Walk and Rally to be held June 11 in Wellsville
Allegany County – March for Our Lives, the organization founded by survivors of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, is planning nationwide protests in the wake of the nation’s latest school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, which took the lives of 21 people, 19 of them children.
A group of concerned grandparents, parents, students, and citizens will hold a March for Our Lives Walk and Rally as part of the nationwide protest on June 11 in Wellsville, NY. This event will take place rain or shine. The public is invited to attend.
The purpose of the event is to is to encourage action on common sense gun legislation on the federal, state, and county levels. Participants are invited to wear orange (the defining color of the movement for gun violence prevention) and bring a sign. All participants will be provided with a call to action following the rally.
Participants will meet up between 10:00 – 10:30 am at the Island Park main parking lot on West Dyke St. off Route 417. (For GPS, enter “Island Park, Wellsville, NY”.) At 10:30 the group will march to the Fassett Greenspace, 55 N. Main St. where the rally will take place beginning at 11:00 am.
Speakers for the rally include: Brock Mapes, a teacher at Genesee Valley Central School with a mechanical engineering degree from Cornell University. Brock grew up during endless gun control debates in the two+ decades post-Columbine. He will discuss what the failure to act reveals about our system’s ability to address crises in general.
Karen Patterson a mother, a grandmother and a great-grandmother who has served on the New York State Board of Directors for the National Wild Turkey Federation. A former hunter and skeet shooter, Karen has shifted her focus to her family and building a better community for them. She describes herself as Pro Common Sense, not Anti-Gun. Karen will focus on measures most Americans agree on: Universal Background Checks, Red Flag Laws, Magazine Capacity limits, and improvements in Behavioral Health services.
Other invited speakers have not yet confirmed. As more details become available, they’ll be posted to the Facebook Event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/555159549324887
