CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – After recent mass shootings that killed 10 people at a grrocery store in Buffalo, New York, and then 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, local organizations decided to team up to protest the violence.
The March For Our Lives protest was organized by Clarksville Indivisible and the local chapter of the NAACP. In front of the Montgomery County Courthouse, T-shirts were put on a line to display the name of each recent shooting victim.
Clarksville Indivisible is a group that works “to build an inclusive, representative democracy.”
Joy Rice, an organizer of Clarksville Indivisible, told Clarksville Now that they weren’t protesting to take guns away, but rather to keep them out of the hands of dangerous people.
“Everybody keeps saying ‘Never again’ or ‘Enough is enough,’ but it really is, ‘We can’t keep going like this,'” Rice said. “Other countries manage to have guns and people that have issues and challenges, and they don’t bury their children like this because they have regulations that help that.
“We’re not saying that we’re not entitled to the Second Amendment, we’re saying that an 18-year-old shouldn’t be legally allowed to go in and buy an assault rifle. If he wants to use a gun for hunting or for his own protection, that’s great, but it doesn’t have to be an AR-15 that rapidly reloads,” Rice said.
After the group marched throughout downtown Clarksville starting at the courthouse, a couple of members from the NAACP came up and gave an emotional reading of the victims’ names from the Buffalo shooting. This was then followed by a teary-eyed reading of the 19 people killed in Uvalde.
Rice had a list of things she said could be done to prevent something like this from continuing to happen, which included banning large capacity magazines or ammo feeding devices, requiring gun owners to go through a licensing process, and raising the legal age to own an AR-15 from 18 to 21.
Rice said the list she provided was based on research of what has worked for other areas of the world.
Nahan Abubucker, an organizer of the rally, ran a similar march at 16 years old when the Parkland shooting occurred.
Now, at 20 years old, she told Clarksville Now the recent tragedies have brought back a lot of bad memories.
“I’m motivated to be here because I don’t want to be desensitized to these tragedies,” Abubucker said. “Reform is needed not so we can take guns away from law-abiding citizens, but so we can keep dangerous weapons away from dangerous people.”
At the end of the rally, organizers passed out flowers that had the names of the victims attached.
A somber silence filled the courthouse square.
“It’s easy to become very hopeless seeing these events happen so frequently, but that type of mindset won’t get us anywhere,” Abubucker said. “You need to have hope, and you need to have the strength to make change.”