Texas School Shooting: Students march across U.S. to protest gun violence

A day of turmoil and grief gripped America’s public schools Thursday, as thousands of students staged walkouts across the country to protest the Uvalde shooting in Texas.

The shooting killed 19 elementary school children and two adults on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, scattered threats of violence were also reported and quelled in the states of Texas and Colorado, local authorities said.

From the coast of California to Vermont’s northern mountains, students from more than 200 schools in at least 34 states plus the District of Columbia walked out to protest the Uvalde massacre.

Social media showed videos and images of student walkouts in Rhode Island, New York, Michigan, Missouri and California.

The first student protests occurred Thursday morning in the northeast U.S. state of Vermont, located south of Canada.

“I feel outraged, but also at the same time, I feel numb,’’ South Burlington High School junior Parker Banas told the Vermont Digger Daily News.

Burlington, in northern Vermont on the shores of Lake Champlain, is 285 miles (459 kilometres) north of Newton, Connecticut.

There, the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred a decade ago, the deadliest in American history, where 20 first-graders and six adults were gunned down.

Hundreds of middle and high school students gathered on the south Burlington football field to protest gun violence, which, according to the non-profit data collection organisation, Gun Violence Archive, has hit 27 American schools this year.

At Green Level High School in South Carolina, hundreds of students filled the football stadium bleachers where they took turns reading reflections and other thoughts related to the Texas shooting, USA Today said.

Further up the East Coast, New Jersey Spotlight News senior correspondent Brenda Flanagan tweeted that “more than 200 teens had gathered outside Ridgewood High School to protest gun violence.’’

In Oxford, Michigan, hundreds of students gathered on the school’s football field on Thursday, forming a giant “U’’ to show condolences on the tragedy in Texas, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Last November at Oxford High School, four students were killed and seven others wounded by a 15-year-old sophomore whom police said used a gun that his parents bought him as a gift.

On Thursday, when Oxford students left the school marching across the campus to the football stadium, they were greeted by applause from dozens of parents who parked their cars across the street.

On the West Coast, California had seen dozens of protests, including some 150 students who walked out of Crescenta Valley High School and students at El Camino Real Charter High School chanting “enough is enough’’.

In South Los Angeles, students holding signs chanted “protect our kids’’ at a walkout at Locke High School, with some signs asking “Are we next?’’ and “Put the guns down.’’

Also, there was a walkout in Santa Clarita’s Saugus High School, wherein in 2019 a 16-year-old killed two students and wounded three others before killing himself, and hundreds joined the protest.