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Wall Street Journal - Students Stage National School Walkout to Protest Shootings. Demonstrations span the nation one month after a former student killed 17 in Parkland, Florida.

By Arian Campo-Flores Updated March 14, 2018

Students on the East Coast began a national walkout Wednesday morning to press elected officials to take action on school gun violence, one month after the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., killed 17 people.

At 10:00 a.m., students at Stoneman Douglas began streaming out in droves to the football field, where they stood quietly or milled about. On a nearby street beyond a fence, onlookers cheered and applauded them, some chanting “MSD! MSD!” Some of the students waved back.

One woman outside carried a sign reading, “Protect Kids Not Guns.” A man next to her raised a placard that said, “Ban Assault Weapons.”

More than 2,800 demonstrations in all 50 states were expected to draw hundreds of thousands of students and others, according to organizers with Women’s March Youth Empower, which helped coordinate the “#Enough” school walkouts.

Students were taking a range of approaches, from calling for moments of silence to delivering speeches to organizing voter registration and lobbying drives. Events were scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. local time and to last 17 minutes, one for each shooting victim.

In the wake of the Parkland massacre, Stoneman Douglas students “took that moment and their frustration and grievance to speak up about gun violence and demand Congress’s action,” said Winter Minisee, a 17-year-old senior in Riverside, Calif., and one of the Enough organizers. “We want to capitalize off that.”

Though Florida Gov. Rick Scott last week signed into law a measure that added new gun restrictions, such as raising the minimum age to buy any type of firearm to 21, many students are calling for much more. Among the demands listed by the Enough campaign are a ban on semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, and the expansion of background checks to all gun sales.

In Parkland, two separate events were planned. A walkout at Stoneman Douglas remained within the school’s perimeter, in part for safety reasons, said Ashley Schulman, a 17-year-old senior. Students at some nearby schools marched to Stoneman Douglas’s campus in solidarity, she said.

Another walkout that was part of the Enough campaign took place at a nearby park, where some 400 people were expected to attend, said organizer Susana Matta Valdivieso, a 17-year-old junior. Some students and adult community members spoke, and others devoted a minute each to commemorating the 17 killed.

In Wellesley, Mass., students at Wellesley High School held a moment of silence, followed by speeches calling for policy changes and students reading statements about what prompted them to walk out. “It’s really important to continue the discussion,” said Cort Breuer, a 17-year-old senior and one of the planners. “It often disappears within days because of other news events.”

Students at Newtown High School in Newtown, Conn., decided to move their walkout to a parking lot because the school stadium is blanketed with snow from the winter storm that just hit. They plan to stand atop a truck with a megaphone, with 17 students taking a minute each to read the names of students from numerous past school shootings, not just the one in Parkland.

“This movement is built off the foundation of what’s happened in past tragedies,” including the shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, said organizer Jackson Mittleman, a 16-year-old junior.

Some events planned for Wednesday weren’t tied to school campuses. In Sacramento, Calif., students from Oakland, San Francisco and other cities planned to rally in front of a National Rifle Association office. Organizers also planned to offer training to students on how to lobby lawmakers. One of those scheduled to speak was Ms. Minisee, who drove up from Riverside on Tuesday and plans to urge members of Congress to do more to prevent gun violence.

“I’m calling on them to act on our demands and definitely encouraging the rest of my peers to vote,” Ms. Minisee said.

Write to Arian Campo-Flores at arian.campo-flores@wsj.com