Protests for a kinder world.
The map above shows protests for and against gun control in the United States based on local news reports between January 20, 2017 and January 31, 2021. Each marker's size represents the relative number of attendees at an event, and events with fewer than 900 attendees are shown with the smallest marker. Blue markers indicate events in support of greater gun control, while yellow markers indicate the events against greater gun control.
Given the recent nationwide protests on March 14th (National Walkout Day), March 24th (March for Our Lives), and April 14th for and against gun control legislation, we decided to compare all of the local news coverage that we've come across related to guns. In the map above, we plotted pro-gun control protests in blue and anti-gun control protests in yellow. Each marker's total area represents that protest's attendance count. The anti-gun control protests in yellow are somewhat hard to see because, in fact, there weren't many of them, and they weren't well attended.
As of April 15, 2018, we've found 2176 protests for greater gun control, and 187 against. The largest pro-gun control demonstration, not surprisingly, was the main March For Our Lives protest in Washington, DC on March 24th. Depending on which report you believe (we generally try to cite the most conservative attendance count that we find), between 200k and 800k people attended. By contrast, the largest anti-gun control demonstration was in Trenton, New Jersey on March 26th; about 2000 people attended. Anti-gun control advocates also held demonstrations at state capitols across the country on April 14, 2018. Of the reports that we've read, Hartford, Connecticut's protest was the largest with about 2000 attendees.
During our nightly crawls, we come across articles about many types of protests. While we've tried to highlight the demonstrations that we believe advocate for a more empathetic country, we keep track of all protests that we come across to try to glean insights about the connections between national and local issues. Since we started documenting protests in January 2017, gun control is the first national issue that we've found large protest activity for on both sides and have been able to directly compare and contrast.