Refresh for updates Paul McCartney is among those marching against gun violence in New York City today, and spoke to CNN’s Jason Caroll to note, “One of my best friends was killed in gun violence right around here, so it’s important to me.”
McCartney was referring, of course, to John Lennon, who was murdered by a gunman on Dec. 8, 1980 outside the Dakota apartment building on New York’s Upper West Side, blocks from where anti-gun-violence protesters were gathering today to begin their march downtown.
New York is one of more than 800 cities worldwide where marches will take place in coordination with the massive Washington D.C. March For Our Lives event. Today’s events will be covered extensively on television.
Celebrities took to social media to express their support (see a sampling below), and the White House issued the following statement:
“We applaud the many courageous young Americans exercising their First Amendment rights today. Keeping our children safe is a top priority of the President’s, which is why he urged Congress to pass the Fix NICS and STOP School Violence Acts, and signed them into law. Additionally, on Friday, the Department of Justice issued the rule to ban bump stocks following through on the President’s commitment to ban devices that turn legal weapons into illegal machine guns.”
As of mid-day Eastern Time, President Donald Trump had not tweeted his thoughts on the topic from Mar-A-Lago, where he is spending the weekend far away from the D.C. gathering, though he did tweet about yesterday’s terrorist attack in France:
Here are some celebrity tweets about the march for gun reform in America. Deadline will update as the day goes on.
#MarchForOurLives pic.twitter.com/Fs1pyc84by
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 24, 2018
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