary tale rather than a model.

In the streets of Denver and across the nation yesterday, that question was put to rest forever.