gun violence

1,000 women hold a sit-in at the Colorado Capitol to push for an end to gun violence

The event Monday was billed not only as a call to action but a remembrance of those killed by guns

RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

More than 1,000 women flocked to the Colorado Capitol in the first light of dawn Monday with the weighty goal of ending gun violence in the U.S., one state at a time.

Mothers in workout leggings held signs bearing photos of their children and others settled into camping chairs and picnic blankets on the Capitol lawn for a sit-in organized by Here 4 the Kids, a group founded in March by the authors and social justice advocates Tina Strawn, of Texas, and Saira Rao, of Virginia.

The women, both mothers, said they were moved to act by the mass shooting in March at The Covenant School, a private Christian institution in Nashville, Tennessee, in which six people were killed, including three children.

So far this year, the Gun Violence Archive has tallied 276 mass shootings in the U.S. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teenagers, according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Banning guns isn’t radical,” Rao said last week. “What’s radical is normalizing dropping our kids off at school and not knowing if we will pick them up alive. What’s radical is going to the mall and getting murdered. Banning guns, the No. 1 killer of our kids, is sensible.”

The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department released body footage from two of the five officers who responded to the school shooting at Covenant School in Nashville. The original video can be found on the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department YouTube channel.

For more on this story, go to NBC News.

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