Columbia 'Wear Orange' Event To Protest Gun Violence

COLUMBIA, MD — Don’t be surprised to see a sea of orange shirts, shoes, socks and headbands in and around Columbia this weekend. Nearly 750 grassroots events are planned nationwide from Friday through Sunday to call for an end to gun violence.

The so-called "Wear Orange" events are part of the fifth annual National Gun Violence Awareness Day on June 7.

The event in Columbia will be from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 8, in the Joseph Square courtyard at Harpers Choice Village Center on Harpers Farm Road and Beaverkill Road, Columbia, MD 21044.

Community groups will be represented and resources will be available to honor survivors and victims of gun violence at the event in Columbia, which is family friendly. Here is the link to RSVP.

More than 100 Americans are killed with guns every day, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, the organization that sponsors the "Wear Orange" campaign.

Organizers chose the color orange in honor of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, who was gunned down in Chicago a week after performing at President Barack Obama’s second inaugural parade in 2013. Pendleton’s friends wore orange in her honor because it is the color hunters wear to signal that they are not the target. "We said, 'We're not the target, and we don't want to be the next victim of Chicago's gun violence,'" one of Pendleton's friends told the Chicago Tribune.

Closer to home, Baltimore has experienced 129 homicides so far in 2019 as of the June 5, the 156th day of the year.

Baltimore is hosting multiple "Wear Orange" events along with other cities participating such as Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco, Tampa and Washington, D.C. Some landmarks and stores plan to turn orange as well, including the Empire State Building in New York City. The Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus entrance, HarborView Tower condominiums and Bloomberg School of Public Health are among those in Baltimore that will be illuminated orange.

The Wear Orange event comes days after 13 people were killed in a mass shooting at Virginia Beach Municipal Center. The Virginia shooting was one of 156 mass shootings for 2019 as of June 3, the 154th day of the year, according to a database compiled by the Gun Violence Archive. Shootings can only be eligible for the database if at least four people are shot or killed, excluding the shooter.

Americans make up 4.4 percent of the world's population and own 42 percent of the world's guns, according to a 2016 study by Adam Lankford, an associate criminology and criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama.

Patch national staffer Dan Hampton contributed to this report.

Editor's note: This article has been updated.