A university professor studying large-scale, Trump-era protests in Washington says the media is giving the wrong impression about who made up the crowd during last weekend’s anti-gun March for Our Lives demonstration. “My research tells a different story about who participated in the March for Our Lives — and it is more complicated and less well-packaged for prime time,” University of Maryland sociology professor Dana R. Fisher wrote in a Wednesday story for the Washington Post. Fisher’s study indicates that -- while news coverage focused on the teenagers marching for gun control in the wake of last month’s shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida --- 90 percent of the crowd was actually adults. She said the average age of adults in the crowd was just under 49.
“Contrary to what’s been reported in many media accounts, the D.C. March for Our Lives crowd was not primarily made up of teenagers,” Fisher wrote. “Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18.”
Fisher said her team sampled 256 people who were randomly selected. Her research will become a book titled “American Resistance” and will be published after the midterm elections.
Fisher also expressed skepticism that all those who showed up to the march were there primarily because of their views on guns. Some, she said, came for entertainment.
“The March for Our Lives had the allure of a free concert — in fact, the event’s website maintained a list of performers but never listed the speakers," she said. "But it is one thing to turn out to watch Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ariana Grande perform, and quite another to vote in the midterm election in November.”
The research follows an imaging company saying the turnout for the march was much less than claimed by its organizers.
Organizers of the demonstration claimed Sunday that some 850,000 people attended the pro-gun control event.
But Virginia-based Digital Design & Imaging Service Inc., which uses aerial photos to calculate crowd sizes, reported the event’s peak crowd size was at 202,796 people.
