Toms River Students Heading To March For Our Lives

TOMS RIVER, NJ — Saturday morning, while most folks will be taking a well-deserved break from the weekday grind, a group of Toms River students will be hitting the road, headed to join hundreds of others expected to gather in Newark to protest gun violence and call for more strict firearms laws.

About 20 students are going up to Newark to join the March for Our Lives, one of more than 10 in New Jersey and one of more than hundreds of sister marches to the national March for Our Lives begin held in Washington, DC, on Saturday.

The marches were sparked by the students from Parkland, Florida, who survived the mass shooting that killed 14 of their classmates and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine's Day. There were 16 other students injured in the shooting.

The Newark march will begin with student speeches, and Gov. Phil Murphy is scheduled to appear and address the students, his press secretary, Daniel Bryan, confirmed.

Zach Dougherty, the Toms River North junior who organized a rally on the steps of the Ocean County Library just days after the Parkland shooting, said he and his fellow classmates are leaving about 7 a.m. to head up to Newark. That event is being held in Marine Park, near the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and is expected to begin about 10 a.m.

Dougherty said they chose Newark a few weeks ago, before some of the closer rallies, including ones in Asbury Park and Red Bank, were announced.

The Parkland massacre has sparked a groundswell of protests among high school students across the country that included student walkouts of varying forms at hundreds of high schools on March 14, the one-month anniversary of the Parkland shooting. Another national student walkout is scheduled for April 20, which will be the 19th anniversary of the Columbine massacre that killed 13 students in 1999.

At Toms River North, students and school administrators compromised on the March 14 walkouts with an optional assembly in the RWJ Barnabas Health Arena, where students could speak and administrators felt they could be protected.

Dougherty spoke with David Hogg, one of the student leaders from Parkland, shortly after the massacre, which Dougherty said many teens around the country saw unfold on Snapchat.

"We were watching it in real time," Dougherty said. "You could see the blood on the floor. You could hear them."

"I realized it could be my school," he said.

He traded messages with Hogg via Instagram, and Hogg urged Dougherty to organize rallies and speak out. That led to the Ocean County Library rally on Feb. 19, the first in New Jersey and one of the first in the country outside Florida.

At that rally, Dougherty and other students said they were tired of hearing "the same conversation that guns don't kill people, people kill people. It's not enough anymore."

"We don't want to hear it. It's time for action," he said in that speech.

Students across the country have called for reforms to gun laws, including an increase in the minimum age, universal background checks, efforts to close loopholes in the law that allow firearms purchases at gun shows and for the banning of access to military-style firearms such as the AR-15 rifle used in Parkland and in the Sandy Hook school massacre on Dec. 14, 2012.

"This is the first time the younger generation has something to fight for," Dougherty said in a recent interview. "We want to at least have people have a conversation about what can be done to prevent this from happening again. It doesn't have to be an argument it just has to be a conversation."

A list of New Jersey marches can be found by clicking here.

Zach Dougherty, joined by other Toms River students, speaks outside the Ocean County Library on Feb. 19. Photo by Karen Wall, Patch staff