Counter-protesters Defend Second Amendment on DTLA March
The sun was shining over the intersection of 5th street and Broadway this Saturday morning in Downtown Los Angeles, where tens of thousands of people had gathered to march for our lives. Most of the crowd were there to fight for stricter gun-control laws, but a few stood their ground, saying they needed to protect the second amendment.
In the March were Santa Monica College students, Liberty Fuchs and Ben Kolodny. They were there to mourn the loss of innocent people, but also to stand up for what they believe in. “I think that civilians need to be able to defend themselves against the government, and by restricting their access to firearms, it is restricting their access to safety, it’s restricting their access to freedom,” Kolodny said. “The second amendment is a fundamental right for individuals to violently resist their government if necessary, god forbid."
At approximately 10:30 a.m. the crowd started marching down Broadway and Spring street with signs held high and voices screaming loud. In the crowd was Senator Kamala Harris. "I am here today to march with the leaders, who are our students, and our young people and who are really leading a movement that is so powerful," she said to the Corsair.
Most of the crowd did not agree with his view, as the other marchers were there to fight for stricter gun-control laws. But at the end of the march, next to city hall, stood a few other counter-protesters behind a yellow line and police separating them from the rest of the people. One of them was Andy Blanch, running for Governor. “Guns aren’t the issue, it’s our moral values that cause people to go out and kill people,” he said.
Some name-calling and yelling started when the gun-control protesters and the counter-protesters encountered each other, but it was a relatively quiet protest according to the Los Angeles Police Department's media relations officer, Mike Lopez, who said, “We’re really glad to see that everyone is really behaving.”
Counter-protestors showed their sympathy for those marching but said that there are alternative options than gun control. “I’m saddened that someone would go into a school and kill, I think that schools should be the safest place on the face of the earth for our children.” Blanch said and continued, “Let’s put a lock box in every classroom, no one has to be armed, teachers in five seconds gets a whole classroom in the lockbox, shuts it, it’s ventilated, it’s bulletproof.”
Kolodny said on the same issue, “My opinion about guns is that the purpose of the second amendment is to ensure that we have a free and democratic country, which really means that we as civilians need to be able to access anything we want to access when it comes to firearms.”
In response to why they were attending the march on Saturday, Fuchs said, “I mostly want to get people to understand that there are kind and reasonable people with opposite positions to them.”