The March for Our Lives Event Wasn't Actually Packed With America's Youth as Advertised

Hundreds of students protesting gun violence marched to the Minnesota State Capitol Wednesday, March 7, 2018, in St. Paul, Minn. St. Paul police estimate 2,000 students from around the metro area marched to the Capitol. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

We already knew that the “student-led” March for Our Lives wasn’t the grassroots anti-gun violence march the media made it out to be.

For one, the march wasn’t organized by the kids. As we learned, the march was put together by a who’s who list of leftist organizations ranging from Everytown to Planned Parenthood. Then we learned the march organizers deplatformed students or family members of students who didn’t go along with the call for restricting guns.”

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Now, from the Washington Post, we learn that the vast majority of the march’s attendees weren’t students either, but people much older:

Contrary to what’s been reported in many media accounts, the D.C. March for Our Lives crowd was not primarily made up of teenagers. Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18. The average age of the adults in the crowd was just under 49 years old, which is older than participants at the other marches I’ve surveyed but similar to the age of the average participant at the Million Moms March in 2000, which was also about gun control.

This should neither be shocking or surprising. Despite all the media attention being put on students who are against firearms, and are calling for either bans or restrictions, most youngsters feel that guns make us safer according to various polls.

This includes Gallup, Pew, and Harvard, who found that the younger Americans are, the more they believe firearms — specifically of the concealed variety — keep people safe.

But that’s not all WaPo reported. According to those polled at the march, 60 percent of those protesting were experienced protesters. Furthermore, many who were there weren’t really even there to protest for gun control:

Even more interesting, the new protesters were less motivated by the issue of gun control. In fact, only 12 percent of the people who were new to protesting reported that they were motivated to join the march because of the gun-control issue, compared with 60 percent of the participants with experience protesting.

Instead, new protesters reported being motivated by the issues of peace (56 percent) and Trump (42 percent), who has been a galvanizing force for many protests.

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And as many would have already guessed, the march attendees were ideologically slanted to the left, with 79 percent identifying as “left-leaning” and 89 percent reported having voted for Hillary Clinton.

So the March for Our Lives wasn’t the groundbreaking youth movement on gun control it’s being made out to be. While there were some interesting firsts, this truthfully amounted to nothing more than another cookie-cutter leftist protest with a different brand of sprinkles on it.

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