WASHINGTON, D.C. — Caleb Poer, a senior at Bloomington High School North, shouted into a megaphone in a crowd gathered March 24 for the March for Our Lives rally.
“Hey, hey, NRA — how many kids did you kill today?"
His words echoed through the street as the crowd caught on and repeated the phrase with him.
Poer and 45 other students from Bloomington high schools joined an estimated 800,000 people who gathered near the National Mall to protest the National Rifle Association, mass shootings and gun control laws.
People of all ages demonstrated support for stricter legislation, encouraging those around them to speak out and register to vote in midterm elections.
Although gun violence in the United States is growing, there has been a larger call for action in the wake of a mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
As of the day of the march, the Educators School Safety Network has recorded over 1,350 threats to schools nationwide since the Parkland shooting.
The Indiana Daily Student has also reported that the Bloomington Police Department has responded to five threats to local schools in this time.
“We have to go to school knowing that there is a chance someone will shoot it up, and that’s like a sacrifice we have to pay so we can own weapons of war,” Poer said.
As the nation watched the events of the Parkland shooting unfold almost in real time on social media, Bloomington students realized they could easily have been the ones stepping over the dead bodies of their friends.
“I feel like this is something that everyone should care about,” Poer said. “If you stay stagnant and stay silent, that’s how democracies die.”
The march didn’t officially start until noon, but the Bloomington students left around 8 a.m from their hotel in Springfield, Virginia to get everyone on the Metro and ride into the city together.
Bloomington students raised $15,000 to pay for a trip to attend the march. They wore shirts in support of the March for Our Lives rally and at least one student had on a pink pussy hat made popular by the Women’s March on Washington last January.
Many of them carried signs and practiced chants on the ride to the march.
When the group made it off the train and headed toward the National Mall, Poer climbed up onto a white barricade and raised his megaphone to address the Bloomington crowd.
“They always try to say our generation is lacking, but here we are,” Poer said.
Students split up into smaller groups and waded into the crowd for the main event. Poer and a few others weaved through other marchers to try to make it as close to the main event as possible.
The crowd’s age showed in the protest signs they carried. Many based their slogans and drawings from pop culture memes, and SpongeBob SquarePants references were common.
The speakers were all students, some as young as 11, who had been affected by gun violence at their schools or in their communities. They came from Parkland as well as Chicago, Los Angeles and the Sandy Hook community in Newtown, Connecticut.
One Parkland survivor, Sam Fuentes, threw up in the middle of reading a piece she wrote called “Enough,” she quickly continued on with her speech.
“Forget your size and colors, let’s save one another,” she said in the second half of her reading.
Emma Gonzalez, one of the most outspoken Parkland students, used her speech to name the Parkland victims as tears ran down her face.
Then she stood silent.
At first, people seemed confused. They began cheering for Gonzalez, as if they thought she just needed some encouragement to talk about the traumatic event.
The Bloomington students in Poer’s group didn’t get it. They looked around at one another.
Some people chanted in the distance from somewhere in the back of the crowd.
No one from the Bloomington group joined the first couple of times, but even though they were still confused, they halfheartedly latched on.
“Ne-ver again,” they said under their breath.
They quickly stopped and talked quietly to each other to ask what was going on.
Poer’s guess was that Gonzalez wouldn't talk for 17 minutes — one minute for each of the victims.
The silence continued until a timer beeped, and she announced she had been onstage for six minutes and 20 seconds.
It was the amount of time the shooter took to kill her peers and teachers.
“Fight for your lives,” she said to the crowd, “before it’s someone else’s job.”
Find coverage of the Indianapolis March for Our Lives rally here.
