Crime

March For Our Lives launches billboard campaign

FLORIDA COURIER — Like ticker tape, the messages quickly scroll on the digital billboards.“I saw my brother get shot. I saw my sister get shot. I saw my son get shot,” the words flow in New York’s Times Square. They are the latest anti-gun violence messages from the March For Our Lives group, which was founded by the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre last year in Parkland.

Published

7 years ago

May 1, 2019

Oakland Post

By Johnny Diaz

Like ticker tape, the messages quickly scroll on the digital billboards.

“I saw my brother get shot. I saw my sister get shot. I saw my son get shot,” the words flow in New York’s Times Square.

They are the latest anti-gun violence messages from the March For Our Lives group, which was founded by the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre last year in Parkland.

The digital billboards sponsored by the nonprofit group went up Monday, April 15, and will remain in place throughout this month.

“For the next two weeks, a series of billboards in Times Square will remind Americans that we must come together to save lives,” wrote Brendan Duff, a co-founder of March For Our Lives and a communications strategist for the group — in an opinion piece he wrote with Lauren Hogg about the billboards.

Duff graduated from Stoneman Douglas and his brother was a freshman at the school during the Feb. 14, 2018 massacre that killed 17 students and staff and wounded 17 others.

‘WE WANT CHANGE’

The group expects the billboards to reach about 5 and a half million people.

After the messages roll on the billboards, they suddenly shatter into digital glass with the words, “Enough. We want change” on a yellow background. There is also a number (954-954), which is Broward’s main area code, for people to text to get more information about the group and local chapters.

“The Times Square billboards are meant to reach people from around the world in an impactful way, and like all of our messages, they are meant to be accessible to those willing to fight for safer communities, schools, concert venues, places of worship, and everywhere the threat of gun violence exists,” added Duff, a student at Elon University in North Carolina.

Previous ads by the group, including one meant to get people to the polls in November, included a video that depicted a gun firing bullets through a school hallway.

This article originally appeared in the Florida Courier.