The community wears orange to advocate for an end to gun violence
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF)- Chattanoogans were encouraged to wear orange to prevent gun violence at Miller Park on Sunday.
The goal is to advocate for ending gun violence and creating common sense gun laws.
One mom who attended the event explained her feelings when she first heard about the Texas school shooting.
At the time of the devastating murders, her daughter was also in fourth grade, which was the same age as the ones who were shot and killed in the Uvalde school shooting.
It was so hard to hear that and to imagine that what that would’ve been like for those families and those kids. It just felt too real, and then to have like the incidents at school when there’s like a threat made or something like that, and they go into that lockdown, and then as parents, we’re all kind of thrown into that ‘what if?’ scenario, and it’s hard to hear your children go to school with fear and thinking of that as a possibility,” said mother, advocate and attendee, Brittany Wilkins.
Other than spreading awareness, the event was also meant to honor and celebrate survivors of gun violence.
They even created a “living memorial” where survivors were encouraged to bring a memento to add to the memorial.
One 5th grader told News 12 about how scary it is to be in grade school during a time period, where each day feels like a threat, just to sit in a classroom.
“It’s like really scary because last year our school- we had to go into lock down- and like, a gun showed up there, so we had to wait there for like over two hours in our classrooms and like, it was really scary. A lot of my classmates were crying. Now we have to lock all of our doors, and we have two police officers at our school that just walk around campus,” said 5th grader and advocate, Belou Anderson.
The group plans to host more events this summer…..
